National Review, July 31st, 1995
THIS IS how Walter Pater begins his only completed novel, Marius the Epicurean: ``As, in the triumph of Christianity, the old religion lingered latest in the country, and died out at last as but paganism -- the religion of the villagers, before the advance of the Christian Church; so, in an earlier century, it was in places remote from town-life that the older and purer forms of paganism itself had survived the longest.'' I have this recurring fantasy: Ugly, nervous, reticent, and insecure Mr. Pater, Fellow of Brasenose and one of the foremost essayists of the nineteenth century, returns to ...
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