a triumph to find him tripping.  You experience the pleasure of the University Extension lecturer pointing out the mistakes in Shakespeare’s geography, the joy of the schoolboy when the master has made a false quantity.  In marking the modern discoveries which have shattered, not the value of Pater’s criticisms, but the authenticity of pictures round which he wove his aureoles of prose, Mr. Benson says:  ’In the essay on Botticelli he is on firmer ground.’  But among the first masterpieces winged by the sportsmen of the new criticism was the Hamilton Palace ‘Assumption of the Virgin’ (now proved to be by Botticini), to which Pater makes one of his elusive and delightful allusions.  While the ‘School of Giorgione,’ which Mr. Benson thinks a little passe in the light of modern research is now in the movement.  The latest bulletins of Giorgione, Pater would have been delighted to hear, are highly satisfactory.  Pictures once torn from the altars of authenticity are being reinstated under the acolytage of Mr. Herbert Cook.  A curious and perhaps wilful error, too, has escaped Mr. Benson’s notice.  Referring to the tomb of Cardinal Jacopo at San Miniato, Pater says, ’insignis forma fui—­his epitaph dares to say;’ the inscription reads fuit.  But perhaps the t was added by the Italian Government out of Reference to the English residents in Florence, and the word read fui in 1871. Troja fuit might be written all over Florence.

Then some of the architecture at Vezelay ‘typical of Cluniac sculpture’ is pure Viollet-le-Duc, I am assured by a competent authority.  A more serious error of Pater’s, for it is adjectival, not a fact, occurs in Apollo in Picardy—­’rebellious masses of black hair.’  This is the only instance in the parfait prosateur, as Bourget called him, of a cliche worthy of the ‘Spectator.’  Then it is possible to differ from Mr. Benson in his criticism of the Imaginary Portraits (the four fair ovals in one volume), surely Pater’s most exquisite achievement after the Renaissance. Gaston is the failure Pater thought it was, and Emerald Uthwart is frankly very silly, though Mr. Benson has a curious tenderness for it.  One sentence he abandons as absolute folly.  The grave psychological error in the story occurs where the surgeon expresses compunction at making the autopsy on Uthwart because of his perfect anatomy.  Surely this would have been a source of technical pleasure and interest to a surgeon, much as a butterfly-collector is pleased when he has murdered an unusually fine species of lepidoptera.  Speaking myself as a vivisector of some experience, I can confidently affirm that a well-bred golden collie is far more interesting to operate upon than a mongrel sheep-dog.  Nor can I comprehend Mr. Benson’s blame of Denys l’Auxerrois as too extravagant and even unwholesome, when the last quality, so obvious in Uthwart, he seems to condone.