Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 44.djvu/25

 teneto nervos atque artus esse scientiæ: Non temere credere.’ Pate had many friends at Oxford, and he presented a portrait of Sir Kenelm Digby to the Bodleian Library in 1692. An autograph note to Sir Hans Sloane about a pattern of black cloth is preserved at the British Museum (Addit. MS. 4055, f. 29).



PATER, WALTER HORATIO (1839–1894), critic and humanist, was born at Shadwell in the east of London on 4 Aug. 1839. He was the second son of Dr. Richard Glode Pater and Maria Hill, his wife. The family is of Dutch extraction, the critic's ancestors having, it is believed, come over from the Low Countries with William of Orange. It is said that the French painter Jean-Baptiste Pater was of the same stock. The English Paters had settled at Olney in Buckinghamshire, where they lived all through the eighteenth century. Reserved and shy, preserving many of their Dutch habits, they are described in family tradition as mingling little with their neighbours, and as keeping through several generations this curious custom, that, while the sons were always brought up as Roman catholics, the daughters were no less invariably trained in the Anglican faith. The father of Walter Pater quitted the Roman church before his marriage, without, however, adopting any other form of faith, and his two sons were the first Paters who were not brought up as catholics.

The grandfather of the critic removed to New York, and there Richard Glode Pater was born. He settled as a physician at Shadwell, and here were born to him two sons—the elder, William Thomson Pater (1835–1888), a medical practitioner—and two daughters, who survive. Richard Glode Pater died so early that his second son scarcely remembered him in later life. The family, at his decease, removed to a retired house in Chase Side, Enfield, which has since been pulled down. Here they continued to reside for fourteen or fifteen years. Walter Pater received the first elements of education in a local school at Enfield, but proceeded at the age of fourteen to King's School, Canterbury. Of the feelings and experiences of this change of life he has given a vivid picture in the ‘imaginary portrait’ called ‘Emerald Uthwart.’ Pater was happy at King's School, in spite of his complete indifference to outdoor games. In his first years at public school he was idle and backward, nor was it till he reached the sixth form that his faculties seemed really to awaken. From the first, however, and long before he went to Canterbury, Walter had been considered the ‘clever’ one of the family; not specially precocious, he was always meditative and serious—marked from the very cradle for the intellectual life. From the time when he first began to think of a future condition, his design was to be a clergyman, and this had received a great impetus, while he was yet a little boy, from his having seen, during a visit to Hursley, Keble, who walked and talked much with him, and encouraged him in his religious aspirations.

Shortly before he left school, when he was entering his twentieth year, Pater read ‘Modern Painters,’ and came very abruptly under the influence of Ruskin. The world of art was thus for the first time opened to him. But there is no truth in the fable, widely circulated at the time of his death, to the effect that the finished and beautiful essay on 'Wlnckelmann' was written and even printed while the author was a school-boy at Canterbury. It was not until many years later that Pater became aware of the existence of the German critic, and his essay was composed and published long after he was a fellow of Brasenose. But he is not known to have made any attempt to write, either as schoolboy or undergraduate, his earliest essays being as mature in style as he was mature in years. Pater did not begin to practise the art of authorship until he had mastered all its secrets.

On 11 June 1858 Pater entered Queen's College, Oxford, as a commoner, with an exhibition from Canterbury, and four years later, in the Michaelmas term of 1862, he graduated B.A. with a second class in classics. He was the pupil of Mr. W. W. Capes, then bursar and tutor of Queen's, and he was coached by Jowett, who was struck by his abilities, and who said to him, 'I think you have a mind that will come to great eminence.' Some years afterwards there was an estrangement of sympathy between Jowett and Pater, but this was removed in the last year of the life of each, and the master of Balliol was among those who congratulated Pater most cordially on his 'Plato and Platonism.' In 1862 Pater took rooms in the High Street, Oxford, and read with private