A flood of publications on the elusive Victorian scholar-aesthete, Walter Pater, has appeared during the last two decades. As plans for a critical edition of his works are now being made, the writings on him continue to flow from the presses, threatening to submerge his achievement in their vastness, as they seek to sustain it. Books, articles, anthologies, Ph. D. dissertations, symposia, and now the May 1981 issue of Prose Studies—where the interested reader will find a detailed summary of recent bibliography on Pater—have scrutinized seemingly every facet of the man, from his place in the history of literature to the significance of his moustache. This is not to say that even Pater's best-known works are now conveniently available to a broad audience in paperback editions sold in drugstores and airports. For the Pater boom is largely an academic phenomenon.

Few writers as distinguished as Pater have lived lives as diaphanous as his. Between birth in London in 1839 and death 55 years later, he lived in a quiet reverie among books and works of art, seeking to divine the magical powers of beauty, journeying invisibly among sensations and ideas in quest of their ineffable essences. The center of this private existence was Oxford, where the almost ghostly scholar and writer, a seemingly disembodied consciousness, dwelt more than 20 years as student, fellow, and tutor, gravely and fastidiously measuring the exquisite nuances of aesthetic experience in prose of incomparable refinement. He occasionally traveled without incident in Germany, France, and Italy, imperceptibly absorbing impressions under a dreamlike veil. One of the singular, rare facts of Pater's physical existence, if one can even speak of it as such, was the