Pater, Walter Horatio 1839-94
English critic and essayist

Born in London, he was educated at King's School, Canterbury, and Queen's College, Oxford, and became a Fellow of Brasenose College. His Studies in the History of the Renaissance (1873) displays the influence of the pre-Raphaelites with whom he associated. His philosophic romance, Marius the Epicurean (1885), appealed to a wider audience. His Imaginary Portraits (1887) and Appreciations (1889), followed by Plato and Platonism (1893), established his position as a critic, but already people were beginning to talk of his influence as being unhealthy, in the sense that he advocated a cultivated hedonism. That Pater's neo-Cyrenaism, as it might be called, involved strenuous self-discipline hardly occurred to his critics, who found in his style alone an enervating quality. His influence on Oxford, however, was profound. He died having left unfinished another romance, Gaston de Latour (1896).

Bibliography: A C Benson, Walter Pater (1906)