Essays from 'The Guardian'

NOTES BY THE E-TEXT EDITOR:
E-text Editor: Alfred J. Drake, Ph.D. Electronic Version 1.0 / Date 10-12-01
Reliability: Although I have done my best to ensure that the text you read is error-free in comparison with an exact reprint of the standard edition—Macmillan's 1910 Library Edition—please exercise scholarly caution in using it. It is not intended as a substitute for the printed original but rather as a searchable supplement. My e-texts may prove convenient substitutes for hard-to-get works in a course where both instructor and students accept the possibility of some imperfections in the text, but if you are writing a scholarly article, dissertation, or book, you should use the standard hard-copy editions of any works you cite.
Hyphenation: I have not preserved original hyphenation since an e-text does not require line-end or page-end hyphenation.
Greek typeface: For this full-text edition, I have transliterated Pater's Greek quotations. If there is a need for the original Greek, it can be viewed at my site, http://www.ajdrake.com/etexts, a Victorianist archive that contains the complete works of Walter Pater and many other nineteenth-century texts, mostly in first editions.
PATER'S NOTE: The nine papers contained in the following volume originally appeared anonymously in The Guardian newspaper.
E-TEXT EDITOR'S NOTE: I have not preserved the title pages of this volume, but have instead moved dates to each essay's end and included any necessary title-page material in the heading area of the first substantive page.

Steele, for one, had certainly succeeded in putting himself, and his way of taking the world—for this pioneer of an everybody's literature had his subjectivities—into books. What a survival of one long-past day, for instance, in A Ramble from Richmond to London ! What truth to the surface of common things, to their direct claim on our interest! yet with what originality of effect in that truthfulness, when he writes, for instance: