APPRECIATIONS, WITH AN ESSAY ON STYLE
By WALTER HORATIO PATER
E-text Editor: Alfred J. Drake, Ph.D. Electronic Version 1.0 / Date10-12-01
NOTES BY THE E-TEXT EDITOR:
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Greek typeface: For this full-text edition, I have transliteratedPater's Greek quotations. If there is a need for the original Greek,it can be viewed at my site, http://www.ajdrake.com/etexts, aVictorianist archive that contains the complete works of Walter Paterand many other nineteenth-century texts, mostly in first editions.
CONTENTS
Style: 5-38
Wordsworth: 39-64
Coleridge: 65-104
Charles Lamb: 105-123
Sir Thomas Browne: 124-160
"Love's Labours Lost": 161-169
"Measure for Measure": 170-184
Shakespeare's English Kings: 185-204
Dante Gabriel Rossetti: 205-218
Feuillet's "La Morte": 219-240
Postscript: 241-261
APPRECIATIONS
STYLE
[5] SINCE all progress of mind consists for the most part indifferentiation, in the resolution of an obscure and complex objectinto its component aspects, it is surely the stupidest of losses toconfuse things which right reason has put asunder, to lose the sense ofachieved distinctions, the distinction between poetry and prose, forinstance, or, to speak more exactly, between the laws andcharacteristic excellences of verse and prose composition. On theother hand, those who have dwelt most emphatically on the distinctionbetween prose and verse, prose and poetry, may sometimes have beentempted to limit the proper functions of prose too narrowly; and thisagain is at least false economy, as being, in effect, the renunciationof a certain means or faculty, in a world where