Walter Pater (1839–94) was the foremost Victorian writer on art and on aesthetic experience. He brought his extensive knowledge of the history of art to bear on the new problem of how to explain the very personal affective response to beauty, and raised this into a central concern of aesthetic and philosophical thought. His ideas still shape modern assumptions about how art plays on our feelings and intellectual responses. This edition of Pater's complete works was published in 1900–1 in a limited edition of 775 copies. This collection of essays, first published in 1889, was Pater's only literary-critical work until the posthumous publication of his reviews from The Guardian (the ninth volume in this edition). His well-known essay 'Style', written from the perspective of a critic and a novelist, opens the volume. The other essays include his readings of Thomas Browne, Wordsworth and Coleridge, Shakespeare and D. G. Rossetti.
