Walter Pater

Walter Pater (1839–1894) was an English essayist and critic, a fellow of Brasenose College, Oxford, for most of his life. Studies in the History of the Renaissance (1873), with its celebration of intense experience for its own sake, made him the central figure of the aesthetic movement and an influence on Oscar Wilde and a generation of writers, and also brought him lasting suspicion in Oxford. Marius the Epicurean (1885), a philosophical novel of the age of Marcus Aurelius, was his fullest statement; Imaginary Portraits, Appreciations and Plato and Platonism followed. He lived quietly with his sisters and wrote slowly, in a prose of deliberate and much-imitated cadence.