An annotated edition of selected essays by the major Victorian writer and aesthete Walter Horatio Pater, this volume brings together a generous selection of nonfiction writings on literature, art, history, philosophy and mythology, supported by a critical and biographical introduction and extensive explanatory notes. The essays range in subject from archaic Greece to the culture of Pater's own day, and they are all, as Wilde called them, "delicately wrought works of art" by an exceptional writer and a passionately delicate thinker.