in the university, but among men of letters in London and elsewhere. The little body of Pre-Raphaelites were among his friends, and by the time that Marius the Epicurean appeared he had quite a following of disciples to hail it as a gospel. This fine and polished work, the chief of all his contributions to literature, was published early in 1885. In it Pater displays, with perfected fullness and loving elaboration, his ideal of the aesthetic life, his cult of beauty as opposed to bare asceticism, and his theory of the stimulating effect of the pursuit of beauty as an ideal of its own. In 1887 he published Imaginary Portraits, a series of essays in philosophic fiction; in 1889, Appreciations, with an Essay on Style; in 1893, Plato and Platonism; and in 1894, The Child in the House. His Greek Studies and his Miscellaneous Studies were collected posthumously in 1895; his posthumous romance of Gaston de Latour in 1896; and his Essays from the “Guardian” were privately printed in 1897. A collected edition of Pater’s works was issued in 1901. Pater changed his residence from time to time, living sometimes at Kensington and in different parts of Oxford; but the centre of his work and influence was always his rooms at Brasenose. Here he laboured, with a wonderful particularity of care and choice, upon perfecting the expression of his theory of life and art. He wrote with difficulty, correcting and recorrecting with imperturbable assiduity. His mind, moreover, returned to the religious fervour of his youth, and those who knew him best believed that had he lived longer he would have resumed his boyish intention of taking holy orders. He was cut off, however, in the prime of his powers. Seized with rheumatic fever, he rallied, and sank again, dying on the staircase of his house, in his sister’s arms, on the morning of Monday the 30th of July 1894. Pater’s nature was so contemplative, and in a way so centred upon reflection, that he never perhaps gave full utterance to his individuality. His peculiar literary style, too, burnished like the surface of hard metal, was too austerely magnificent to be always persuasive. At the time of his death Pater exercised a remarkable and a growing influence among that necessarily restricted class of persons who have themselves something of his own love for beauty and the beautiful phrase. But the cumulative richness and sonorous depth of his language harmonized intimately with his deep and earnest philosophy of life; and those who can sympathize with a nervous idealism will always find inspiration in his sincere and sustained desire to “burn with a hard, gem-like flame,” and to live in harmony with the highest. (A. Wa.)
Mr Ferris Greenslet’s Walter Pater (in the “Contemporary Men of Letters” series, 1904) is an interesting piece of criticism. Mr Arthur Benson’s study in the “English Men of Letters” series is admirable. See too a sketch in Edmund Gosse’s Critical Kit-Kats; and an estimate from a Roman Catholic standpoint in Dr William Barry’s Heralds of Revolt, where Pater is compared with J. Addington Symonds. T. Wright’s Life of Walter Pater (1907) is an elaborate but unsatisfactory piece of work.
PATERA, the Latin name for a shallow circular vessel used for drinking or for pouring libations. The Greek name for such a vessel was φιάλη. It has no foot or stem underneath, but occasionally a boss rising in the centre inside. The term is sometimes given incorrectly in architecture to a circular disk carved with a conventional rose, which is found in many early styles, the proper term being rosette.
PATERNÒ, a town of Sicily, in the province of Catania, 11 m. W.N.W. of Catania by rail, at the southern foot of Mt Etna. Pop. (1881), 15,230; (1901), 20,098 (town), 22,857 (commune). The castle, originally erected in 1073, upon the acropolis of the ancient Hybla Minor or Galeatis, has a square tower and a chapel with frescoes belonging to the 14th century. Some mosaic pavements still exist under the houses in the Strada
deir Ospedale, and remains of baths and of an ancient bridge
over the Simeto on the road to Centuripa are to be seen in the
neighbourhood. The place was unsuccessfully besieged by the
Athenian forces in the summer of 415 B.C.
PATERSON, ROBERT (1715–1801), Scottish stone-mason, who suggested to Sir Walter Scott the character of “Old Morality,” was born near Hawick in 1715. Through the patronage of Sir Thomas Kirkpatrick, whose cook he had married, he obtained the lease of a quarry at Gatelawbrig, but in 1745 his house was plundered by the retreating Jacobites, and Paterson himself, a pronounced Cameronian, was carried off a prisoner. He subsequently devoted his life to cutting and erecting stones for the graves of the Covenanters, for 40 years wandering from place to place in the lowlands. He died in poverty in 1801, and a stone to to his memory was erected by Scott’s publishers in 1869 in Caerlaverock churchyard.
PATERSON, WILLIAM (1658–1719), British writer on finance, founder of the Bank of England and projector of the Darien scheme, was born in April 1658 at the farmhouse of Skipmyre, parish of Tinwald, Dumfriesshire. His parents occupied the farm there, and with them he resided till he was about seventeen. A desire to escape the religious persecution then raging in Scotland,
and the immemorial ambition of his race, led him southward. He went through England with a pedlar’s pack (“whereof the print may be seen, if he be alive,” says a pamphleteer in 1700), settled for some time in Bristol, and then proceeded to America. There he lived chiefly in the Bahamas, and is said by
some to have been a predicant or preacher, and by others a buccaneer. In truth his intellectual and moral superiority to
his fellow-settlers caused his selection as their spiritual guide,
whilst his thirst for knowledge led to intercourse with the
buccaneers. It was here he formed that vast design which is
known in history as the Darien scheme. On his return to
England he was unable to induce the government of James II.
to engage in his plan. He went to the continent and pressed
it to no purpose in Hamburg, Amsterdam and Berlin, and on his
return to London he engaged in trade and rapidly amassed a
considerable fortune. About 1690 he was occupied in the
formation in the Hampstead Water Company, and in 1694 he
founded the Bank of England. The government required money,
and the country, rapidly increasing in wealth, required a bank.
The subscribers lent their money to the nation, and this debt
became the bank stock. The credit of having formulated the
scheme and persuaded its adoption is due to Paterson. He was
one of the original directors, but in less than a year he fell out
with his colleagues, and withdrew from the management. He
had already propounded a new plan for an orphan bank (so called
because the debt due to the city orphans by the corporation of
London was to form the stock). They feared a dangerous rival
to their own undertaking, and they felt some distrust for this
eager Scotsman whose brain teemed with new plans in endless
succession.
At that time the people of the northern kingdom were considering how best to share in that trade which was so rapidly enriching their southern neighbours. Paterson saw his opportunity. He removed to Edinburgh, unfolded his Darien (q.v.) scheme, and soon had the whole nation with him. He is the supposed author of the act of 1695 which formed the “Company of Scotland trading to Africa and the Indies.” This company, he arranged, should establish a settlement on the Isthmus of Darien, and “thus hold the key of the commerce of the world.” There was to be free trade, the ships of all nations were to find shelter in this harbour not yet erected, differences of race or religion were neglected; but a small tribute was to be paid to the company, and this and other advantages would so act that, at one supreme stroke, Scotland was to be changed from the poorest to the richest of nations.
On the 26th of July 1698 the first ships of the expedition set sail “amidst the tears and prayers and praises of relatives and friends and countrymen.” Some financial transactions in which Paterson was concerned, and in which, though he had acted with perfect honesty, the company had lost, prevented his nomination to a post of importance. He accompanied the expedition as a private individual, and was obliged to look idly on whilst what his enemies called his “golden dream” faded away indeed like the “baseless fabric of a vision” before his eyes. His wife and child died, and he was seized with a dangerous illness, “of which, as I afterwards found,” he says, “trouble of mind was not the least cause.” It was noted that “he hath been so mightily concerned in this sad disaster, so that he looks now more
