This posthumous 1895 collection brings together, from many different journals and magazines, Paters influential and wide-ranging writings. The contents include Prosper Mérimée, Raphael, Pascal, Art Notes in Northern Italy, Notre-Dame dAmiens, Vézelay, Apollo in Picardy, The Child in the House, Emerald Uthwart, and one of his earliest essays, Diaphaneité, a meditation on the sensual and the moral.

Walter Pater (1839-1894) was a British critic and essayist who championed the idea of "art for art's sake," which was later used by such figures as Oscar Wilde and other devotees of Aestheticism.  His essays on art and literature were printed in his Studies in the History of the Renaissance (1873), one of his most famous works.