This chapter aims to expose what ‘quaint’ means for Pater, and the work it does in his criticism. His use of ‘quaint’ is idiosyncratic but connected to a wider pattern in criticism: on the one hand, the attempt of his predecessors and contemporaries to account for Browne’s peculiarity; on the other, a vogue for the word as a critical term with strong and ambivalent associations. It is a keyword, marking a simultaneous discomfort with and interest in the lingering appeal of outmoded aesthetic objects which connects it to Pater’s broader theoretical statements on style, and on the relationship between Classicism and Romanticism. The chapter shows how Pater’s quaintness fits in the longer history of the reception of Browne, which traces changing attitudes to difficulty, Latinity, and ‘metaphysical’ style. These qualities were associated with forms of religion and philosophical education rejected in the later seventeenth century, just as ‘classical clearness’ became the ideal of prose, and they have remained variously embarrassing, threatening, or appealing ever since: a complex of aesthetic effects which ‘quaint’ works both to name and conceal.

The Introduction frames a collection that makes the case for Pater’s importance for the study of English literature, bringing to the fore key themes and preoccupations and thus underlining the unity and coherence of the book. Discussion starts in 1886 when the Pall Mall Gazette asked writers, intellectuals, and educators to comment on the proposal by J. Churton Collins to establish a School of English at the University of Oxford; Pater’s writings on literature are looked at in the light of institutional debates and developments in literary criticism at this time. The Introduction explores in detail Pater’s commitment to what, in the ‘Preface’ to The Renaissance, he calls ‘aesthetic criticism’, derived in part from German philosophical aesthetics, and what he intends by his stress on ‘style’ and ‘form’. Finally it looks at Pater’s conception of education as dialogic process, stemming in particular from Plato and Montaigne, and the role his use of the essay plays in that process; the case is made that Pater has much to offer us when we think about desirable forms of English Studies for today that are neither nationalistic nor exceptionalist but cosmopolitan.