Walter Pater called the short fictions he published between 1878 and 1893 "imaginary portraits." They are a distinctive blend of history, myth, and autobiography, the outgrowth of his study and writing in the 1860s and 1870s on the Italian and French Renaissance and the society and religion of ancient Greece. They point to his effort to create a literary form that would express the ways in which the values and rituals of earlier cultures are preserved and transmitted to a later time through the medium of a temperament decidedly like Pater's own. The imaginary portraits may be considered not so much conventional stories as complex, dramatized meditations on the process by which the modern personality is shaped by the interplay of historical forces--literary, artistic, philosophical--and individual memory. As the first British writer to treat this process, Pater links the revolutionary representations of selfhood characteristic of earlier nineteenth-century Romanticism with the...