SOURCE: Saintsbury, George. “English Criticism from 1860-1900.” In A History of English Criticism, pp. 468-514. Edinburgh: William Blackwood & Sons, 1962.

In the following excerpt, originally published in 1911, Saintsbury considers Pater's disputed reputation as the finest literary critic of his generation.

To assert too positively that Mr Walter Pater was the most important English critic of the last generation of the nineteenth century—that he stands to that generation in a relation resembling those of Coleridge to the first, and Arnold to the latter part of the second—would no doubt cause grumbles. The Kingdom of Criticism has been of old compared to that of Poland, and perhaps there is no closer point of resemblance than the way in which critics, like Polacks, cling to the Nie pozwalam, to the liberum veto. So, respecting this jus Poloniœ, let us say that those are fair reasons for advancing Mr Pater to...