Walter Pater (1839—94) is a man whose time is coming, but it has been a long wait. Despite the excellent books by Michael Levey (The Case of Walter Pater, 1978) and Denis Donoghue (Walter Pater: Lover of Strange Souls, 1995), we still need a full biography; the two-volume effort by Thomas Wright (1907) is seriously inadequate. We at least have a reliable edition of Pater’s letters by Lawrence Evans (1970). It is a cause for celebration that Oxford University Press has announced a modern scholarly edition of the complete works to replace the unannotated “Library Edition” of 1910. Meanwhile, few individual titles are available. The Renaissance (1873) and Marius the Epicurean (1885) may still be found by diligent searchers, but the former is likely to be read by students of art history rather than English literature, and the latter encountered, if at all, by postgraduates specializing in the nineteenth-century fin-de-siècle. Imaginary Portraits (1887) was published in 2014 in an exemplary edition by Lene Østermark-Johansen, but I doubt whether it has had wide currency. On the credit side, there are high-quality monographs such as Carolyn Williams’s Transfigured World: Walter Pater’s Aesthetic Historicism (1989) and William F. Shuter’s Rereading Walter Pater (1997). These are now joined by the outstanding collection of essays in Pater the Classicist.1Tellingly, of the twenty-one contributors, only seven are academic teachers of literature. The others are classicists and art historians. Their collective aim is to make the