On 10 August 1894, Henry James wrote to Edmund Gosse (1849– 1928), from his home at 34 De Vere Gardens in West London, expressing regret for having missed Walter Pater's funeral. He had been ‘deterred by […] my very limited acquaintance with Pater, my non-communication with him for so long, and above all by (what I supposed would be) the compact Oxfordism of it all; in which I seem to feel myself to have no place’ (LHJ 3: 483). James felt he would have been an alien at both Pater's funeral and Oxford itself, marked as an outsider. Later that winter, having received a copy of Gosse’s reminiscences published in Critical Kit-Kats (1896), James praised Pater's diaphanous style and life:

For James, reading Pater in the future perfect, the radical and divisive figure so famous for that hedonistic ‘Conclusion’ ended up burning with a ‘phosphorescent’ rather than ‘hard gem-like’ flame (SHR 189).

The careers of James and Pater overlapped in a number of interesting ways. While in Florence in May 1873, James wrote to his brother, William (1842–1910): ‘I saw Pater's Studies […] in the English bookseller’s window: and was inflamed to think of buying it and trying a notice. But I see it treats several things I know nothing about’ (LHJ 1: 391). This unwritten review constitutes a teasing missed encounter in the history of Pater's reception. But James must have read the Renaissance, because he refers to the essay on Botticelli in ‘Florentine Notes’, published the following year, in which he calls Pater an ‘accomplished critic’ (IH 18.260). Pater, for his part, read The Europeans (1878), praising it to Alexander Macmillan (1818–1896), who passed on the compliment through Frederick Macmillan (1851–1936), with James expressing his thanks to ‘the exquisite P.’ (Moore 1993: 21).