The family was of Dutch extraction, and while the sons of his
grandfather were trained in the Roman Catholic religion, the daughters
were Protestants from their childhood. His father left the Roman
Catholic communion early in life, without adopting any other form of
Christian faith. It is not surprising that out of so strongly marked and
widely mingled a heredity there should have emerged a writer prone to
symbolism and open to the sense of beauty in ritual, and yet too
cosmopolitan to accept easily the conventional religious forms. Before
his twentieth year he had come under the influence of Ruskin's writings,
but he soon parted from that wayward and contradictory master, whose
brilliant dogmatism enslaved so thoroughly, but so briefly, the taste of
young England. Ruskin, however, had awakened Pater, although to a style
of criticism very different from his own, and for this service we owe
him much. The environment of Oxford subjected his spirit to two widely
different sets of influences. On the one hand, he was in contact with
such men as Jowett, Nettleship, and Thomas Hill Green: on the other
hand, with Swinburne, Burne-Jones, and the pre-Raphaelites.
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