... fell under the more Decadent influence of his tutor, the German and Greek philosophy don Walter Pater, who had already published a number of essays on the subject of art, including one in 1866 in which he publicly declared his renunciation of Christianity in favour of 'a religion of art'1. Pater proposed in his collection of essays Studies in the History of the Renaissance2 that young men ought to actively seek out sensation and 'great passions'3 and cultivate Romantically heightened sensibilities in the pursuit of aesthetic experience, advocating that they ought to 'get as many pulsations as possible into the given time'4. Wilde later described the work as 'the golden book of spirit and sense, the holy writ of beauty' and, in the same letter, as having had 'such a strange influence over my life'5 and it seems likely that he saw it as his own equivalent of Dorian Gray's ...

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