8vo. In two volumes. [8], 260pp; [8], 246pp, [2]. Original publisher's green cloth, lettered in gilt to spine. Lightly rubbed and marked, bumping to head and foot of spines. Endpapers browned, very occasional light scattered spotting.

The first edition of English essayist and literary critic Walter Horatio Pater's (1839- 1894) philosophical novel, Marius the Epicurean. A commercial success, with two editions released in its first year of print, the narrative followed a young Roman secretary, whose pursuit of an 'aesthetic' life reflected the author's own experiments with Aestheticism; his earliest published work, Studies in the History of the Renaissance (1873), revised as The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry (1877), was viewed by many contemporaries as a manifesto of the movement. The novel, interspersed with segments from classical and historical texts, is one of the most interesting examples of early intertextual composition.