How Walter Pater might have countered charges that he misused sources: A dialogue between graduate student Walter Pater and Professor Samantha Marks at Great State University, U.S.A., in 2003, with an addendum

In the dialogue Professor Marks, who has received and read five papers from her student Walter Pater, including "Winckelmann," "Pico della Mirandula," and "The Heroic Age of Greek Art," calls attention to his unacceptable practices in the handling of sources. These practices include not quoting exactly in passages set in quotation marks, but improving the diction and omitting or rearranging phrases and passages without indicating ellipses; avoiding footnotes; and not indicating the extent of indebtedness to other authors, especially "antiquarians." Walter adroitly defends his practices by quoting opinions of Schiller, Goethe, and Emerson, and by relating his practices to stylistic goals that they help him achieve. Walter apparently concludes that in this twentieth-first century environment he cannot develop as the sort of author that he wants to be, a visionary prose artist imbued with the intellectually and spiritually nourishing literature of the past and in touch with archaeological discoveries. He bids the professor goodbye and returns to England and the nineteenth century. In the Addendum, Inman asks why Pater's handling of sources, which was sharply criticized in the twentieth century, was not an issue in the nineteenth. She answers that (1) reviewers, scholars, and critics were aware that throughout Western history translators and editors had made "silent revisions"; (2) students in the Liberal Arts succeeded by passing examinations, not by writing research papers; (3) understanding of the copyright had not in all fields settled into the twentieth-century scientific model; and (4) reviewers, scholars, critics, and general readers were more appreciative of authors and of distinction in prose style.