If the publication of Studies provoked controversy, it also elicited admiration, and Pater produced a steady series of signed essays between 1874 and 1880, most of which appeared in the Fortnightly. However, Macmillan, now established as Pater's publisher, managed to solicit contributions from its new author to the firm's monthly magazine, and two pieces in this period appeared there: ‘Romanticism’ (November 1876) was the third essay on English literature Pater published in the years immediately following Studies, the other two being on Wordsworth and Measure for Measure; and ‘The Child in the House’ (April 1878) was Pater's first work of fiction to be published and the first of his ‘imaginary portraits’. In September 1880 Macmillan's Magazine, under George Grove, published an article ‘The New Renaissance; or, The Gospel of Intensity’, which attacked aestheticism, and by implication Pater's work. It seems unsurprising, therefore, that Pater did not publish with Macmillan's Magazine again until October 1885, but between May 1880 and that date Pater published nothing in a national monthly magazine, presumably because he was working on Marius. It is also true that, after 1880, Pater gave very little to the Fortnightly, although he did return to it for his important piece on ‘Style’ in 1888.

If the Westminster Review was Pater's periodical during the 1860s, and the Fortnightly during the 1870s, Macmillan's was his principal place of publication in the 1880s. But this shift accompanies a change in the balance of Pater's writing. Four of his five articles there were fictional ‘imaginary portraits’ and in 1888 the first five chapters of his novel Gaston de Latour were serialized in monthly instalments. Pater did more reviews than ever before, and two of these were for Macmillan's. However, the only criticism he published there was on another English figure, Thomas Browne, author of The Anatomy of Melancholy. The fact is that Pater occupied himself with writing and publishing fiction in the 1880s, and with reviewing; criticism took a back seat. Much of Pater's reviewing was anonymous, and involved mutual ‘puffing’ between Pater and his friends, a system also known as ‘log-rolling’.

Pater reviewed for a variety of journals, one of them being the Guardian, the Church of England paper.