His () first main work, ''Studies in the History of the Renaissance'' was published in 1873. Over the next three or four years it became the focus of considerable hostility towards Pater, principally reviewers objected to its amoral hedonism. Moreover, Pater was the subject of a cruel satire in W. H. Mallock's ''The New Republic'' which was published in ''Belgravia'' in 1876-7 and in book form in 1877. He appeared there as 'Mr. Rose'—an effete, impotent, sensualist with a perchant for erotic literature and beautiful young men. In the second edition of the ''Renaissance'' the 'Conclusion' was removed, partly in response to the public ridicule, but mainly because of pressure brought to bear on Pater within Oxford by figures such as Benjamin Jowett. In particular, the discovery of his 'relationship' with William Money Hardinge, a Balliol undergraduate, threatened Pater with a sexual scandal.〔Guy, Josephine M. (1998). ''The Victorian Age: An Anthology of Sources and Documents.'' London: Routledge.〕

The Civic Federation of New York, an influential body which aims, in various ways, at harmonising apparently divergent industrial interests in America, having decided on supplementing its other activities by a campaign of political and economic education, invited me, at the beginning of the year 1907, to initiate a scientific discussion of socialism in a series of lectures or speeches, to be delivered under the auspices of certain of the great Universities in the United States. This invitation I accepted, but, the project being a new one, some difficulty arose as to the manner in which it might best be carried out – whether the speeches or lectures should in each case be new, dealing with some fresh aspect of the subject, or whether they should be arranged in a single series to be repeated without substantial alteration in each of the cities visited by me. The latter plan was ultimately adopted, as tending to render the discussion of the subject more generally comprehensible to each local audience. A series of five lectures,〔Mallock, William H. (1907). (''Socialism.'' ) New York: The National Civic Federation.〕〔Hillquit, Morris (1907). (''Mr. Mallock's "Ability".'' ) New York: Socialist Literature Co.〕 substantially the same, was accordingly delivered by me in New York, Cambridge, Chicago, Philadelphia, and Baltimore.〔Mallock, William H. (1908). ( ''A Critical Examination of Socialism.'' ) London: John Murray, p. vii.〕

How is one to sum up the work of W. H. Mallock, which fills twenty-seven volumes, exclusive of ephemerae? Mallock is remembered chiefly for one book, ''The New Republic,'' and that his first, composed while he still was at Oxford – "the most brilliant novel ever written by an undergraduate," says Professor Tillotson, justly.〔Tillotson, Geoffrey (1951). ''Criticism and the Nineteenth Century.'' London: Athlone Press, p. 124.〕 (It is also the most brilliant accomplishment in its genre, after Thomas Love Peacock; and perhaps it is equal to Peacock at his best.) But other books of Mallock's are worth looking into still — his theological and philosophical studies, his didactic novels, his zealous volumes of political expostulation and social statistics, even his books of verse.
"He had astonishing acuteness, great argumentative power, wide and accurate knowledge, excellent style," Saintsbury says of Mallock. "He might have seemed — he did seem, I believe, to some – to have in him the making of an Aristophanes or a Swift of not so much lessened degree... And yet after the chiefly scandalous success of ''The New Republic'' he never 'came off.' To attribute this to the principles he advocated is to nail on those who dislike those principles their own favourite gibe of 'the stupid party.' We know brains when we see them, even if they belong to the enemy. Exactly what was the flaw, the rot, the 'dram of eale,' I do not know – it lay in faults of taste and temper, perhaps."〔Sainstsbury, George (1923). (''A Second Scrap Book.'' ) London: Macmillan & Co., pp. 178–180.〕 In the past two or three years, interest in Mallock has revived somewhat, probably stimulated by that conservative revival for which Mallock hoped, and the lines of which he predicted. ''Is Life Worth Living?'', ''Social Equality,'' and ''The Limits of Pure Democracy'', together with Mallock's charming autobiography, are especially deserving of attention from anyone interested in the conservative mind. Mallock died in 1923, half forgotten even then; but he has had no equal among English conservative thinkers since. He spent his life in a struggle against moral and political radicalism: for bulk and thoroughness, quite aside from Mallock's gifts of wit and style, his work is unexcelled among the body of conservative writings in any country.
By inheritance a country gentleman of ancient family, by inclination a poet, Mallock turned himself into a pamphleteer and a statistician on the Benthamite pattern, all for the sake of the old English life that he describes lovingly in his ''Memoirs of Life and Literature'' – the splendid houses, the good talk, the wines and dinners, the tranquillity of immemorial ways. This may be the conservatism of enjoyment, but Mallock defended it by the conservatism of the intellect. For its sake he spent his life among blue-books and reports of the income-tax commissioners; he accomplished unassisted what the research staff of the Conservative Political Centre now carries on as a body. "Throughout almost all his books is to be noticed the aspiration after a Truth which will give the soul something more than 'a dusty answer'; it is everywhere evident," says Sir John Squire. In the search for this truth, he assailed some of the most formidable personages of his day – Huxley, Spencer, Jowett, Kidd, Webb, Shaw.〔Fuchs, James (1926). (''The Socialism of Shaw.'' ) New York: Vanguard Press.〕 And none of these writers, not even Bernard Shaw, came off well from a bout with Mallock.
In boyhood, Mallock "unconsciously assumed in effect, if not in so many words, that any revolt or protest against the established order was indeed an impertinence, but was otherwise of no great importance." His first aspiration as a conservative was the restoration of classical taste in poetry. But as he grew, he came to realize "that the whole order of things—literary, religious, and social—which the classical poetry assumed, and which I had previously taken as impregnable, was being assailed by forces which it was impossible any longer to ignore." He turned to the defense of orthodox religion against the positivists and other worshippers of skeptical science.〔Kirk, Russell (1960). (''The Conservative Mind.'' ) Chicago: Henry Regnery Company, pp. 450–452.〕

Those, however, who... are adherents of the principles which () shares with the latest scientists of to-day, can hardly find the only hope which is open to them expressed by any writer with a loftier and more poignant dignity than that with which they will find it expressed by the Roman disciple of Epicurus.〔Mallock (1900), p. xxi.〕