2-57 LITERARY STUDIES VOL. I. PRINTED BY sromswooDK AND co., MSW-STRKICI LONDON Woodburytype Company. LITERARY STUDIES BY THE LATE WALTEB BAGEHOT M.A. AND FELLOW OF UNIVERSITY COLLEGE, LONDON WITH A PREFATORY MEMOIR EDITED BY RICHARD HOLT HUTTON IN TWO VOLUMES VOL. I. FOURTH EDITION LONDON LONGMANS, GREEN, AND CO. AND NEW YOBK : 15 EAST 16"' STREET 1891 Jill rit/hts reien-eJ ADYEETISEMENT TO THE FOURTH EDITION. THE only changes that have been made in this edition are corrections of the press, the need of which has been discovered since the third edition was issued. For a few of these I have been indebted to the very carefully annotated American edition of Mr. Bagehot's works brought out at Hartford, Connecticut, by Mr. Forrest Morgan, of the Travellers' Insurance Society. In some cases I think that the American editor has missed Mr. Bagehot's meaning, and have not, therefore, accepted his corrections. K. H. H. November 1, 1890, 2066944 ADVERTISEMENT. SEVERAL of the following Essays were published by Mr. BAGEHOT himself in a volume which appeared in 1858, entitled 'Estimates of some Englishmen and Scotchmen' a volume which has now long been out of print. A good many others are republished, now for the first time, from The National Review, in which they appeared, while one other, that on Henry Crabb Robinson, is taken, with the kind permission of the Editor, from The Fortnightly Review ; two short meta- physical papers are from the Contemporary Review, and three one biographical and two political from the Economist. The Prefatory Memoir is also republished, with the Editor's permission, from The Fortnightly Review. In all cases the date of the first publication has been appended to each Essay. The Portrait was taken in photography by Monsieur Adolphe Beau, in 1864. It has been printed by Messrs. Locke & Whit- field by the Woodbury process. Jfovcmler 1878. CONTENTS OF THE FIRST VOLUME. PAGE PRELIMINARY MEMOIR . . ix ESSAY I. THE FIRST EDINBTOGH REVIEWERS (1855) . ... 1 II. HARTLEY COLERIDGE (1852) 41 III. PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY (1856) 75 IV. SHAKESPEARE THE MAN (1853) 126 V. JOHN MILTON (1859) 173 VI. LADY MARY WORTLEY MONTAGU (1862) . . . .221 VII. WILLIAM COWPER (1855) 255 APPENDIX. 1. LETTERS ON THE FRENCH COOT D'ETAT OF 1851 (1852) . . 309 II. C^SARISM AS IT EXISTED IN 1865 361 III. MEMOIR OF THE RIGHT HON. JAMES WILSON (1860) . . 367 MEMOIR BY THE EDITOR. 1 IT is inevitable, I suppose, that the world should judge of a man chiefly by what it has gained in him, and lost by his death, even though a very little reflection might sometimes show that the special qualities which made him so useful to the world implied others of a yet higher order, in which, to those who knew him well, these more conspicuous characteristics must have been well-nigh merged. And while, of course, it has given me great pleasure, as it must have given pleasure to all Bagehot's friends, to hear the Chancellor of the Ex- chequer's evidently genuine tribute to his financial saga- city in the Budget speech of 1877, and Lord Granville's eloquent acknowledgments of the value of Bagehot's political counsels as Editor of the Economist, in the speech delivered at the London University on May 9, 1877, I have sometimes felt somewhat unreasonably vexed that those who appreciated so well what I may almost call the smallest part of him, appeared to know so little of the essence of him, of the high-spirited, 1 This essay appeared in the Fortnightly Review for October 1877, and is now republished, with slight. alterations, by the kind permission of the editor and proprietors of that Keview. In most of the alterations now made, as well as in a great part of the original essay, I have been greatly assisted by the help of Mrs. Walter Bagehot. Memoir. buoyant, subtle, speculative nature in which the ima- ginative qualities were even more remarkable than the judgment, and were, indeed, at the root of all that was strongest in the judgment, of the gay and dashing humour which was the life of every conversation in which he joined, and of the visionary nature to which the commonest things often seemed the most marvellous, and the marvellous things the most intrinsically pro- bable. To those who hear of Bagehot only as an original political economist and a lucid political thinker, a curiously false image of him must be suggested. If they are among the multitude misled by Carlyle, who regard all political economists as c the dreary professors of a dismal science,' they wih 1 probably conjure up an arid disquisitionist on value and cost of production ; and even if assured of Bagehot's ima- ginative power, they may perhaps only understand by the expression, that capacity for feverish preoccupation which makes the mention of ' Peel's Act ' summon up to the faces of certain fanatics a hectic glow, or the rumour of paper currencies blanch others with the pallor of true passion. The truth, however, is that the best qualities which Bagehot had, both as economist and as politician, were of a kind which the majority of economists and politicians do not specially possess. I do not mean that it was in any way an accident that he was an original thinker in either sphere ; far from it. But I do think that what he brought to political and economical science, he brought in some sense from outside their normal range, that the man of business and the financier in him fell within such sharp and well-defined limits, that he knew better than most JHcwoir. xi of his class where their special weakness lay, and where their special functions ended. This, at all events, I am quite sure of, that so far as his judgment was sounder than other men's and on many subjects it was much sounder it was so not in spite of, but in consequence of, the excursive imagination and vivid humour which are so often accused of betraying otherwise sober minds into dangerous aberrations. In him both lucidity and caution were directly traceable to the force of his imagination. Walter Bagehot was born at Langport on February 3, 1826. Langport is an old-fashioned little town in the centre of Somersetshire, which in early days re- turned two members to Parliament, until the burgesses petitioned Edward I. to relieve them of the expense of paying their members, a quaint piece of economy of which Bagehot frequently made humorous boast. The town is still a close corporation, and calls its mayor by the old Saxon name of Portreeve, and Bagehot himself became its Deputy-Recorder, as well as a Magistrate for the County. Situated at the point where the river Parret ceases to be navigable, Langport has always been a centre of trade; and here in the last century Mr. Samuel Stuckey founded the Somersetshire Bank, which has since spread over the entire county, and is now the largest private bank of issue in England. Bagehot was the only surviving child of Mr. Thomas Watson Bagehot, who was for thirty years Managing Director and Vice- chairman of Stuckey's Banking Company, and was, as Bagehot was fond of recalling, before he resigned that position, the oldest joint-stock banker in the United Kingdom. Bagehot succeeded his father as Vice-Chair- Memoir. man of the Bank, when the latter retired in his old age. His mother, a Miss Stuckey, was a niece of Mr. Samuel Stuckey, the founder of the Banking Company, and was a very pretty and lively woman, who had, by her pre- vious marriage with a son of Dr. Estlin of Bristol, been brought at an early age into an intellectual atmosphere by which she had greatly profited. There is no doubt that Bagehot was greatly indebted to the constant and careful sympathy in all his studies that both she and his father gave him, as well as to a very studious dis- position, for his future success. Dr. Prichard, the well- known ethnologist, was her brother-in-law, and her son's marked taste for science was first awakened in Dr. Prichard's house in Park Eow, where Bagehot often spent his half-holidays while he was a schoolboy in Bristol. To Dr. Prichard's Eaces of Man ' may, indeed, be first traced that keen interest in the speculative side of ethnological research, the results of which are best seen in Bagehot's book on * Physics and Politics.' I first met Bagehot at University College, London, when we were neither of us over seventeen. I was struck by the questions put by a lad with large dark eyes and florid complexion to the late Professor De Morgan, who was lecturing to us, as his custom was, on the great difficulties involved in what we thought we all understood perfectly such, for example, as the meaning of 0, of negative quantities, or the grounds of probable expectation. Bagehot's questions showed that he had both read and thought more on these subjects than most of us, and I was eager to make his acquaint- ance, which soon ripened into an intimate friendship, in which there was never any intermission between that Memoir. xiii time and his death. Some will regret that Bagehot did not go to Oxford ; the reason being that his father, who was a Unitarian, objected on principle to all doctrinal tests, and would never have permitted a son of his to go to either of the older Universities while those tests were required of the undergraduates. And I am not at all sure that University College, London, was not at that time a much more awakening place of education for young men than almost any Oxford college. Bagehot himself, I suspect, thought so. Fifteen years later he wrote, in his essay on Shelley : * A distinguished pupil of the University of Oxford once observed to us, " The use of the University of Oxford is that no one can overread himself there. The appetite for knowledge is repressed." ' And whatever may have been defective in University College, London and no doubt much was defective nothing of the kind could have been said of it when we were students there. Indeed, in those years London was a place with plenty of intellectual stimulus in it for young men, while in University College itself there was quite enough vivacious and original teaching to make that stimulus available to the full. It is some- times said that it needs the quiet of a country town remote from the capital, to foster the love of genuine study in young men. But of this, at least, I am sure, that Gower Street, and Oxford Street, and .the New Road, and the dreary chain of squares from Euston to Bloomsbury, were the scenes of discussions as eager and as abstract as ever were the sedate cloisters or the flowery river-meadows of Cambridge or Oxford. Once, I remember, in the vehemence of our argument as to whether the so-called logical principle of identity (A is A) Memoir. were entitled to rank as ' a law of thought ' or only as a postulate of language, Bagehot and I wandered up and down Eegent Street for something like two hours in the vain attempt to find Oxford Street : ' And yet what days were those, Parmenides, When we were young, when we could number friends, In all the Italian cities like ourselves, When with elated hearts we joined your train, Ye sun-born virgins, on the road of truth ! Then we could still enjoy, then neither thought Nor outward things were closed and dead to us, But we received the shock of mighty thoughts On single minds with a pure natural joy; And if the sacred load oppressed our brain, We had the power to feel the pressure eased, The brow unbound, the thoughts flow free again In the delightful commerce of the world." Bagehot has himself described, evidently from his own experience, the kind of life we lived in those days, in an article on Oxford Eeform : ' So, too, in youth, the real plastic energy is not in tutors, or lectures, or in books " got up," but in Wordsworth and Shelley, in the books that all read because all like ; in what all talk of because all are interested ; in the argumentative walk or disputatious lounge ; in the impact of young thought upon young thought, of fresh thought on fresh thought, of hot thought on hot thought ; in mirth and refutation, in ridicule and laughter ; for these are the free play of the natural mind, and these cannot be got without a college.' 1 The late Professor Sewell, when asked to give his pupils some clear conception of the old Greek Sophists, 1 Prospective Review, No. 31, for August 1852, a paper too strictly temporary and practical in its aim for republication now. Memoir. xv is said to have replied that he could not do this better than by referring them to the Professors of University College, London. I do not think there was much force in the sarcasm, for though Professor T. Hewitt Key, whose restless and ingenious mind led him many a wild dance after etymological Will-of-the-wisps I remember, for instance, his cheerfully accepting the suggestion that ' better ' and ' bad ' (melior and mains) came from the same root, and accounting for it by the probable disposition of hostile tribes to call everything bad which their enemies called good, and everything good which their enemies called bad may have had in him much of the brilliance, and something also, perhaps, of the flightiness, of the old sophist, it would be hard to ima- gine men more severe in exposing pretentious conceits and dispelling dreams of theoretic omniscience, than Professors De Morgan, Maiden, and Long. De Morgan, who at that time was in the midst of his controversy on formal logic with Sir William Hamilton, was, indeed, characterised by the great Edinburgh metaphysician as ' profound in mathematics, curious in logic, but wholly deficient in architectonic power ; ' yet, for all that, his lectures on the Theory of Limits were a far better logical discipline for young men than Sir William Hamilton's on the Law of the Unconditioned or the Quantification of the Predicate. Professor Maiden con- trived to imbue us with a love of that fastidious taste and that exquisite nicety in treating questions of scho- larship, which has, perhaps, been more needed and less cultivated in Gower Street than any other of the higher elements of a college education ; while Professor Long's caustic irony, accurate and almost ostentatiously dry xvi Memoir. learning, and profoundly stoical temperament, were as antithetic to the temper of the sophist as human qua- lities could possibly be. The time of our college life was pretty nearly con- temporaneous with the life of the Anti-Corn-Law League and the great agitation in favour of Free- trade. To us this was useful rather from the general impulse it gave to political discussion, and the literary curiosity it excited in us as to the secret of true elo- quence, than because it anticipated in any considerable degree the later acquired taste for economical science. Bagehot and I seldom missed an opportunity of hearing together the matchless practical disquisitions of Mr. Cobden lucid and homely, yet glowing with intense conviction, the profound passion and careless, though artistic, scorn of Mr. Bright, and the artificial and ela- borately ornate periods, and witty, though somewhat ad captandum, epigrams of Mr. W. J. Fox (afterwards M.P. for Oldham). Indeed, we scoured London together to hear any kind of oratory that had gained a reputa- tion of its own, and compared all we heard with the declamation of Burke and the rhetoric of Macaulay, many of whose later essays came out and were eagerly discussed by us while we were together at college. In our conversations on these essays, I remember that I always bitterly attacked, while Bagehot moderately defended, the glorification of compromise which marks all Macaulay 's writings. Even in early youth Bagehot had much of that ' animated moderation ' which he praises so highly in his latest work. He was a vora- cious reader, especially of history, and had a far truer appreciation of historical conditions than most young Memoir. xvii thinkers ; indeed, the broad historical sense which cha- racterised him from first to last, made him more alive than ordinary students to the urgency of circumstance, and far less disposed to indulge in abstract moral criti- cism from a modern point of view. On theology, as on all other subjects, Bagehot was at this time more Con- servative than myself, he sharing his mother's ortho- doxy, and I at that time accepting heartily the Unita- rianism of my own people. Theology was, however, I think, the only subject on which, in later life, we, to some degree at least, exchanged places, though he never at any time, however doubtful he may have become on some of the cardinal issues of historical Christianity, accepted the Unitarian position. Indeed, within the last two or three years of his life, he spoke on one occasion of the Trinitarian doctrine as probably the best account which human reason could render of the mystery of the self-existent mind. In those early days Bagehot 's manner was often supercilious. We used to attack him for his intel- lectual arrogance his v/fyns we called it, in our college slang a quality which I believe was not really in him, though he had then much of its external appearance. Nevertheless his genuine contempt for what was intel- lectually feeble was not accompanied by an even ade- quate appreciation of his own powers. At college, however, his satirical 'Hear, hear,' was a formidable sound in the debating society, and one which took the heart out of many a younger speaker ; and the ironical 'How much?' with which in conversation he would meet an over-eloquent expression, was always of a nature to reduce a man, as the mathematical phrase VOL. i. a xviii Memoir. goes, to liis 'lowest terms.' In maturer life he became much gentler and mellower, and often even delicately considerate for others ; but his inner scorn for in- effectual thought remained, in some degree, though it was very reticently expressed, to the last. For in- stance, I remember his attacking me for my mildness in criticising a book which, though it professed to rest on a basis of clear thought, really missed all its points. ' There is a pale, whitey-brown substance,' he wrote to me, ' in the man's books, which people who don't think take for thought, but it isn't ; ' and he upbraided me much for not saying plainly that the man was a muff. In his youth this scorn for anything like the vain beat- ing of the wings in the attempt to think, was at its maximum. It was increased, I think, by that which was one of his greatest qualities, his remarkable ' de- tachment' of mind in other words, his comparative inaccessibility to the contagion of blind sympathy. Most men, more or less unconsciously, shrink from even thinking what they feel to be out of sympathy with the feelings of their neighbours, unless under some strong incentive to do so ; and in this way the sources of much true and important criticism are dried up, through the mere diffusion and ascendancy of conven- tional but sincere habits of social judgment. And no doubt for the greater number of us this is much the best. We are worth more for the purpose of consti- tuting and strengthening the cohesive power of the social bond, than we should ever be worth for the purpose of criticising feebly and with little effect, perhaps, except the disorganising effect of seeming ill- nature the various incompetences and miscarriages of Memoir. xlx our neighbours' intelligence. But Bagehot's intellect was always far too powerful and original to render him available for the function of mere social cement ; and full as he was of genuine kindness and hearty personal affections, he certainly had not in any high degree that sensitive instinct as to what others would feel, which so often shapes even the thoughts of men, and still oftener their speech, into mild and complaisant, but unmeaning and unfruitful, forms. Thus it has been said that in his very amusing article on Crabb Eobinson, published in the Fortnightly Review for August 1869, he was more than a little rough in his delineation of that quaint old friend of our earlier days. And certainly there is something of the naturalist's realistic manner of describing the habits of a new species, in the paper, though there is not a grain of malice or even depreciatory bias in it, and though there is a very sincere regard manifested throughout. But that essay will illustrate admirably what I mean by saying that Bagehot's detachment of mind, and the deficiency in him of any aptitude for playing the part of mere social cement, tended to give the impression of an intellectual arrogance which certainly in the sense of self-esteem or self-assertion did not in the least belong to him. In the essay I have just mentioned he describes how Crabb Eobinson, when he gave his somewhat famous breakfast-parties, used to forget to make the tea, then lost his keys, then told a long story about a bust of Wieland during the extreme agony of his guests' appetites, and finally, perhaps, withheld the cup of tea he had at last poured out, while he regaled them with a poem of Wordsworth's a2 Memoir. or a diatribe against Hazlitt. And Bagehot adds, ' The more astute of his guests used to breakfast before they came, and then there was much interest in seeing a steady literary man, who did not understand the region, in agonies at having to hear three stories- before he got his tea, one again between his milk and his sugar, another between his butter and his toast, and additional zest in making a stealthy inquiry that was sure to intercept the coming delicacies by bringing on Schiller and Goethe.' The only ' astute ' person referred to was, I imagine, Bagehot himself, who confessed to me, much to my amusement, that this was always his own precaution before one of Crabb Robinson's break- fasts. I doubt if anybody else ever thought of it. It was very characteristic in him that he should have not only noticed for that, of course, anyone might do this weak element in Crabb Robinson's break- fasts, but should have kept it so distinctly before his mind as to make it the centre, as it were, of a policy, and the opportunity of a mischievous stratagem to try the patience of others. It showed how much of the social naturalist there was in him. If any race of animals could understand a naturalist's account of their ways and habits, and of the devices he adopted to get those ways and habits more amusingly or instructively displayed before him, no doubt they would think that he was a cynic ; and it was this intellectual detachment, as of a social naturalist, from the society in which he moved, which made Bagehot's remarks often seem somewhat harsh, when, in fact, they were animated not only by no suspicion of malice, but by the most cordial and earnest friendliness. Owing to this separateness of Memoir. xxi mind, he described more strongly and distinctly traits which, when delineated by a friend, we expect to find painted in the softened manner of one who is half dis- posed to imitate or adopt them. Yet, though I have used the word ' naturalist ' to denote the keen and solitary observation with which Bagehot watched society, no word describes him worse, if we attribute to it any of that coldness and stillness of curiosity which we are apt to associate with scientific vigilance. Especially in his youth, buoyancy, vivacity, velocity of thought, were of the essence of the impres- sion which he made. He had high spirits and great capacities for enjoyment, great sympathies indeed with the old English Cavalier. In his Essay on Macaulay he paints that character with profound sympathy : * What historian, indeed,' he says, ' has ever estimated the Cava- lier character 1 There is Clarendon, the grave, rhetorical, decorous, lawyer piling words, congealing arguments very stately, a little grim. There is Hume, the Scotch metaphysician, who has made out the best case for such people as never were, for a Charles who never died, for a Straflbrd who could never have been attainted, a saving, calculating North-countryman, fat, impassive, who lived on eight- pence a day. What have these people to do with an enjoying English gentleman 1 Talk of the ways of spreading a wholesome Conserva- tism throughout the country .... as far as communicating and establishing your creed is concerned, try a little pleasure. The way to keep up old customs is to enjoy old customs ; the way to be satis- fied with the present state of things, is to enjoy that state of things. Over the " Cavalier " mind this world passes with a thrill of delight ; there is an exultation in a daily event, zest in the " regular thing," joy at an old feast.' l And that aptly represents himself. Such arrogance as he seemed to have in early life was the arrogance as 1 See volume ii., page 232, of this work. xxii Memoir. much of enjoyment as of detachment of mind the in- souciance of the old Cavalier as much at least as the calm of a mind not accessible to the contagion of social feelings. He always talked, in youth, of his spirits as inconveniently high ; and once wrote to me that he did not think they were quite as ' boisterous ' as they had been, and that his fellow-creatures were not sorry for the abatement ; nevertheless, he added, ' I am quite fat, gross, and ruddy.' He was, indeed, excessively fond of hunting, vaulting, and almost all muscular effort, so that his life would be wholly misconceived by anyone who, hearing of his ' detachment ' of thought, should picture his mind as a vigilantly observant, far-away intelligence, such as Hawthorne's, for example. He liked to be in the thick of the melee when talk grew warm, though he was never so absorbed in it as not to keep his mind cool. As I said, Bagehot was a Somersetshire man, with all the richness of nature and love for the external glow of life which the most characteristic counties of the South-west of England contrive to give to their most characteristic sons : ' This north-west corner of Spain,' he wrote once to a newspaper from the Pyrenees, ' is the only place out of England where I should like to live. It is a sort of better Devonshire; the coast is of the same kind, the sun is more brilliant, the sea is more brilliant, and there are mountains in the background. I have seen some more beautiful places and many grander, but I should not like to live in them. As Mr. Emerson puts it, " I do not want to go to heaven bafore my time." My English nature by early use and long habit is tied to a certain kind of scenery, soon feels the want of it, and is apt to be a 1 armed as well as pleased at perpetual snow and all sorts of similar beauties. But here, about San Sebastian, you have the best England can give you (at least if you hold, as I do, that Devonbhire Memoir. is the finest of our counties), and the charm, the ineffable, indescrib- able charm of the South too. Probably the sun has some secret effect OQ the nervous system that makes one inclined to be pleased, but the golden light lies upon everything, and one fancies that one is charmed only by the outward loveliness.' The vivacity and warm colouring of the landscapes of the South of England certainly had their full share in moulding his tastes, and possibly even his style. Bagehot took the mathematical scholarship with his Bachelor's degree in the University of London in 1846, and the gold medal in Intellectual and Moral Philosophy with his Master's degree in 1848, in reading for which lie mastered for the first time those principles of political economy which were to receive so much illustration from his genius in later years. But at this time philosophy, poetry, and theology had, I think, a much greater share of his attention than any narrow and more sharply defined science. Shakespeare, Keats, Shelley and Wordsworth, Coleridge, Martineau and John Henry Newman, all in their way exerted a great influence over his mind, and divided, not unequally, with the authors whom he was bound to study that is, the Greek philosophers, together with Hume, Kant, J. S. Mill, and Sir William Hamilton the time at his disposal. I have no doubt that for seven or eight years of his life the Roman Catholic Church had a great fas- cination for his imagination, though I do not think that he was ever at all near conversion. He was intimate with all Dr. Newman's writings. And of these the Oxford sermons, and the poems in the Lyra Apoxtolica afterwards separately published partly, I believe, on account of the high estimate of them which Bagehot had himself expressed were always his special favourites. xxiv Me The little poetry he wrote and it is evident that he never had the kind of instinct for, or command of, language which is the first condition of genuine poetic genius seems to me to have been obviously written under the spell which Dr. Newman's own few but finely-chiselled poems had cast upon him. If I give one specimen of Bagehot's poems, it is not that I think it in any way an adequate expression of his powers, but for a very different reason, because it will show those who have inferred from his other writings that his mind never deeply concerned itself with religion, how great is their mistake. Nor is there any real poverty of resource in these hues, except perhaps in the awkward mechanism of some of them. They were probably written when he was twenty-three or twenty-four. ' To THE ROMAN CATHOLIC CHURCH. ' " Casta inceste." Lucretius. ' Thy lamp of faith is brightly trimmed, Thy eager eye is not yet dimmed, Thy stalwart step is yet unstayed, Thy words are well obeyed. ' Thy proud voice vaunte of strength from heaven, Thy proud foes carp, " By hell's art given :" No Titan thou of earth-bom bands, Strange Church of hundred hands. ' Nursed without knowledge, born of night, With hand of power and thoughts of light, As Britain seas, far reach ingly O'er-rul'st thou history. Wild as La Pucelle in her hour, O'er prostrate realms with awe-girt power Thou marchest stedfast on thy path Through wonder, love, and wrath. Memoir, xxv ' And will thy end be such as hers, O'erpowered by earthly mail-clad powers, Condemned for cruel, magic art, Though awful, bold of heart 1 * Through thorn -clad Time's unending waste With ardent step alone thou strayest, As Jewish scape-goats tracked the wild, Unholy, consecrate, defiled. ' Use not thy truth in manner nide To rule for gain the multitude, Or thou wilt see that truth depart, To seek some holier heart ; ' Then thou wilt watch thy errors lorn, O'erspread by shame, o'erswept by scorn, In lonely want without hope's smile, As Tyre her weed-clad Isle. ' Like once thy chief, thou bear'st Christ's name; Like him thou hast denied his shame, Bold, eager, skilful, confident, Oh, now like him repent !' That has certainly no sign of the hand of the master in it, for the language is not moulded and -vivified by the thought, but the thought itself is fine. And there is still better evidence than these lines would afford, of the fascination which the Eoman Catholic Church had for Bagehot. A year or two later, in the letters on the coup d'etat, to which I shall soon have to refer, there occurs the following passage. (He is trying to explain how the cleverness, the moral restlessness, and in tellectual impatience of the French, all tend to unfit them for a genuine Parliamentary government) : ' I do not know that I can exhibit the way these qualities of the French character operate on their opinions better than by teFing you how the Roman Catholic Church deals with them. I have rather xxvi Memoir. attended to it since I came here. It gives sermons almost f.n interest, their being in French, and to those curious in intellectual matters, it is worth observing. In other times, and even now in out-of-the-way Spain, I suppose it may be true that the Catholic Church has been opposed to inquiry and reasoning. But it is not so now and here. Loudly from the pens of a hundred writers, from the tongues of a thousand pulpits, in every note of thrilling scorn and exulting de- rision, she proclaims the contrary. Be she Christ's workman or Antichrist's, she knows her work too well. " Reason, reason, reason !" exclaims she to the philosophers of this world. " Put in practice what you teach if you would have others believe it. Be consistent. Do not prate to us of private judgment, when you are but yourselves repeating what you heard in the nursery, ill-mumbled remnants of a Catholic tradition. No; exemplify what you command; inquire and make search. Seek, and we warn you that ye will never find, yet do as ye will. Shut yourselves up in a room, make your mind a blank, go down (as you speak) into the depth of your consciousness, scrutinise the mental structure, inquire for the elements of belief, spend years, your best years, in the occupation, and at length, when your eyes are dim, and your brain hot, and ycur hands unsteady, then reckon what you have gained. See if you cannot count on your fingers the certainties you have reached ; reflect which of them you doubted yesterday, which you may disbelieve to-morrow ; or rather, make haste assume at random some essential credenda, write down your inevitable postulates, enumerate your necessary axioms, toil on, toil on, spin your spider's web, adore your own soul, or if ye prefer it, choose some German nostrum ; try an intellectual intuition, or the pure reason, or the intelligible ideas, or the mesmeric clair- voyance, and when so, or somehow, you have attained your results, try them on mankind. Don't go out into the byeways and hedges ; it is unnecessary. Ring a bell, call in the servants, give them a course of lectures, cite Aristotle, review Descartes, panegyrise Plato, and see if the bonne will understand you. It is you that say Vox populi, vox Dei. You see the people reject you Or, suppose you succeed, what you call succeeding. Your books are read ; for three weeks or even a season you are the idol of the salons. Your hard words are on the lips of women ; then a change comes a new actress appeara at the Theatre Frane.ais or the Opera; her charms eclipse your theories ; or a great catastrophe occurs ; political liberty, it is said, is annihilated. Ilfaut sefaire mo^lchard, is the observation of scoflers. Anyhow you are forgotten. Fifty years may be the gesta- Memoir. tion of a philosophy, not three its life. Before long, before you go to your grave, your six disciples leave you for some newer master, or to set up for themselves. The poorest priest in the remotest region of the Basses-Alpes has more power over men's souls than human cultivation. His ill-mouthed masses move women's souls can you ? Ye scoif at Jupiter, yet he at least was believed in, you never have been. Idol for idol, the dethroned is better than the zmthroned. No, if you would reason, if you would teach, if you would speculate, come to us. We have our premises ready; years upon years before you were born, intellects whom the best of you delight to magnify, toiled to systematise the creed of ages. Years upon years after you are dead, better heads than yours will find new matter there to define, to divide, to arrange. Consider the hundred volumes of Aquinas. Which of you desire a higher life than that ; to deduce, to subtilise, dis- criminate, systematise, and decide the highest truth, and to be believed 1 Yet such was his luck, his enjoyment. He was what you would be. No, no, credite, credite. Ours is the life of speculation. The cloister is the home for the student. Philosophy is stationary, Catholicism progressive. You call. We are heard," &c. So speaks each preacher, according to his ability. And when the dust and noise of present controversies have passed away, and, in the interior of the night, some grave historian writes out the tale of half-forgotten times, let him not forget to observe that, profoundly as the mediaeval Church subdued the superstitious cravings of a painful and barbarous age, in after-years she dealt more discerningly still with the feverish excite- ment, the feeble vanities, and the dogmatic impatience of an over- intellectual generation.' l It is obvious, I think, both from the poem, and from these reflections, that what attracted Bagehot in the Church of Eome was the historical prestige and social authority which she had accumulated in believing and uncritical ages for use in the unbelieving and critical age in which we live, while what he condemned and dreaded in her was her tendency to use her power over the multitude for purposes of a low ambition. And as I am on this subject, this will be, I think, the best opportunity I shall have to say what I have 1 See Appendix to this volume, page 335. Memoir. got to say of Bagehot's later religious belief, without returning to it when I have to deal with a period in which the greatest part of his spare intellectual energy was given to other subjects. I do not think that the religious affections were very strong in Bagehot's mind, but the primitive religious instincts certainly were. From childhood he was what he certainly remained to the last, in spite of the rather antagonistic influence of the able scientific group of men from whom he learned so much a thorough transcendentalist, by which I mean one who could never doubt that there was a real foundation of the universe distinct from the outward show of its superficial qualities, and that the substance is never exhaustively expressed in these qualities. He often repeats in his essays Shelley's fine hue, 'Lift not the painted veil which those who live call life,' and the essence at least of the idea in it haunted him from his very child- hood. In the essay on ' Hartley Coleridge' perhaps the most perfect in style of any of his writings he describes most powerfully, and evidently in great measure from his own experience, the mysterious confusion between appearances and realities which so bewildered little Hartley, the difficulty that he complained of in dis- tinguishing between the various Hartleys, 'picture Hartley,' 'shadow Hartley,' and between Hartley the subject and Hartley the object, the enigmatic blending of which last two Hartleys the child expressed by catching hold of his own arm, and then calling himself the ' catch-me-fast Hartley.' And in dilating on this bewildering experience of the child's, Bagehot borrows from his own recollections : 'All children have a world of their own, as distinct from that of Memoir. xxix the grown people who gravitate around them, as the dreams of girl- hood from our prosaic life, or the ideas of the kitten that plays with the falling leaves, from those of her carnivorous mother that catches mice, and is sedulous in her domestic duties. But generally about this interior existence children are dumb. You have warlike ideas, but you cannot say to a sinewy relative, " My dear aunt, I wonder when the big bush in the garden will begin to walk about ; I'm sure it's a Crusader, and I was cutting it all the day with my steel sword. But what do you think, aunt 1 for I'm puzzled about its legs, because you see, aunt, it has only one stalk and besides, axint, the leaves." You cannot remark this in secular life, but you hack at the infe i- citous bush till you do not wholly reject the idea that your small garden is Palestine, and yourself the most adventurous of knights.' l They have a tradition in the family that this is but a fragment from Bagehot's own imaginative childhood, and certainly this visionary element in him was very vivid to the last. However, the transcendental or in- tellectual basis of religious belief was soon strengthened in him, as readers of his remarkable paper on Bishop Butler will easily see, by those moral and retributive instincts which warn us of the meaning and consequences of guilt : ' The moral principle,' he wrote in that essay, ' whatever may be said to the contrary by complacent thinkers, is real'y and to most men a principle of fear Conscience is the condemnation of ourselves; we expect a penalty. As the Greek proverb teaches, " Where there is shame, there is fear." How to be free from this is the question. How to get loose from this how to be rid of the secret tie which binds the strong man and cramps his pride, and makes him angry at the beauty of the universe, which will not let him go forth like a great animal, like the king of the forest, in the glory of his might, but which restrains him with an inner fear and a secret foreboding that if he do but exalt himself he shall be abased, if he do but set forth his own dignity he will offend ONE who will deprive him of it. This, as has often been pointed out, is the source of the bloody rites of heathendom.' 2 1 See vol. i. p. 43. * See vol. ii. p. 66. xxx Memoir. And then, after a powerful passage, in which he describes the sacrificial superstitions of men like Achilles, he returns, with a flash of his own peculiar humour, to Bishop Butler, thus : ' Of course it is not this kind of fanaticism that we impute to a prelate of the English Church ; human sacrifices are not respectable, and Achilles was not rector of Stanhope. But though the costume and circumstances of life change, the human heart does not; its feelings remain. The same anxiety, the same consciousness of per- sonal sin, which lead, in barbarous times, to what has been described, show themselves in civilised life as well. In this quieter period, their great manifestation is scrupulosity;' 1 which he goes on to describe as a sort of inexhaustible anxiety for perfect compliance with the minutest posi- tive commands which may be made the condition of forgiveness for the innumerable lapses of moral obliga- tion. I am not criticising the paper, or I should point out that Bagehot failed in it to draw out the distinction between the primitive moral instinct and the corrupt superstition into which it runs ; but I believe that he recognised the weight of this moral testimony of the conscience to a divine Judge, as well as the transcen- dental testimony of the intellect to an eternal substance of things, to the end of his life. And certainly in the reality of human free-will as the condition of all genuine moral life, he firmly believed. In his ' Physics and Polities' the subtle and original essay upon which, in conjunction with the essay on the ' English Constitution,' Bagehot's reputation as a European thinker chiefly rests he repeatedly guards himself (for instance, pp. 9, 10) against being supposed to think that in accepting the 1 See vol. ii. p. 67. Memoir. xxxi principle of evolution, he has accepted anything incon- sistent either with spiritual creation, or with the free will of man. On the latter point he adds, ' No doubt the modern doctrine of the " conservation of force," if applied to decision, is inconsistent with free-will ; if you hold that force is " never lost or gained," you cannot hold that there is a real gain, a sort of new creation of it in free volition. But I have nothing to do here with the universal " conservation of force." The conception of the nervous organs as stores of will-made power, does not raise or need so vast a discussion.' l And in the same book he repeatedly uses the expres- sion ' Providence,' evidently in its natural meaning, to express the ultimate force at work behind the march of ' evolution.' Indeed, in conversation with me on this subject, he often said how much higher a conception of the creative mind, the new Darwinian ideas seemed to him to have introduced, as compared with those con- tained in what is called the argument from contrivance and design. On the subject of personal immortality, too, I do not think that Bagehot ever wavered. He often spoke, and even wrote, of ' that vague sense of eternal continuity which is always about the mind, and which no one could bear to lose,' and described it as being much more important to us than it even appears to be, important as that is ; for, he said, ' when we think we are thinking of the past, we are only thinking of a future that is to be like it.' But with the exception of these cardinal points, I could hardly say how much Bagehot's mind was or was not affected by the great speculative controversies of later years. Certainly he became much more doubtful concerning the force of the historical 1 Physics and Politics, p. 10. xxxii Memoir. evidence of Christianity than I ever was, and rejected, I think, entirely, though on what amount of personal study he had founded his opinion I do not know, the Apostolic origin of the fourth Gospel. Possibly his mind may have been latterly in suspense as to miracle alto- gether, though I am pretty sure that he had not come to a negative conclusion. He belonged, in common with myself, during the last years of his life, to a society in which these fundamental questions were often dis- cussed ; but he seldom spoke in it, and told me very shortly before his death that he shrank from such dis- cussions on religious points, feeling that, in debates of this kind, they were not and could not be treated with anything like thoroughness. On the whole, I think, the cardinal article of his faith would be adequately represented even in the latest period of his life by the following passage in his essay on Bishop Butler : 'In every step of religious argument we require the assumption, the belief, the faith, if the word is better, in an absolutely perfect Being ; in and by whom we are, who is omnipotent as well as most holy; who moves on the face of the whole world, and ruleth all things by the word of his power. If we grant this, the difficulty of the opposition between what is here called the natural and the super- natural religion is removed ; and without granting it, that difficulty is perhaps insuperable. It follows from the very idea and definition of an infinitely perfect Being, that he is within us as well as without us, ruling the clouds of the air and the fishes of the sea, as well as the fears and thoughts of men ; smiling through the smile of natura as well as warning with the pain of conscience, " sine qualitate, bonum ; sine quantitate, magnum ; sine indigentia, creatorem ; sine situ, praesidentem ; sine habitu, omnia continentem ; sine loco, ubique totum ; sine tempore, sempiternum ; sine ulla sui mutatione, muta- bilia facientem, nihilque patientem." If we assume this, life is simple; without this, all is dark.' l ' Volume ii. p. 71. Memoir. XXXlll Evidently, then, though Bagehot held that the doc- trine of evolution by natural selection gave a higher conception of the Creator than the old doctrine of mechanical design, he never took any materialistic view of evolution. One of his early essays, written while at college, on some of the many points of the Kantian philosophy which he then loved to discuss, concluded with a remarkable sentence, which would probably have fairly expressed, even at the close of his life, his profound belief in God, and his partial sympathy with the agnostic view that we are, in great measure, in- capable of apprehending, more than very dimly, His mind or purposes : ' Gazing after the infinite essence, we are like men watching through the drifting clouds for a glimpse of the true heavens on a drear November day ; layer after layer passes from our view, but still the same immovable grey rack remains.' After Bagehot had taken his Master's degree, and while he was still reading Law in London, and hesitat- ing between the Bar and the family bank, there came as Principal to University Hall (which is a hall of resi- dence in connection with University College, London, established by the Presbyterians and Unitarians after the passing of the Dissenters' Chapel Act), the man who had, I think, a greater intellectual fascination for Bagehot than any of his contemporaries Arthur Hugh Clougli, Fellow of Oriel College, Oxford, and author of various poems of great genius, more or less familiar to the public, though Clough is perhaps better known as the subject of the exquisite poem written on his death in 1861, by his friend Matthew Arnold the poem to which he gave the name of ' Thyrsis ' than VOL. j. b xxxiv Memoir. by even the most popular of his own. Bagehot had subscribed for the erection of University Hall, and took an active part at one time on its council. Thus he saw a good deal of Clough, and did what he could to mediate between that enigma to Presbyterian parents - a college-head who held himself serenely neutral on almost all moral and educational subjects interesting to parents and pupils, except the observance of discipli- nary rules and the managing body who bewildered him and were by him bewildered. I don't think either Bagehot or dough's other friends were very success- ful in their mediation, but he at least gained in Clough a cordial friend, and a theme of profound intellectual and moral interest to himself which lasted him his life, and never failed to draw him into animated discussion long after Clough 's own premature death ; and I think I can trace the effect which some of Clough 's writings had on Bagehot's mind to the very end of his career. There were some points of likeness between Bagehot and Clough, but many more of difference. Both had the capacity for boyish spirits in them, and the florid colour which usually accompanies a good deal of animal vigour ; both were reserved men, with a great dislike of anything like the appearance of false senti- ment, and both were passionate admirers of Words- worth's poetry ; but Clough was slightly lymphatic, with a great tendency to unexpressed and unacknow- ledged discouragement, and to the paralysis of silent embarrassment when suffering from such feelings, while Bagehot was keen, and very quickly evacuated embar- rassing positions, and never returned to them. When however, Clough was happy and at ease, there was a Memoir. xxxv calm and silent radiance in his face, and his head was set with a kind of stateliness on his shoulders, that gave him almost an Olympian air ; but this would sometimes vanish in a moment into an embarrassed taciturnity that was quite uncouth. One of his friends declares that the man who was said to be ' a cross between a schoolboy and a bishop,' must have been like Clough. There was in Clough, too, a large Chaucerian simplicity and a flavour of homeliness, so that now and then, when the light shone into his eyes, there was some- thing, in spite of the air of fine scholarship and culture, which reminded one of the best likenesses of Burns. It was of Clough, I believe, that Emerson was thinking (though, knowing Clough intimately as he did, be was of course speaking mainly in joke) when he described the Oxford of that day thus : ' "Ah," says my languid Oxford gentleman, " nothing new, and nothing true, and no matter." ' No saying could misrepresent dough's really buoyant and simple character more completely than that ; but doubtless many of his sayings and writings, treating, as they did, most of the greater problems of life as insoluble, and enjoining a self-pos- sessed composure under the discovery of their insolu- bility, conveyed an impression very much like this to men who came only occasionally in contact with him. Bagehot, in his article on Crabb Robinson, says that the latter, who in those days seldom remembered names, always described Clough as ' that admirable and accom- plished man you know whom I mean the one who never says anything.' And certainly Clough was often taciturn to the last degree, or if he opened his lips, delighted to open them only to scatter confusion by b 2 xxxvi Memoir. discouraging, in words at least, all that was then called earnestness as, for example, by asking, 'Was it or- dained that twice two should make four, simply for the intent that boys and girls should be cut to the heart that they do not make five ? Be content ; when the veil is raised, perhaps they will make five ! Who knows ? ' l dough's chief fascination for Bagehot was, I think, that he had as a poet in some measure rediscovered, at all events realised, as few ever realised before, the enormous difficulty of finding truth a difficulty which he somewhat paradoxically held to be enhanced rather than diminished by the intensity of the truest modern passion for it. The stronger the desire, he teaches, the greater is the danger of illegitimately satisfying that desire by persuading ourselves that what we wish to believe, is true, and the greater the danger of ignoring the actual confusions of human things : ' Rules baffle instincts, instincts rules, Wise men are bad, and good are fools, Facts evil, wishes vain appear, "We cannot go, why are we here ? ' Oh, may we, for assurance' sake, Some arbitrary judgment take, And wilfully pronounce it clear, For this or that 'tis, we are here ? ' Or is it right, and will it do To pace the sad confusion through, And say, it does not yet appear What we shall be what we are here ? ' This warning to withhold judgment and not cheat 1 Poems and Prose Remains of Arthur Hugh dough, vol. i, p. 175. Memoir. xxxvii ourselves into beliefs which our own imperious desire to believe had alone engendered, is given with every variety of tone and modulation, and couched in all sorts of different forms of fancy and apologue, throughout dough's poems. He insists on 'the ruinous force of the will ' to persuade us of illusions which please us ; of the tendency of practical life to give us beliefs which suit that practical life, but are none the truer for that ; and is never weary of warning us that a firm belief in a falsity can be easily generated : 'Action will furnish belief, but will that belief be the true one? This is the point, you know. However, it doesn't much matter. "What one wants, I suppose, is to predetermine the action, So as to make it entail, not a chance belief, but the true one.' This practical preaching, which dough urges in season and out of season, met an answering chord in Bagehot's mind, not so much in relation to religious belief as in relation to the over-haste and over-eagerness of human conduct, and I can trace the effect of it in all his writings, political and otherwise, to the end of his life. Indeed, it affected him much more in later days than in the years immediately following his first friendship with dough. With all his boyish dash, there was something in Bagehot even in youth which dreaded precipitancy, and not only precipitancy itself, but those moral situations tending to precipitancy which men who have no minds of their own to make up, so often court. In later life he pleased himself by insisting that, on Darwin's principle, civilised men, with all the complex problems of modern life to puzzle them, suspend their judgment so little, and are so eager for action, only because they have inherited from the xxxviii Memoir. earlier, simpler, and more violent ages, an excessive predisposition to action unsuited to our epoch and dangerous to our future development. But it was Clough, I think, who first stirred in Bagehot's mind this great dread of ' the ruinous force of the will,' a phrase he was never weary of quoting, and which might almost be taken as the motto of his ' Physics and Politics,' the great conclusion of which is that in the ' age of discus- sion,' grand policies and high-handed diplomacy and sensational legislation of all kinds will become rarer and rarer, because discussion will point out all the dif- ficulties of such policies in relation to a state of exist- ence so complex as our own, and will in this way tend to repress the excess of practical energy handed down to us by ancestors to whom life was a sharper, simpler, and more perilous affair. But the time for Bagehot's full adoption of the suspensive principle in public affairs was not yet. In 1851 he went to Paris, shortly before the coup d'etat. And while all England was assailing Louis Napoleon (justly enough, as I think) for his perfidy, and his im- patience of the self-willed Assembly he could not control, Bagehot was preparing a deliberate and very masterly defence of that bloody and high-handed act. Even Bagehot would, I think, if pressed judiciously in later life, have admitted though I can't say he ever did that the coup d'etat was one of the best illustra- tions of ' the ruinous force of the will ' in engendering, or at least crystallising, a false intellectual conclusion as to the political possibilities of the future, which recent history could produce. Certainly he always spoke somewhat apologetically of these early letters, though I Memoir. xxxix never heard him expressly retract their doctrine. In 1851 a knot of young Unitarians, of whom I was then one, headed by the late Mr. J. Langton Sanford after- wards the historian of the Great Eebellion, who survived Bagehot barely four months had engaged to help for a time in conducting the Inquirer, which then was, and still is, the chief literary and theological organ of the Unitarian body. Our regime was, I imagine, a time of great desolation for the very tolerant and thoughtful con- stituency for whom we wrote ; and many of them, I am confident, yearned, and were fully justified in yearning, for those better days when this tyranny of ours should be overpast. Sanford and Osier did a good deal to throw cold water on the rather optimist and philan- thropic politics of the most sanguine, because the most benevolent and open-hearted of Dissenters. Eoscoe criticised their literary work from the point of view of a devotee of the Elizabethan poets ; and I attempted to prove to them in distinct heads, first, that their laity ought to have the protection afforded by a liturgy against the arbitrary prayers of their ministers ; and next, that at least the great majority of their sermons ought to be suppressed, and the habit of delivering them discontinued almost altogether. Only a denomina- tion of 'just men' trained in tolerance for generations, and in that respect, at least, made all but 'perfect,' would have endured it at all ; but I doubt if any of us caused the Unitarian body so much grief as Bagehot, who never was a Unitarian, but who contributed a series of brilliant letters on the coup d'etat, in which he trod just as heavily on the toes of his colleagues as he did on those of the public by whom the Inquirer was taken- xl Memoir. In those letters he not only, as I have already shown, eulogised the Catholic Church, but he supported the Prince-President's military violence, attacked the free- dom of the Press in France, maintained that the country was wholly unfit for true Parliamentary government, and worst of all perhaps insinuated a panegyric on Louis Napoleon himself, asserting that he had been far better prepared for the duties of a statesman by gambling on the turf, than he would have been by poring over the historical and political dissertations of the wise and the good. This was Bagehot's day of cynicism. The seven letters which, he wrote on the coup d'etat were certainly very exasperating, and yet they were not caricatures of his real thought, for his private letters at the time were more cynical still. Crabb Robinson, in speaking of him, used ever afterwards to describe him to me as ' that friend of yours you know whom I mean, you rascal ! who wrote those abominable, those most disgraceful letters on the coup d'etat I did not forgive him for years after.' Nor do I wonder, even now, that a sincere friend of constitutional freedom and intellectual liberty, like Crabb Eobinson, found them difficult to forgive. They were light and airy, and even flippant on a very grave subject. They made nothing of the Prince's perjury ; and they took impertinent liberties with all the dearest prepossessions of the readers of the Inquirer, and assumed their sym- pathy just where Bagehot knew that they would be most revolted by his opinions. Nevertheless, they had a vast deal of truth in them, and no end of ability, and I hope that there will be many to read them with interest now that they are here republished. There is a good Memoir. xli deal of the raw material of history in them, and certainly I doubt if Bagehot ever again hit the satiric vein of argument so well. Here is a passage that will bear taking out of its context, and therefore not so full of the shrewd malice of these letters as many others, but which will illustrate their ability. It is one in which Bagehot maintained for the first time the view (which I believe he subsequently almost persuaded English poli- ticians to accept, though in 1852 it was a mere flippant novelty, a paradox, and a heresy) that free institutions are apt to succeed with a stupid people, and to founder with a ready-witted and vivacious one. After broaching this, he goes on : ' I see you are surprised. You are going to say to me as Socrates did to Polus, " My young friend, of course you are right, but will you explain what you mean, as you are not yet intelligible ?" I will do so as well as I can, and endeavour to make good what I say, not from a prior demonstration of my own, but from the details of the present and the facts of history. Not to begin by wounding any present susceptibilities, let me take the Roman character, for, with one great exception I need not say to whom I allude they are the great political people of history. Now is not a certain dulness their most visible characteristic ? What is the history of their speculative mind ? A blank. What their literature ? A copy. They have left not a single discovery in any abstract science, not a single perfect or well-formed work of high imagination. The Greeks, the perfec- tion of human and accomplished genius, bequeathed to mankind the ideal forms of self-idolising art ; the Romans imitated and admired. The Greeks explained the laws of nature ; the Romans wondered and despised. The Greeks invented a system of numerals second only to that now in use ; the Romans counted to the end of their days with the clumsy apparatus which we still call by their name. The Greeks made a capital and scientific calendar; the Romans began their month when the Pontifex Maximus happened to spy out the new moon. Throughout Latin literature this is the perpetual puzzle Why are we free and they slaves'? we praetors and they barbers? Why do the .stupid people always win and the clever people always xlii Memoir. lose 1 I need not say that in real sound stupidity the English people are unrivalled. You'll have more wit, and better wit, in an Irish street-row than would keep "Westminster Hall in humour for five weeks. These valuable truths are no discoveries of mine. They are familiar enough to people whose business it is to know them. Hear what a douce and aged attorney says of your peculiarly promising barrister. " Sharp 1 Oh ! yes, yes : he's too sharp by half. He isn't safe, not a minute, isn't that young man." "What style, sir," asked of an East India Director some youthful aspirant for literary- renown, " is most to be preferred in the composition of official despatches ?" " My good fellow," responded the ruler of Hindostan, " the style as we like, is the Humdrum." ' * The permanent value of these papers is due to the freshness of their impressions of the French capital, and their true criticisms of Parisian journalism and society ; their perverseness consists in this, that Bagehot steadily ignored in them the distinction between the duty of resisting anarchy, and the assumption of the Prince- President that this could only be done by establishing his own dynasty, and deferring sine die that great con- stitutional experiment which is now once more, no thanks to him or his Government, on its trial ; an ex- periment which, for anything we see, had at least as good a chance then as now, and under a firm and popular chief of the executive like Prince Louis, would probably have had a better chance then than it has now under MacMahon. I need hardly say that in later life Bagehot was by no means blind to the political short- comings of Louis Napoleon's regime, as the article re- published from the Economist, in the second appendix to this volume, sufficiently proves. Moreover, he rejoiced heartily in the moderation of the republican statesmen during the severe trials of the months which just pre- 1 See Appendix to this volume, page 329. Memoir. xliii ceded his own death, in 1877, and expressed his sincere belief confirmed by the history of the last year and a half that the existing Eepublic has every prospect of life and growth. During that residence in Paris, Bagehot, though, as I have said, in a somewhat cynical frame of mind, was full of life and courage, and was beginning to feel his own genius, which perhaps accounts for the air of recklessness so foreign to him, which he never adopted either before or since. During the riots he was a good deal in the streets, and from a mere love of art helped the Parisians to construct some of their barricades, notwithstanding the fact that his own sympathy was with those who shot down the barricades, not with those who manned them. He climbed over the rails of the Palais Eoyal on the morning of December 2nd to breakfast, and used to say that he was the only person who did breakfast there on that day. Victor Hugo is certainly wrong in asserting that no one expected Louis Napoleon to use force, and that the streets were as full as usual when the people were shot down, for the gates of the Palais Eoyal were shut quite early in the day. Bagehot was very much struck by the ferocious look of the Montagnards. ' Of late,' he wrote to me, * f have been devoting my entire attention to the science of barricades, which I found amusing. They have systernatised it in a way which is pleasing to the cultivated intellect. We had only one good day's fighting, and I naturally kept out of cannon-shot. But I took a quiet walk over the barricades in the morning, and superintended the construction of three with as much keenness as if I had been clerk of the works. You've seen lots, of course, at Berlin, but I should not think those Germans were up to a real Montagnard, who is the most horrible being to the eye I ever saw, sallow, sincere, sour fanaticism, with grizzled moustaches, xliv Memoir. and a strong wish to shoot you rather than not. The Montagnards are a scarce commodity, the real race only three or four, if so many f to a barricade. If you want a Satan any odd time, they'll do ; only I hope that he don't believe in human brotherhood. It is not possible to respect any one who does, and I should be loth to confound the notion of our friend's solitary grandeur by supposing him to fraternise.'