The Works of Walter Bagehot

THIS EDITION was planned and begun as a simple reprint, uniform and indexed, of the existing editions of Bagehot's works; *there was then no thought of "editing" the text, or recognition of its extreme necessity. The accidental notice, after the work was well under way, that a series of extracts from a familiar book were full of errors, led first to an attempt to verify and correct all quotations; then, as attention was more sharply directed to the text, to the discovery that Bagehot's own matter was in almost as corrupt a state as his extracts from other writers, and in consequence to still further examination of the original sources of his facts, which resulted in some surprising developments; lastly, to a collation of his original review articles with the reprints revised by himself, not unfruitful task. Had the enormous labor involved, and the utter impossibility of fully accomplishing the design, been realized at the outset (for it needed several years of exclusive time, while only the spare moments of a couple of busy years could be given

* Namely, the two volumes of "Literary Studies" and the volume of "Biographical Studies" (including the "Letters on the French Coup d'État ”), and the unfinished "Economic Studies," edited by his friend and schoolfellow, Mr. Hutton; and the scattered volumes "English Constitution," "Physics and Politics," "Lombard Street," " Depreciation of Silver," and "International Coinage" (from the Economist of 1868, as the first reprinted edition was unobtainable and the second had not been issued; the latter is used in the present set). To this edition are added also the obituary article on John Stuart Mill from the Economist, to fill a gap in the "Economic Studies"; Mr. Hutton's memoir in the National Cyclopædia; and copious extracts from a very uneven article on "Oxford" in the Prospective Review. Mr. Hutton judiciously omitted this essay from his collection, -as a whole it is not only obsolete, but (an unknown thing in Bagehot's later writings) rather tedious; yet it contains in spots so much of his very best wit and acute sense that it seemed a wrong both to him and the public to suppress it entirely. Especially good are the passages on the use and influence of the higher education (though even this has another side which he neglects); and the closing one on the smoldering fury of hate in the English mind toward anything papistic, as racy and characteristic a bit as anything he ever wrote. - ED.

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to it, and many mortifying gaps were inevitable), the plan would probably have been confined to its original proportions; but I believe that even a partial success will be welcomed by the public, for no modern writer needed the service so badly, and there was no likelihood of its being undertaken by another.

No one who does not – -as probably no one save a possible future editor ever will- - compare this edition, word by word, with any former ones, can form any adequate conception of the shocking state of Bagehot's text as heretofore given to the world; there is nothing even remotely approaching it in the case of any other English writer of high rank since Shakespeare's time. This reflects no discredit on Mr. Hutton, who simply left it as he found it, and who shows in his memoir of Bagehot that he knew it was not in very good shape, though apparently he did not realize how bad it was; but I think it does reflect a good deal on Bagehot, who could have saved the worst things by the most casual glance at his proofs, and who evidently never even looked at most of them at all. These slips cover almost the entire possible range of human blunders, and are sometimes of serious moment.

Perhaps the most numerous sort resulted from misreading by the printers of Bagehot's not very legible handwriting, perpetuated by his failure to correct them. Through this, some of the review articles are perfect museums of grotesque errors. Names of persons and places suffer badly: Horner masquerades as Hume,* Croker as Crocker, and Daniel Malthus as David; Wortley Montagu's country seat of Sandon appears as Loudon, and Lady Althorp's home, Wiseton, as Winton; and so on. In Horace Walpole's stinging letter on Mary Wortley Montagu, “dirt” is changed to "art"; in one of Francis Horner, "success" is made "sweep "; in an extract from "Eōthen," "command" is printed "commerce "; in an extract from Wordsworth in the sketch of Crabb Robinson, "Of nature's impress" is turned to "A nation's impress"; and so on ad tedium, in most cases the new reading being perfect gibberish. Diverting examples of this are near the beginning of "Physics and Politics," and the last page but one of the "Letters on the French Coup d'Etat," where the printers had serious and unsuccessful struggles to keep "politics" and "polities" separate, and the author seems not to have helped them at all. But nothing in printed literature is quite as ridiculous as the extract from the "Prelude" in the essay on Lord Althorp, which I have embalmed for a wondering world. This article, published about the

The exact places of these mistakes can be easily found by the index.

time of Bagehot's death, is in a little the worst condition of all; but that on Mary Wortley Montagu is not much better. Nor is this by any means confined to extracts: the foot-notes will show more than one case where the sense of his own writing is destroyed by a misread word whose correct reading is easy to guess. In this list belong also a mass of mere typographical errors and slips of the pen (as George III. for George I., Queen Anne for George II., etc.), sometimes of a most annoying kind; for instance, in two cases a misprinted date caused a long search for a quotation in the wrong quarter.

Another remarkable and curiously balanced sort consists in the misplacement of quotation marks, either crediting Bagehot with the writing of others or vice versa; there are, I think, just the same number of each. For instance, a half-page of Lady Louisa Stuart's is printed as his own in the article on Mary Wortley Montagu; a half-page of Lord Mahon in that on William Pitt; several lines of Lord Macaulay in "Lombard Street" (mangled as usual); and there are one or two more. On the other hand, he partially requites Lady Louisa with a couple of lines, and gives some to Le Marchant in the sketch of Lord Althorp and to Catlin in "Economic Studies," and there are other instances.

Again, the number of cases where the sense is exactly inverted by the misplacement of negatives or the reversal of the place of alternatives in a sentence is something incredible; I have kept no exact account, but there must be well toward twenty in the five volumes. A few of these have been changed outright (and noted in the table of alterations); but in general, attention has been called to them in foot-notes.

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The department of distorted quotations is recruited from so many different sources of error that it is hard to know where to begin. Of course inevitable lapses of memory are the chief cause for the corrupt state of minor quotations and anecdotes. No miscellaneous writer can possibly go back to all his original sources to verify his " 'points," it would take a lifetime to write a volume in any such way. The maxim of the proof-room is, that quotations are always to be assumed as wrong; and it is curious how seldom the fact is otherwise. And very likely Bagehot's memory seems to me to have worked with more than usual crookedness because I have not had occasion to explore the maze of any other man's; but it seems impossible that any one else can ever have remembered so many non-existent things, or so often wrongly accredited his quotations or introduced them with total irrelevance to the context. The list of these is long, but I will not

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The Works of Walter Bagehot: With Memoirs by R. H. Hutton, Volumen1