rarer, because discussion will point out all the difficulties of such policies in relation to a state of existence 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'État. And while all England was assailing Louis Napoleon (justly enough, as I think) for his perfidy and his impatience 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'État was one of the best illustrations of "the ruinous force of the will" in engendering, or at least crystallizing, 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 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, afterwards the historian of the Great Rebellion, who survived Bagchot 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 régime was, I imagine, a time of great desolation for the very tolerant and thoughtful constituency 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 Osler did a good deal to throw cold water on the rather optimist and philanthropic politics of the most sanguine, because the most benevolent and open-hearted, of Dissenters; Roscoe criticized 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 denomination 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. In those letters he not only, as I have already shown, eulogized the Catholic Church, but he supported the PrincePresident's military violence, attacked the freedom 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'État - 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 Robinson, 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 sympathy 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 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 politicians 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 yet you are not intelligible.' I will do so as well as I can, and endeavor to make good what I say, not by an a priori 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 dullness 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 perfection of human and accomplished genius, bequeathed to mankind the ideal forms of self-idolizing 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 prætors and they barbers? why do the stupid people always win and the clever people always lose? I need not say that in real sound stupidity, the English people are unrivaled: you'll hear more wit and better wit in an Irish street row than would keep Westminster Hall in humor 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? Oh yes, yes! he's too sharp by half. He is not 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 dispatches?" "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 PrincePresident that this could only be done by establishing his own dynasty and deferring sine die that great constitutional experiment which is now once more, no thanks to him or his government, on its trial; an experiment 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 shortcomings of Louis Napoleon's régime, as the article republished from the Economist, in the second appendix to this volume,* sufficiently proves. Moreover, he rejoiced heartily in the moderation

"A Later Judgment," close of Vol. ii. of this edition.

of the republican statesmen during the severe trials of the months which just preceded his own death, in 1877, and expressed his sincere belief-confirmed by the history of the last year and a halfthat the existing Republic had 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 Royal on the morning of Dec. 2 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 Royal 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, "I have been devoting my entire attention to the science of barricades, which I found amusing. They have systematized 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 mustaches, 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, 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 torespect any one who does, and I should be loth to confound the notion of our friend's solitary grandeur by supposing him to fraternize," etc. "I think M. Buonaparte is entitled to great praise. He has very good heels to his boots, and the French just want treading down, and nothing else,calm, cruel, business-like oppression, to take the dogmatic conceit out of their heads. The spirit of generalization which, John Mill tells us, honorably distinguishes the French mind, has come to this, that every Parisian wants his head tapped in order to get the formulæ and nonsense out of it. And it would pay to perform the operation, for they are very clever on what is within the limit of their experience, and all that can be ‘expanded' in terms of it; but beyond, it is all generalization and folly. . . . So I am for any carnivorous government."

And again, in the same letter:

"Till the Revolution came I had no end of trouble to find conversation, but now they'll talk against everybody, and against the President like mad; and they talk immensely well, and the language is like a razor, - capital if you are skillful, but sure to cut you if you aren't. A fellow can talk German in crude forms, and I don't see it sounds any worse; but this stuff is horrid unless you get it quite right. A French lady made a striking remark to me:- C'est une révolution qui a sauvé la France. Tous mes amis sont mis en prison.' * She was immensely delighted that such a pleasing way of saving her country had been found."

Of course the style of these familiar private letters conveys a gross caricature not only of Bagehot's maturer mind, but even of the judgment of the published letters; and I quote them only to show that at the time when he composed these letters on the Coup d'État, Bagehot's mood was that transient mood of reckless youthful cynicism through which so many men of genius pass. I do not think he had at any time any keen sympathy with the multitude, — i. e., with masses of unknown men. And that he ever felt what has since then been termed "the enthusiasm of humanity," the sympathy with "the toiling millions of men sunk in labor and pain," he himself would strenuously have denied. Such sympathy, even when men really desire to feel it, is indeed very much oftener coveted than actually felt by men as a living motive; and I am not quite sure that Bagehot would have even wished to feel it. Nevertheless, he had not the faintest trace of real hardness about him towards people whom he knew and understood. He could not bear to give pain; and when in rare cases, by youthful inadvertence, he gave it needlessly, I have seen how much and what lasting vexation it caused him. Indeed, he was capable of great sacrifices to spare his friends but a little suffering.

It was, I think, during his stay in Paris that Bagehot finally decided to give up the notion of practicing at the bar, and to join his father in the Somersetshire Bank and in his other business as a merchant and ship-owner. This involved frequent visits to London and Liverpool; and Bagehot soon began to take a genuine interest in the larger issues of commerce, and maintained to the end that "business is much more amusing than pleasure." Nevertheless, he could not live without the intellectual life of London, and never stayed more than six weeks at a time in the country without finding some excuse for going to town; and long before his death he made his home there. Hunting was the only sport he really cared for. He was a dashing rider, and a fresh wind was

"It is a revolution which has saved France. All my friends have been sent to prison."