THE WORKS AND LIFE OF
WALTER BAGEHOT
VOL. X.
A
Works ^ Luie o~\ V/2uTe.r
LIFE ^
OF
WALTER BAGEHOT
BY HIS SISTER-IN-LAW
MRS. RUSSELL BARRINGTON
WITH PORTRAITS AND OTHER ILLUSTRATIONS
REISSUE WITH APPENDIX
LONGMANS, GREEN AND CO.
39 PATERNOSTER ROW, LONDON
FOURTH AVENUE & 30rn STREET, NEW YORK
BOMBAY, CALCUTTA, AND MADRAS
1918
V. 10
\i
PREFACE.
AN attempt to write the life of Walter Bagehot presents
a few rather special difficulties. In the first place, it is
thirty-seven years since he died ; inevitably, therefore,
much material which would have been of great value
has already vanished. Most of his political friends,
among others Sir George Cornewall Lewis, Lord
Goschen, Lord Granville, and Lord Carnarvon, with
whom Walter Bagehot corresponded, have long since
been dead, and letters which these may have preserved
during their lifetime are no longer forthcoming. More-
over, Bagehot himself was in the habit of destroying
any letters he received except those from his parents,
from my father, and from Mr. Richard H. Hutton. A
few from others were saved after his marriage because
they chanced to come into my sister's possession.
In 1852 Walter Bagehot left London and lived
for some years with his parents at Herd's Hill ; con-
sequently the correspondence between them ceased.
Even after his marriage, when he lived elsewhere, he
paid his father and mother a few days' visit nearly
every fortnight up to the time of his death, and would
then talk over matters which had formerly been dis-
cussed in letters. My father died in 1860; and from
1 86 1, when Bagehot again lived in London, he so fre-
vi PREFACE
quently saw his friend Hutton that few letters passed
between them. Hence the biographer's best material
ceases many years before Bagehot's death.
There remain but two chief sources, the articles
in the Economist and personal reminiscences. Of the
former, two as a rule appeared every week during
eighteen years (1859 to 1877); but though these are
of considerable value, in that they note the subjects
which were engaging Walter Bagehot's attention and
embody his opinions on passing public events, they are
naturally impersonal in their tone and character. The
latter, on the contrary, are of so intimate and personal
a nature that the question arises how far they can be
brought within the focus of matter suitable for pub-
lication ?
The Diary which my sister kept for sixty years has
been of the greatest service to me in supplying dates
and in recalling many events of our family life after
Walter Bagehot entered it.
My grateful thanks are due to President Woodrow
Wilson for kindly sending me his two brilliant articles
on Walter Bagehot which appeared in the Atlantic
Monthly in 1895 and 1898, from which I have quoted
several passages. I am also greatly indebted to Vis-
count Bryce, Lord Welby, Colonel Gary Batten, and
Mr. Robert Dickinson for their valuable contributions,
as also to Viscount Morley, to Sir Edward Fry, and to
the executors of the Earl of Carnarvon, Earl Granville,
Earl Canning, Viscount Halifax, Sir Charles Trevelyan,
the Right Hon. W. E. Gladstone, William Caldwell-
Roscoe, T. Smith Osier, and R. H. Hutton for their
courteous permission to publish the correspondence with
Walter Bagehot which still exists.
E. I. B.
HERD'S HILL.
CONTENTS.
PAGE
I
I. INTRODUCTORY .
II. LANGPORT AND ITS SURROUNDINGS 37
III. HOME AND FAMILY 58
IV. EARLY EDUCATION 77
V. UNIVERSITY COLLEGE . 101
VI. AN INTERREGNUM 165
VII. PARIS 189
VIII. AUTHOR AND BANKER 205
IX. ENGAGEMENT AND MARRIAGE 229
X. " THE ARCHES " AND LONDON 260
XI. INDIA 299
XII. " THE ECONOMIST " 348
XIII. " THE ENGLISH CONSTITUTION " 377
XIV. " PHYSICS AND POLITICS " 401
XV. " LOMBARD STREET " 411
XVI. " ECONOMIC STUDIES " 441
XVII. TRIBUTES FROM CONTEMPORARIES 457
INDEX 465
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS.
PORTRAIT OF WALTER BAGKHOT Frontispiece
From a Mtszotint by Norman Hirst.
FACING PAGE
CHEQUE ON STUCKEY'S BANK DATED JUNE, 1811, WITH PICTURE OF
THEIR ORIGINAL PREMISES IN BRISTOL 50
50 BROAD QUAY, THE PREMISES IN WHICH STUCKEY'S BANK CARRIED ON
THEIR BUSINESS TILL 1826, WHEN THEY MOVED INTO THE DUTCH
HOUSE 52
STUCKEY'S ONE POUND BANK NOTE SIGNED BY WALTER BAGEHOT'S
FATHER IN 1825 54
THE DUTCH HOUSE CALLED THE CASTLE BANK: BANKING HOUSE OF
STUCKEYS FROM 1826-1854 56
PORTRAIT OF RICHARD HOLT HUTTON
From a Photograph by Fredk. Hollyer.
108
SKETCH FROM MEMORY OF ELIZABETH WILSON BY HER SISTER, EMILIE
ISABEL WILSON 238
PORTRAIT OF THE RT. HON. JAMES WILSON, M.P 344
From an Oil Painting by Sir J. Watson Gordon, P.R3.A., presented to Mrs.
James Wilson by the Royal Academy of Scotland.
viii
ERRATA.
Page 18, line 23, for cresting read exerting.
88, , 5 from foot, for Druro read Douro.
98, , 12, for Peutapolis read Pentapolis.
99, , 1 1, for at Clifton read in Bristol.
101, , 9, for Unitarian read Dissenter.
128, , 7, for for read by.
144, date ofletter,/or 1884 read 1844.
189, last line (note), for Enquirer read Inquirer.
193, line 5 from foot, for Paris Royal read Palais Royal.
199, lines i and 30, for Enquirer read Inquirer.
200, line 20, for Enquirer read Inquirer.
218, lines 20 and 31, for Taylor read Tayler.
222, line 5, for Compton read Crompton.
226, , 26, for adhering read adducing.
256, , 17, /or came read gave.
257, , 5, for gth October read 9 o'clock.
258, , 4 from foot, for Bibbacombe read Babbacombe.
259i > 4>/o»' Audrey read Audries.
282, , 4, from foot (note), for Druro read Douro.
317, , 6, for 4th read i4th.
348, , 5, for Asheton read Ashton.
360, , 15, for Somerleage read Somerleaze.
369, , 4 of note, for Orbey read Orby.
377 1 » 3 from foot, for Cheques read Checks.
382, last line of text, for H. I. Maine read H. S. Maine.
401, line 2 from foot, for A. E. Freeman read E. A. Freeman.
404, „ 5 from foot, for two read too.
408, „ 23, for simply read simple.
412, „ iS,for Wolner read Woolner.
413, last line, for Saville read Savile.
430, line 14, for muted read mooted.
446, ,, 10 from foot, for league read League.
459. i) 25> for and the read and his.
do not even allude — for obvious reasons, Walter Bagehot's
father being still alive when they were written — to a fact which,
perhaps, influenced his home life more than any other, namely,
his mother's occasional fits of insanity. The subsequent
essays written on Walter Bagehot have a still less personal
CHAPTER I.
INTRODUCTORY.
i
HAD Walter Bagehot now been alive, he would have reached
the age of 86. Every year robs the world of contemporaries
who knew him personally. From the time he married my
sister in 1858 till his death in 1877, I was constantly living
with them, both before and after my own marriage. My
sister's wish is that I should endeavour to give some written
record of him as he was known by those who shared his home
life, together with selections from the letters which he wrote
and received. His mother kept not only all his letters to
herself and to his father, but those which they wrote to him
from his earliest school-days : and from these a very clear
picture of his nature and character, as a boy and as a youth,
can be gathered at first hand. His intellect developed early,
and from childhood his striking individuality displayed itself.
He was worshipped by both his parents, but the manly fibre
of his character was enriched and strengthened rather than
weakened by this worship.
Those who know Walter Bagehot only through his best-
known writings have a way of referring to him, which to our
ears has a curiously far-off sound. This is inevitable. The
two short memoirs written by his intimate friend, Mr. Richard
Holt Hutton, treat but of the bare facts of his family life, and
do not even allude — for obvious reasons, Walter Bagehot's
father being still alive when they were written — to a fact which,
perhaps, influenced his home life more than any other, namely,
his mother's occasional fits of insanity. The subsequent
essays written on Walter Bagehot have a still less personal
OF WALTER B AGE HOT
note. The reviews which Sir Robert Giffen l and Leslie
Stephen 2 wrote, and the address Sir Mountstuart Grant Duff3
gave, did not touch on his home life, though all three writers
were his personal friends. Mr. Forest Morgan,4 Mr. Augustine
Birrell,5 the Rev. Dr. Kolbe,6 the writer of the article " Walter
Bagehot and his attitude towards the Church" in the Catholic
Magazine and Review, The Month, April, 1896, Mr. Israel
Zangwill,7 President Woodrow Wilson, who wrote in the
November number of the Atlantic Monthly, 1895, the Essay
"A Literary Politician," and in the October number, 1898,
another entitled " A Wit and a Seer," were all personally
unknown to Walter Bagehot, belonging, as they did, to a
later generation. Mr. Birrell's estimate does not create
a complete picture of him, but as far as it goes the resemblance
it recalls is very good. He says : " Every one who has read
Mr. Bagehot's books will agree at once that he is an author
who can be known from his books," and Mr. Birrell's own
paper proves this up to a certain point. He adds : " Give the
world time and it will be right, and the last person it will
willingly forget is a writer like Mr. Bagehot, who loved life
better than books"; and again, "to know Walter Bagehot
through his books is one of the good things of life ". It is
quite clear that Mr. Birrell's appreciation of these books is
on the same lines as the appreciation which his intimate
personal friends accorded to the man. Still there is some-
thing wanting even here, for those who knew him in his
1 Essay in the April No., 1880, of the Fortnightly Review, entitled
" Bagehot as an Economist," also a Biographical Sketch for the Encyclo-
pedia Britannica.
2 Essay in the National Review of August, 1900.
3 An address delivered when President of the Social and Political Edu-
cation League, afterwards printed in the National Review, December,
1899, of peculiar interest to Walter Bagehot's relatives.
4 See preface to the American Edition of Walter Bagehot's works
in part reprinted in this edition.
6 Lecture on Walter Bagehot given at Leighton House — afterwards
printed in his Miscellaneous Essays.
6 Appreciation which appeared in the Irish Monthly, May, 1908.
7 Paper in the Pall Mall Magazine, January, 1896.
INTRODUCTORY 3
family life could not, I think, fail to recognise that Walter
Bagehot himself was even greater than his books.
With reference to President Wilson's two estimates of
Walter Bagehot, it was surprising to learn that they never
met, so strikingly does he portray those attributes in Bagehot's
writings which recall most closely the more personal side of
Bagehot's life; but in a letter written at the time he forwarded
the two numbers of the Atlantic Monthly containing his
articles, President Wilson writes : " As a matter of fact, I never
saw him, but I long had an enlarged drawing of the only
likeness I ever saw, hanging in my study," and adds, " I
have had, ever since my boyhood, a great enthusiasm for Mr.
Bagehot's writings and have derived so much inspiration from
them ".
These writings speak for themselves. As regards the actual
writing, there is scarcely a line which is difficult to understand.
It would be true to add, I think, there is hardly a line that is
not stimulating to the understanding. A striking point about
all his work is that he not only has mastered his subjects
exhaustively, but enjoys them keenly. You feel that his
sympathy and lively interest are always thoroughly aroused ;
hence he discourses on every topic that allures him in a
familiar, humorous fashion all his own. No author was ever
more keenly alive to the folly of pomposity, or of any pose in
style. President Wilson, speaking of Bagehot's writings, says :
"They have all the freshness, the vivacity, the penetration of
eager talk, and abound in those flashes of insight and discovery
which make the' speech of some gifted men seem like a series of
inspirations. He does not always complete his subjects either,
in writing, and their partial incompleteness makes them read the
more as if they were a body of pointed remarks, and not a set
treatise or essay."
Again, after quoting Bagehot's comparison between the
English and American political arrangements, President Wood-
row Wilson writes : " These are eminently business-like
sentences. They are not consciously concerned with style ;
they do not seem to stop for the turning of a phrase ; their
only purpose seems to be plain elucidation, such as will bring
i*
4 LIFE OF WALTER B AGE HOT
the matter within the comprehension of everybody. And yet
there is a stirring quality in them which operates upon the
mind like wit They are a tonic and full of stimulus. No
man could have spoken them without a lively eye. I suppose
their ' secret of utility ' to be a very interesting one indeed —
and nothing less than the secret of all Bagehot's power. Young
writers should seek it out and ponder it studiously. It is this :
he is never writing ' in the air'. He is always looking point
blank and with steady eyes upon a definite object ; he takes
pains to see it, alive and natural, as it really is ; he uses a
phrase, as the masters of painting use a colour, not because it
is beautiful, — he is not thinking of that, — but because it matches
life, and is the veritable image of the thing of which he speaks.
Moreover, he is not writing merely to succeed at that ; he is
writing, not to describe but to make alive. And so the secret
comes to light. Style is an instrument, and is made imperish-
able only by embodiment in some great use. It is not of
itself stuff to last ; neither can it have real beauty except when
working the substantial effects of thought or vision. Its highest
triumph is to hit the meaning ; and the pleasure you get
from it is not unlike that which you will get from the perfect
action of skill. The object is so well and so easily attained!
A man's vocabulary and outfit of phrase should be his thought's
perfect habit and manner of pose. Bagehot saw the world
of his day, saw the world of days antique, and showed us what
he saw in phrases which interpret like the tones of a perfect
voice, in words which serve us like eyes."
The English Constitution, Lombard Street, and Physics and
Politics, the three complete works which have carried Walter
Bagehot's fame far and wide, in no wise suggest the whole range
of his powers and sympathies. The early essays do so perhaps
to a greater extent ; but it is only by taking his writings as a
whole that we can recognise fully his many-sided nature and
versatile gifts, and also best run to ground what explains the
special quality of his genius, the core of its excellence, the power
which enabled him to tackle with equal ability the wide range of
subjects on which he wrote, the power which has been referred
to as Shakesperian in its quality, Whether it was political
INTRODUCTORY 5
economy, religion, poetry, metaphysics, politics, or banking —
all these various subjects, through his pen, become pungent
with the same racy flavour, the same vitality and movement.
The same thread can be discerned running through all he
wrote, all he did, and all he was. If we seek farther and ask
wherein lay the distinctive quality of this stimulating, vitalising
power, we are confronted by his own words — " the sense of
reality is necessary to excellence ". The force of his imagina-
tion was governed and illuminated by this sense of reality.
All the facts of life, all his feelings and ideas were lit up with
a keen apprehension of it, for though he was a voracious reader
he studied Life through contact with Life, rather than from
books. Ideas, he felt, must be taken in, first hand ; they
must be inspired by contact with living creatures, living inter-
ests, genuine sympathies, genuine feelings, not diluted with
human thought, human theories, or human prejudices, as they
are prone to be when conveyed through books. The world
was borne in upon him as in reality it passed before his eyes
— and an engrossingly interesting world it was to him. He
was seldom so completely preoccupied by his own thoughts as
to lose the chance of a picture of real life being imaged on his
brain. Intuitively and subtly he grasped the ways of this
queer world of ours, those ways with all their inconsistencies,
their quirks, their surprises ; the ways that utterly refuse to
be compressed into any rigid theories of what is expected or
not expected to be, under any given circumstances. His sense
of reality carried him far into strange aspects of things. His
own home life with his parents taught him what but few have
the chance of learning : indeed he was an emanation of the
unusual in many respects. His genius, no less than his power
of deep feeling, turned these rare lessons to good account.
Into infinitely higher regions than those conceived by ordin-
ary minds, did these lessons carry him, but even these regions
he confronted with the same sense of reality. With the same
vivid force of conviction with which he could master a funda-
mental principle of banking or of the English Constitution,
he could affirm that " Mysticism is true," and apprehend the
presence of that " Kindly light " which led John Newman,
6 LIFE Of WALTER SAGE HOT
who exercised so strong an influence over him at one time, to
seize the reality of the spiritual life. It is by reason of this
complete view of reality, learned from looking with unprejudiced
vision into the entire world of facts, that Walter Bagehot
manages to convey his own ideas to his readers with so much
force of conviction.
Sir Robert Giffen, who acted as his assistant editor to the
Economist, meeting him as a rule only in that capacity, but
becoming intimate with him thereby, wrote in his contribution
to the Encyclopedia Britannica : " Bagehot was altogether a
remarkable personality. It is impossible to give a full idea
of the brightness and life of Bagehot's conversation, although
the conversational style of his writing may help those who
did not know him personally to understand it. y With winged
words he would transfix a fallacy or stamp a true idea so that
it could not be forgotten. He was certainly greater than his
books, and always full of ideas." / In a letter to my sister,
written six months after Walter Bagehot's death, Lord Morley,
referring to Mr. Hutton's article in the Fortnightly Review, 1
writes : " The article has recalled to my mind some of my
conversations with him (Walter Bagehot), and in musing over
them 'l feel strongly the impossibility of conveying to those
who did not know him, the originality, force, acuteness, and,
above all, the quaint and whimsical humour, of that striking
genius. ' I am only glad to think that I have never failed to
recognise and to enjoy his qualities as they deserve from my
earliest literary days when I read the Estimates — a volume, by
the way, which I hope you will reprint."
If this personality impressed his friends who, like Lord
Morley and Sir Robert Giffen, met him outside the home life,
with how much more force did it stamp itself on those who shared
that life. With Mr. Hutton we have " felt somewhat unreason-
ably vexed that those who appreciated so well what I may al-
most call the smallest part of him, appeared to know so little
of the essence of him. To those who heard of Bagehot only as
an original political economist and a lucid political thinker, a
1 October, 1887, reprinted in the complete edition as the "First
Memoir ".
INTRODUCTORY ^
curiously false image of him must be suggested." l To us
that false image seems to be the only one that is reflected by
many who quote him or speak of him in these quite later days.
But how could the present generation, not having known him,
conjure up the image of an entity so unique? How could it
picture the singular power he had of making everyday matters
in everyday life take an exciting, amusing aspect, while at
the same time the grave, fundamental view of questions which
underlie those everyday aspects, was never felt to be wholly
off the scene, and was always to the fore when it was wanted ?
The idea generally formed of a sound, prudent person, and
Walter Bagehot was eminently sound and prudent, is of one
whose prudence takes a cautious and somewhat unimagina-
tive direction. But, as Mr. Hutton says, in Walter Bagehot
" the imaginative qualities were even more remarkable than the
judgment, and were indeed at the root of all that was strong-
est in the judgment". The uncommon and unexpected
combination of qualities in his nature defies, I fear, any attempt
to convey easily to this generation what those who knew him
personally felt to be his most marked distinction. The light
was distributed so far, yet was so vivid when focussed.
It is notable that Sir Robert Giffen, his intercourse with
Walter Bagehot having been restricted mostly to the discus-
sion of economic questions, should have conceived so true an
impression of the ever-growing, expanding nature of his in-
terests and inquiries. He wrote : " Mentally Bagehot was at
his best when he died, and he looked forward to many years
of happy toil, both in finishing the Economic Studies and other
work beyond. So far from becoming absorbed in economic
science as he grew older, though his later writings happened to be
almost all economic, Bagehot to the last gave me the impres-
sion of only passing through one mental stage, which being
passed through he would again leave political economy behind.
To his historical and descriptive account of English political
economy he was likely enough to have added a history of poli-
tical ideas, or at any rate some other work of general philos-
1 See Memoir by Richard H. Hutton.
8 LIFE OF WALTER B AGE HOT
ophy, which had necessarily more attraction for him than the
ordinary topics of political economy." l
I believe that before the end Walter Bagehot was rather
reverting to earlier grooves of thought, and that, had he lived,
he would have included in his future writings a class of sub-
jects and impressions which characterised many of his earlier
essays, in the days before his life had become somewhat choked
with business. He was getting impatient, I think, of having
to devote his best energies to matters from which religion,
poetry, and art were excluded. His connection with the Meta-
physical Society to which Manning, Ward, and Tennyson be-
longed, re-awakened trains of thought and speculation more in
harmony with the trend of his feelings in those early days
when Shelley and Keats were first delicious to him, and when
Wordsworth and John Henry Newman were his daily food.
In Physics and Politics, when referring "to the loose
conception of morals" which existed in primitive man,
Bagehot writes ten years before his death : "In the best
cases it existed much as the vague feeling of beauty now
exists in minds sensitive but untaught ; a still, small voice of
uncertain meaning ; an unknown something modifying every-
thing else, and higher than anything else, yet in form so indis-
tinct that when you looked for it, it was gone ". More and
more did Walter towards the end desire that the still, small
voice should become clearer and more often heard, that the
something of form so indistinct should become more distinct.
From father and mother alike he inherited a fervent sense
\i of the reality of the spiritual life, and an equally fervent love
for the beauty of nature and, so far as opportunity allowed,
an appreciation of the best art. " We are souls in the disguise
of animals," he writes in the Essay, " The Ignorance of Man ".
From the days when Walter was a very small boy, the three en-
joyed together the delights of their West of England scenery.
Lynmouth was most often chosen for the seaside holidays be-
cause of its great beauty, and together they became intimate
with every rock and cranny in the place, appropriating in
1 Sir R. Giffen's article in the Fortnightly Review, April, 1880.
INTRODUCTORY 9
fancy special spots as their very own. Herd's Hill, their home,
was worshipped by Walter as a boy. Countless letters exist —
written by him from Bristol College and from University
College, London, and from his parents to him, showing the
romantic love they all felt for this Herd's Hill. His father
writes to him in 1 843, Walter being then seventeen : " I do
not know what you will say when you hear that some unspar-
ing hand has commenced the work of destruction at Wick (one
of the many beautiful views seen from the lawns at Herd's
Hill) and is cutting down the trees we have so long valued as
one of our greatest ornaments. We shall be able to bear it I
dare say ; and I live in hope of finding many beauties beyond
them. At all events we must have a beautiful home, while a
virtuous and happy one."
A month or two before his death, Walter and I (we were
staying with him and my sister in their London house, 8
Queen's Gate Place) made a compact. I was to administer
experiences of an artistic — he, an experience of an intellectual
kind. He had not liked any music he had hitherto heard.
He had even felt music to be irritating. From babyhood it
had been associated in his mind with anything but fertilising
influences, having been chiefly allied to a pathetic feature in
the family life. But when he was fifty-one he said to me :
" You must take me to hear Joachim ; I think I might under-
stand Joachim ". A few days before he took his last journey to
Herd's Hill, he said : " You must take me to see Watts — I
should like to see the outside of the person who does these
things ". Deplorable indeed was it that this visit never came
off. Watts, with his quick eye and apt discernment, would not
only have wished to paint what in Walter was pictorially
noticeable, but would have discovered something of him as he
was below the surface — and we might have possessed a por-
trait which would have suggested that something. In return
for the Joachim and Watts's visits, Walter was to have taken
me one Sunday to see George Eliot. I had been asked by
Watts to meet her in his studio, but I had not dared on that
occasion to propose a visit to her, though I had been inspired
by my friend Mrs. Nassau Senior, with a wish to do so. Walter
10
LIFE OP WALTER B AGE HOT
Bagehot was in the habit of attending George Eliot's gather-
ings on Sunday afternoons at The Priory, St. John's Wood.
Bagehot recognised the value of William Morris's art, and
my sister and he had their London house furnished and de-
corated by his firm. It was written of him two years after
his death : l " Few men of our own time have combined in so
eminent a degree the useful and the beautiful. The value of
such a mind is not to be measured by the amount of adulation
poured upon it by the press. Thinking men recognise a gap
which no other writer fills."
Life had been a tremendous rush ever since he had married.
He spent much of it in the train, between Clevedon and Bristol,
London and Langport. Towards the end it quieted down
somewhat, and he then felt the want of some echo of these
things which had been nurtured in the early days, developed
into the expanded form in which they were then revealing
themselves to his matured taste. His nature was always
annexing — and annexing what was best. To quote a saying
of W. R. Greg's, he was "a spring and not a cistern," — not as
Pitt, who " never grew, — he was. cast ". Walter Bagehot had,
to use his own expression, 'above all things an "experiencing
nature ". He was always learning, always expanding ; and
this generation, if it wants to know Walter Bagehot through
the only means it can know him, should read all his books —
and read them as they were written; remembering always
that the record is not quite complete. From circumstances
in his life hereafter to be related, he chose banking as his
actual profession, and thus placed himself in a groove which
narrowed, not his mind or nature, but for a time his oppor-
tunities. When later the work of editing and managing the
Economist devolved on him, he had so full a life of finance
and politics, that it is a marvel his three famous books were
ever achieved. But much was left on the lines that in early
days found an outlet in literature which remained unrecorded
when he died. Hence it is that those who knew him best
think of the man as greater even than his books, for in per-
1 Fraser's Magazine, March, 1879.
INTRODUCTORY It
sonal contact, and in conversation with him, a vein in that
genius was enjoyed which never found a fully developed ex-
pression in any book he wrote, whatever hints of it may be
traced in the early essays. It would be a forlorn hope for me
to attempt to convey any adequate suggestion of this vein in
his genius, which those intimate with him felt as still waiting
to be expressed in his writing, or to describe to those who
never knew him, the rare and stimulating quality of this per-
sonal influence on those with whom he lived ; but the endea-
vour to do so may serve as a tribute to the great qualities of
his heart and character.
It is perhaps especially desirable at the present time for
reasons arising from the political situations of the last few
years, and the Constitutional changes which have recently been
brought about, that an opportunity also should be given of
gathering from the entire range of his writings what in reality
was the distinctive trend of Walter Bagehot's political views.
During the various crises of the last two years, hardly a week
passed without quotations from his books appearing in the
newspapers, for the purpose of enforcing some party argument.
But Walter Bagehot was no bigoted partisan of either side —
Liberal or Conservative ; the Conservative, no less than the
Liberal side, would consult him. Sir Stafford Northcote, no
less than Mr. Gladstone, would seek his counsel on questions
of importance. When Bagehot lost the election at Bridg-
water in 1866 he consoled himself with the belief that parlia-
mentary work would not have suited him. Into neither side
of the House could he have fitted himself quite comfortably.
To use his own words, he was " between sizes in politics ".
He was distinctly not a party man, though with eager interest,
as will be seen in his letters, he entered into the great contest
between the classes which ended in the passing of the Reform
Bill, a measure which aroused strong sympathy in his father.
On 1st May, 1846, at the age of twenty, he writes to his old
school-fellow, Sir Edward Fry : " I do not know whether you
are much of a free-trader or not. I am enthusiastic about, am
a worshipper of, Richard Cobden. I am not very nervous
about Lord Stanley and the House of Lords." Again in the
\
12 LIFE OF WALTER BAGEHOT
same letter he writes : "You ask, is England going downhill ?
I cannot think so. I see a gradual progress in history, especi-
ally in the History of England. I cannot suppose that this
is now going to stand still. There never yet was a nation
while getting freer and freer, more and more intellectually in-
structed, and morally better and better, which ever stopped.
I think England is in this condition ; the progress of the Arts
of life, of material civilisation, has been for two centuries of
unexampled rapidity, and I think that the mental progress
has been also vigorously carried forward, though I do not
think that it has been equally quick. The lower classes of
this country are ignorant, but the last generation is better than
the preceding ones, our generation more instructed than the
last ; it is for us to see to the next The most hopeful sign
of our times is seeing men like Burns and Ebenezer Elliott
showing the falsity of that scale of merit, that is graduated ac-
cording to property, and making the rich to know that there
are richer than they."
Six years after he wrote this letter, Walter Bagehot pub-
lished his essay on " Shakespeare — The Man," and in making
out what were Shakespeare's political views he clearly proves
what were his own concerning " simple democracy ". After
quoting the conversation between " George " and "John " re-
specting Jack Cade's notion that the laws should come out of
his mouth 1 ending with John's exclamation, " I see them ! I
see them ! " he continues : " The English people did see them,
and know them, and therefore rejected them. An audience
which, bonafide, entered into the merit of this scene, would
never believe in everybody's suffrage. They would know that
there is such a thing as nonsense, and when a man has once
attained to that deep conviction, you may be sure of him ever
after. . . . He (Shakespeare) speaks in praise of a tempered
and ordered and qualified polity, in which the pecuniary classes
have a certain influence, but no more, and shows in every
page a keen sensibility to the large views and high-souled
energies, the gentle refinements, and disinterested desires, in
which those classes are likely to be especially deficient."
1 2 King Henry VI. IV. 2.
INTRO D UCTOR Y 1 3
Fourteen years later Bagehot, with forcible argument, ex-
pressed his views on the subject of unduly lowering the
franchise. Early in January, 1866, politics were started by
Mr. Bright making a speech on reform at Rochdale. Bagehot
wrote fifteen articles in the Economist during the course of
that year on this subject which was uppermost in people's
minds. The manner in which it was treated by both sides of
the House furthered much discussion. Bagehot took objection
to Mr. Bright's speech at Rochdale and reiterated the argu-
ments he had always consistently advanced. He maintained
that though every class should be represented in the councils
of the nation, by unduly lowering the franchise you commit
an injustice towards the class whose interests would thus
cease to be represented, owing to the enormous majority of
the poorer classes. "You must pass such a Bill," he writes,
"that the class now excluded from the representation shall no
longer be excluded ; and you must pass such a Bill that the
classes now included in the representation shall still be included,
and shall be in no danger of gradual exclusion by the further
extension of your method. . . . Mr. Bright, like the Radical
party in general, in their absurd superstition as to the vote,
either forgets or contrives to ignore, the only purpose for which
a vote is really useful — representation. He proposes quite
rightly to takes guarantees that no class shall be excluded
from the polling booths, but he is by no means anxious to
take any guarantees that no class shall be excluded from being
fully heard in the House."
Walter Bagehot identified himself completely with the
principles of Free Trade, by becoming the editor of the
Economist. In 1843, with the co-operation of the then Lord
Radnor, my father, Mr. James Wilson, founded the Economist
newspaper. The object of this venture, mooted first at Lord
Radnor's dinner-table, was to spread the principles and
doctrines of Free Trade. When Bagehot accepted the position
of Director of the Economist he carried on the work of the
paper entirely on the lines on which my father conducted
it, but no passion of partisanship can be traced in any
of Walter Bagehot's articles. He speaks from a different
14 LIFE OF WALTER B AGE HOT
platform, certainly from one commanding the view of a
more extended intellectual horizon, than that ever surveyed
by party prejudice. The eager, combative spirit, which, as a
rule, characterises the discussion of party questions by party
men, is never found in any of Walter Bagehot's political
writings. With stimulating vitality, together with a wise
impartiality, he treated any subject which commended itself to
him. He did not need the incentive of battle to awaken his
zeal for elucidating a sound philosophical view of any question
of public interest. He advocated great deliberation with
regard to all public questions. He was keenly alive to the
danger of precipitate, rash action. Two years before his
death, Bagehot pronounced very distinctly his opinion on
the necessity of deliberation and a long discussion before
changes were made in England. He writes : " All changes
in England should be made slowly and after long discus-
y^ sion. Public opinion should be permitted to ripen upon
them. And the reason is, that all the important English
institutions are the relics of a long past ; that they have
undergone many transformations ; that like old houses which
have been altered many times, they are full both of con-
veniences and inconveniences which at first sight would not be
imagined. Very often a rash alterer would pull down the
very part which makes them habitable, to cure a minor evil or
improve a defective outline." *
Some years after Bagehot's death Lord Goschen wrote in
a letter to my sister : "In what dim distance lie the days when
we met at Strawberry Hill. How few of the politicians who
congregated there still remain. How changed is the whole
political and social world. I wonder whether if he were still alive,
your husband would think that I had grown ' too conservative '.
I do not think that I have changed much. I still hold most
of the opinions which I held when, with your husband, I was
classed as moderate left centre Liberal. But Conservatives
and Radicals have both shifted their ground entirely."
At the age of twenty-five Bagehot published "Letters on
1 "The Public Worship Regulation Bill," Economist, July, 1875.
INTR OD UCTOR Y 1 5
the French Coup cTEtat of 1851". In these he explains,
very amusingly, the advisability, even the necessity, there had
been for Louis Napoleon to take despotic action for the inter-
ests of the people at large, being fully impressed by the fact
that " people at large " were singularly attached to their own
somewhat sordid interests. In the third letter he describes
two ideas which must be first got rid of in discussing any con-
stitution. One of these he cites as being the " pernicious mis-
take which creeps out in conversation and sometimes in writ-
ing, that politics are simply a sub-division of immutable ethics ;
that there are certain rights of men in all places and all times,
which are the sole and sufficient foundation of all Government ;
and that accordingly a single stereotyped Government is to
make the tour of the world ; that you have no more right to
deprive a Dyak of his vote in a ' possible ' Polynesian Parlia-
ment than you have to steal his mat ". Burke, Walter Bage-
hot goes on to say, taught " the world at large that politics
are made of time and place, that institutions are shifting
things, to be tried by, and adjusted to, the shifting conditions
of a mutable world, that, in fact, politics are but a piece of
business, to be determined in every case by the exact ex-
igencies of that case ; in plain English, by sense and circum-
stance". He continues by saying that of all immutable
circumstances " by far and out of all question the most im-
portant is National Character".
Walter Bagehot knew that party government in England
must mean a certain amount of compromise, as it is that which
suits the national character with regard to all business trans-
actions, and that, however emotional may be the oratory with
which measures are manipulated in the House of Commons,
" politics are but a piece of business," and " sense and circum-
stance " determine the upshot. But he knew also that no
genuine passion ever rests satisfied which is treated in a spirit
of compromise, and that the evidence of passion, in party
political strife, means, as a rule, not a struggle for the ascend-
ancy of any deep conviction or of immutable principles, but
for that of passing interests and class prejudice.
Sir Mountstuart Grant Duff was of opinion that the House
1 6 LIFE OF WALTER B AGE HOT
of Commons was not the right place for Walter Bagehot ' ' He
was," he said,1 " in his proper place as a deeply interested
spectator and critic of public affairs." And as to his seem-
ingly intuitive knowledge of the nature of politics and
politicians, Sir Mountstuart continues: "What could have
been better, even as the verdict of 'an old Parliamentary
hand,' for instance, than his words about Sir Robert Peel,
written in 1856, when he was only thirty: 'No man has
come so near our definition of a Constitutional Statesman —
the powers of a first-rate man and the creed of a second-rate
man ! ' Or again : ' A constitutional administrator has to be
always consulting others, finding out what this man or that
man chooses to think ; learning which form of error is believed
by Lord B., which by Lord C., adding up the errors of the
Alphabet and seeing what portion of what he thinks he ought
to do, they will all of them together allow him to do ! ' Or
again : ' The most benumbing thing to the intellect is routine,
the most bewildering is distraction ; our system is a distracting
routine,'. A young man looking at the House of Commons
from the outside rarely thinks of that. I am sure I never did ;
but I have known even Mr. Gladstone, at the height of his
power, when the House had met on a Thursday in February,
say when we rose on Friday night : ' Thank God ! there is
one week of the session over ; ' and a colleague sitting by me
on the Treasury Bench once remarked to me : ' It is wishing
one's life shorter by six months ; but does not one wish on
this the first night of the session that it were the last '."
When Walter Bagehot's old school-fellow was returned for
Gloucester as a Conservative, he wrote : —
"Mv DEAR WAIT,
" I congratulate you most sincerely. It is awful this
Conservative reaction ; we shall be all in chains directly —
nevertheless I congratulate you. I think you will really like
1 " Walter Bagehot " : an address delivered by the Right Hon. Sir M.
E. Grant Duff, E.C.S.I., F.R.S., President of the Social and Political
Education League, December, 1899.
INTRODUCTOR Y i 7
the life, which a great many people do not in fact, though no
one ever says so."
"Bagehot," writes Sir Robert Giffen in his contribution
to the Encyclopedia Britannica, "had great city, political, and
literary influence, to which all his activities contributed, and
much of his influence was lasting. In politics and economics
especially his habit of scientific observation affected the tone
of discussion, and both the English Constitution and the
Money Market have been better understood generally because
he wrote and talked and diffused his ideas in every possible
way. He was unsuccessful in two or three attempts to enter
Parliament, but he had the influence of far more than an
ordinary member, as director of the Economist and as the
adviser behind the scenes of the Ministers and permanent heads
of departments who consulted him." Walter Bagehot has
been called "a sort of supplementary Chancellor of the Ex-
chequer," and this was equally true whichever party was in
power. " Though," continues Sir Robert Giffen, " he belonged
to the Liberal party in politics, he was essentially of conserva-
tive disposition, and often spoke with sarcastic boastfulness to
his Liberal friends of the stupidity and tenacity of the English
mind in adhering to old ways as displayed in city and country
alike. He early gave up to literature the energies which
might have gained him a large fortune in business or a great
position in the political world. To write books a man must
give up a good deal ; and, as a man of letters, there is no
doubt he made the sacrifice for himself willingly and cheerfully,
following his true bent without turning to right or left."
One side of his nature made, I think, this sacrifice the
easier. The influence of his genius, the notably independent
attitude of his mind, his power of sympathy, and his gifts as a
brilliant talker, never led him to disguise to himself the fact
that these alone did not necessarily bring the luck of very
obvious worldly success, that, unless the aspirant is born under
a peculiarly happy star, much of the active working which
secures such success is based on a certain contriving and
disposing of the events in life, a certain yielding to the weak-
ness of those in power, a certain suppression of independent
1 8 LIFE OF WALTER B AGE HOT
ition
judgment and action, in other words on a certain abnegation
of moral dignity. In every sense Walter Bagehot was finely
\s pointed. He would never have consented to earn any of the
good things of this world at the cost of entire independence
and freedom of thought and action. Political and social
climbers are not unfrequently obliged to lower their standard
in order to attain their ends : Walter Bagehot thought such
ends hardly good enough to make it worth while to make
what to him would have been a repugnant sacrifice.
From Berlin, in 1848, Mr. Hutton wrote a letter to Walter
Bagehot — then aged twenty-two — in which he expresses the
high expectations he has formed respecting his future career.
He assures him that he is by no means blind to his defects
and goes on to say : " I do not take a one-sided view of your
character. . . . But this does not in the least diminish my faith
and expectation that you have a most important influence to
i / exercise over us all, I hope as a Nation, one which I cannot
Y bear to think should be diminished or destroyed either by the
modifying or incapacitating influence of bad health on genius
such as yours. I think myself I understand your character
pretty thoroughly, both its wants and its powers, at least I feel
as if I could analyse it as well as any character I know ; and
certainly I know none so capable of cresting the highest
permanent influence over England. I think your influence is
essentially more fitted to be exerted over bodies of men, than
over persons ; through institutions, by reason and moral
power, rather than through individuals by authority and
persuasion and affectionate powers. Even in reasoning you
can adapt yourself far better to convince mankind than to alter
individual views, because you generally choose the natural
universal road to Truths, even Truths the most difficult and
obscure and often seem unable to wind along the particular
paths of fallacy or truth by which specially contended minds so
often reach their own views. . . .
"This is partly what makes 'me think your genius is fitted
for a statesman's position ; and I cannot help trusting that
your influence may be so wide and essential in our national
distress and need, as to give you a permanent place in our
INTRODUCTORY 19
•
history. It is strange I should feel such confidence as to this ;
that you are fitted for it, I feel certain. My only fear and
anxiety is about your health and prudence."
Writers of to-day not unfrequently remark that Walter
Bagehot's genius was not recognised during his lifetime. In p-
one sense, but in one sense only, this is true. Undoubtedly
it had not so wide a recognition as might have been expected ;
but what was denied it by the many was most generously
accorded by the few who had both the power and oppor-
tunity to appreciate it. Now, through the sifting of the
mighty sifter, Time, the few have grown into the majority.
Why an obvious fame was not more quickly accorded may
partly be accounted for by the fact that Walter Bagehot was
but fifty-one when he died, and that the quality of his intellect
and character were of too original a mould to be taken at
their rare value at once by a public who only readily recognises
great qualities in the form it is accustomed to value. More-
over Walter Bagehot was callous of undistinguishing praise,
and so strong was the influence of his individuality, that his
views about himself as a rule, infected his nearest friends.
The modest attitude he took with regard to his writings and
the effect they produced on the public, was wont to be adopted
by those who knew him intimately. His value, they felt, was
of a self-contained quality. It neither courted nor desired
any fanning by popular applause. Of his old friend Crabbe
Robinson, Bagehot writes : " I do not mean that he was uni-
versally popular ; it would be defacing his likeness to say so".
" The prowling faculties," he writes in his essay on Bishop
Butler, " will have their way. Those who hunger and thirst
after riches will have riches, and those who hunger not, will
not." So with reputation — Walter Bagehot was no prowler
after popular fame, he did not hunger after it, so had it not
during his lifetime, though, to quote Lord Bryce's words,
"it was with no small surprise that those who knew him,
perceived how little the world seemed to know the loss it
sustained when his keen, bright, fertile intellect left us ".
In the rush and tear of an over-crowded world those who
are indifferent to the crowd's applause are not, as a rule,
-, *
20 LIFE OF WALTER B AGE HOT
applauded by the crowd, till some one wiser than it starts
the drums and trumpets.
Writing to my sister before they married, Bagehot says :
"The only thing I maintain is that I have a spring and energy
in my mind which enables me to take some hold of good
subjects and makes it natural and inevitable that I should
write on them. I do not think I write well, but I write, as I
speak in the way (I think) that is natural to me, and the only
chance in literature, as in life, is to be yourself. If you try to
be more you will be less. But do not take up any extravagant
notions of my abilities or you will be disappointed when you
find out your mistake. . . ."
Speaking of reputation he writes in another letter to my
sister from Claverton, our home when we first knew him : " I
came here to talk ' Crises and Currency ' for an article in the
next number of the National, I feel I should like much more
to have a reputation about these subjects because you would
like it. Of course I should have always liked it somewhat ;
but reputation is not my strongest temptation. I think it a
very healthy and proper object of desire — the wish to be es-
timated at your value is nearly as important for good in a
character, as the wish to be estimated at more than your value
is for evil ; but I am not exceedingly prone to it myself."
When Walter Bagehot died all the principal newspapers
bore witness to his distinguished position among the wise men
of his generation. But fame — as the word fame is generally
understood — was but tardily accorded. Eighteen years after
his death President Wilson writes : " Walter Bagehot is a
name known to not a few of those who have a zest for the
juiciest things in literature, for the wit that illuminates and the
knowledge that refreshes. But his fame is still singularly
disproportioned to his charm ; and one feels once and again
like publishing him at least to all spirits of his own kind. It
would be a most agreeable good fortune to introduce Bagehot t
to men who have not read him. To ask your friend to know
Bagehot is like inviting him to seek pleasure. Occasionally a
man is born into the world whose mission it evidently is to
clarify the thought of his generation, and to vivify it ; to give
I NT ROD UCTOR Y 2 \
it speed where it is slow, vision where it is blind, balance
where it is out of poise, saving humour where it is dry — and
such a man was Walter Bagehot."
Nevertheless twenty-three years after " such a man " died,
Mr. Augustine Birrell, when lecturing on him in his own
country, had, in a sense, to introduce him to his audience.
"My object," he said, "was not to give a precis of Mr.
Bagehot' s books — that must have been dull, or to assign him
his true place in the providential order of the world — that
would have been impertinent, but merely to shake the tree,
so that you might see for yourselves as the fruit fell from it,
what a splendid crop it bears."
Undoubtedly it was in America that the first wide-sounding
blast was blown. In 1 889 — twelve years after Bagehot's death
— the first uniform edition of his works was published by
The Travellers Insurance Company, Hartford, Conn. To
quote from the notice advertising it. " This handsome edi-
tion of the works of one of the greatest and most charming
writers of the Century is published by The Travellers' Insurance
Company as a souvenir of itself; and its nearly nominal price
bringing it easily within reach of the poorest student or the
most slenderly endowed library — is due to their not desiring to
make profit on it as a merchandise." This edition comprised
all the works which had been reprinted under the editorship
of Mr. R. H. Hutton. Mr. Forest Morgan, the editor of this
uniform edition, writes : " Once for all, Walter Bagehot's
writings have been to me for many years one of the choicest
of intellectual luxuries, and a valued store of sound thought
and mental stimulation ". He asks for fair allowance to be
made for "one who has made heavy personal sacrifices of
leisure, health and chosen pursuits, to carry through an
important work ".
When Mr. Hutton expressed his belief that Walter Bage-
hot's genius was " fitted for a statesman's position," he was evi-
dently conceiving a future fame for him somewhat on different
lines from those on which it has been actually attained. His
brilliant vitality, his lovable qualities, his originality and humour,
might reasonably have led his friends of early days to expect
22 LIFE OF WALTER B AGE HOT
that his genius would have made its mark in the active sphere
of political life where the influence of a strong individuality
carries with it so much weight. But for reasons of health, and
also for other yet more important considerations — again to quote
Sir Robert Giffen — "he early gave up to literature the energies
which might have gained him a large fortune in business or a
great position in the political world ".
The world is the gainer for the sacrifice, if sacrifice it were.
Through his writings Walter Bagehot's stimulating genius is
now telling on thousands of minds in many countries. Physics
and Politics alone has been translated into seven different
languages ; and in 1 888 it and Lombard Street had reached their
eighth editions. During the last eighteen months many thousand
copies of one edition alone of the English Constitution have
been sold. Through his works, fertile thoughts are being sug-
gested and wise opinions formed on subjects which concern
the right development of every community at all times, in
rising no less than in passing generations. No personal posi-
tion he might have achieved during his life could have had a
more beneficial effect upon his fellow-creatures. The prophecy
Mr. Hutton made nearly thirty years before Walter Bagehot's
death — namely, that his friend was to exercise an important
and permanent influence "over us all as a nation" is certainly
being fulfilled through his writings, and this influence which
Walter Bagehot's writings have over his posterity, the genera-
tion of to-day, is the result of his ideas having sprung into ex-
istence in the midst of the work of life, not in the retirement
and delicious leisure of the study.
One important service he rendered to the country which
ought to be more widely associated with his name than it is.
Lord Welby writes : —
"October 5th, 1912. In former days when I was at the
head of the Finance Branch of the Treasury, I made the ac-
quaintance (a privilege which I highly value) of Mr. Walter
Bagehot. The machinery of our financial administration is
complicated and Mr. Bagehot is the only outsider who had
thoroughly mastered it. Indeed he understood the machine
almost as completely as we who had to work it. This know-
INTRODUCTORY 23
ledge, added to the soundness of his economical judgment,
gave a special value to his opinion and advice. Chancellors
of the Exchequer attached great weight to the opinion of Mr.
Bagehot, especially Sir Stafford Northcote, who consulted him
on several occasions. In 1877 Mr. Bagehot rendered great
financial service to the Government by devising a new form of
security which enabled the Treasury to borrow quickly and on
favourable terms.
"The National Debt is divided into two sections, (i) the
Funded Debt ; (2) the Unfunded or Floating Debt. The
Floating Debt represents money borrowed to meet temporary,
sudden, or emergency demands. It is therefore an important
part of the financial machine. In the seventies the Treasury
was lending largely to local authorities for education, health
and other purposes, and it became necessary to obtain money
by an increase of the Floating Debt. Ever since the Revo-
lution, the Treasury had raised money under the head of
Floating Debt by the sale of a security called ' Exchequer
Bills '. This security, however, was antiquated in form and
not suited to the requirements of the modern money market.
They had in consequence lost popularity and Sir Stafford
Northcote had (1876 and 1877) to consider a new method of
borrowing. He desired me to state the case to Mr. Bagehot,
as at once a practical Banker and a leading economic authority.
Mr. Bagehot replied promptly : ' The Treasury has the finest
security in the world, but has not known how to use it. The
market where you borrow deals in Bills of Exchange and is
accustomed to that form of security. The security which you
offer should resemble as nearly as possible a Bill of Exchange
both in form and method of negotiation. Such a Bill would
rank before a Bill of Barings ' (then the leading merchants of
London). The suggestion was simple, practicable, and in-
telligible and, although it was not very favourably regarded
by the Bank of England, Sir Stafford Northcote adopted it.
Since that time (now thirty-five years ago) the Treasury has,
for the purpose of Floating Debt, borrowed mainly on the
credit of Mr. Bagehot's invention, known in the market as
Treasury Bills. His prophecy as to their popularity has been
24 LIFE OF WALTER BAGEHOT
fulfilled. They are in general demand and always saleable.
The price of issue varies of course with the state of the market,
but being in favour with lenders, they command good terms.
Foreign Governments often invest in them, and they have
been imitated in different quarters. At the present moment
Japan is meditating the issue of a security on the lines of our
Bills. They have not only met ordinary emergency demands,
but they have stood the strain of a great war.
" I think that I am the only survivor of those who took
part in these consultations of 1876-7, and I have always been
anxious that due credit should be given to Mr. Bagehot for
the happy advice he then gave. He himself died not long
after this event, and I do not think it is mentioned in his
works. Indeed he was too modest to talk about his own
work. He shares with a famous Chancellor of the Exchequer,
Charles Montagu, the invention of the instruments of Credit
by which for more than two centuries provision has been made
for the Floating Debt. Charles Montagu in 1695 invented
'Exchequer Bills,' which served the purpose for 180 years,
and when they fell out of favour, Bagehot invented in lieu of
them 'Treasury Bills,' which still successfully hold the field."
From boyhood Walter Bagehot was a devourer of history,
Greek and Roman, no less than of modern literature, and
his sagacity taught him early, through these studies, that no
great nation made its mark through political strife, but rather
through the quality of its moral temperament, its art and its
literature. Likewise he understood business (and he calls
politics " a piece of business ") far too well to confound its value
with that of those " immutable ethics " — which concern it not.
These were really not cynical views, though at times he might
express them in cynical phraseology. They were born of the
wise power which Walter Bagehot possessed of affixing to
things their proportionate value ; of awarding, for instance, in
those inimitable passages in the " Essay on the First Edinburgh
Reviewers," ] the precise species and measure of approval both
to a Lord Jeffrey and to a Wordsworth. This power of ap-
1 See vol. ii. National Review, October, 1855.
INTRO D UCTOR Y 25
portioning the true value of things was, in its turn, born of
a depth of nature which could reverence profoundly the
greatest things, those whose essence partakes of that of another
world. In the letter to Sir Edward Fry, already quoted, he
writes : " I am an impatient reader of merely pretty poetry
(referring to Longfellow's 'Voices of the Night') though not,
I trust, without enthusiasm for the great masters of the poetic
art, nor untouched by the beautiful expressions of feelings and
aspirations, which earnestly long for what is infinite and
eternal ". On entering University College, London, at the age
of sixteen, he met the first serious trial in his life.1 After
facing it with an equal courage and modesty, he writes to his
mother : "I hope I have acted right ; I have at least the con-
soling reflection that I tried to do so and that I did not enter
upon the performance of a duty to me exceedingly painful in
reliance of my own strength, but with the hope of God's all-
wise direction. It is my first taste of the troubles of life;
henceforth I shall perhaps never be wholly free from them,
and although overcoming one, may render the others more
easy, I felt the other day with some beautiful lines of Words-
worth : —
"Yet why repine we, created as we are for joy and rest
To find them only, in the bosom of eternal things."
This power of measuring aright made him recognise the
value of those things which appeal to, and influence, a people's
imagination. In the English Constitution he lays a stress on
this influence. Leslie Stephen writes : " He (Bagehot) ad-
mitted that the British Constitution was a whole mass of fictions, j
It was a vast make-believe, invoking an ' organised hypocrisy,'
and for that reason the best of all possible constitutions."
Bagehot writes : " We deify a king in sentiment as we once
deified him in doctrine. . . . The illusion has been, and still
is, of incalculable benefit to the human race." The " theatri-
cal show of society " impresses the popular imagination ; and
the " climax of the play is the Queen. Philosophers may
1 Referred to in Mr. T. Smith Osier's letter written at the time of
Walter Bagehot's death.
26 LIFE OF WALTER B AGE HOT
deride the superstition but the results are inestimable." A
Cabinet Government is only possible for " deferential nations" :
men who can delegate power to " superior persons ". Bagehot
delighted in his Somerset clown, who regarded the Crimean
War " as a personal struggle between Queen Victoria and the
Emperor Nicholas, and he did not see how it could be ended
till the Queen had caught the Emperor and locked him up ".
Primitive man, he contended, can only understand loyalty to a
person. To reach him you must represent general principles
by concrete symbols.
Walter Bagehot held that all this was in essence anything
but what Leslie Stephen calls it, " a make-believe ". It had
a reality behind it — a very truth which has been acknowledged
practically, though maybe unconsciously, by all communities
since communities existed. Is it not traceable in birds and
animals ? Is it not the same instinct that makes the peacock
who spreads his tail and displays himself as wonderful and
beautiful in front of his fellow-peacocks, a very potent person
among them ? To the unintellectual, unspiritually-minded
English man or woman the higher life is conceived appreciably
through the visible signs of grandeur and the atmosphere sur-
rounding great people. They appeal also to the peasant as
something to be looked up to. Grandeur and luxury fill the
place in his imagination which beauty in Nature fills in the
soul of the artist, the place a mine of rich ideas fills in the in-
tellectual man, and the place the sense of religion fills in the
spiritually minded. " Philosophers may deride the superstition ; "
the " superior person " may condemn it as beneath contempt ;
but Walter Bagehot's revealing sense of reality and ingenious
insight into human nature — not as it ought to be according to
the " superior person," but as it is — knew that it existed,
and therefore must be counted as one of the elemental forces
in social relations.
"We do not mean to insinuate," Bagehot wrote,1 "we
would disclaim that party partiality, that this attraction of the
lower stratum of the State to the aristocratic is always or
1 See the Economist, loth November, 1866, in the first leader, " Ought
the Tories to Touch a Reform Bill ?"
INTRODUCTORY 27
mostly a base feeling. We believe, on the contrary, that it is
an attraction of the most ignorant people towards the best
that they know."
He knew that to discount any value in appearance as a
force acting on the imagination, is to ignore the value of
beauty in Nature, as also in the responsive appreciation of
that beauty, which is a rudimentary instinct in undistorted
human nature. Walter Bagehot was the last to discount the
value of such a force. Watts, who desired to teach the ethical
importance of such enjoyment of beauty through the eye,
would often lament and condemn the modern fashion in the
aristocracy of viewing the display of grandeur in everyday
life as bad form, of hiding their magnificence from the multi-
tude. " Why," he would say, " should they not give the
poor the indulgence of enjoying the show?" Enjoy it they
certainly do, as any grand function, such as a coronation, can
prove, and they do not grudge it to the King and Queen, the
Lords and Ladies, as long as they have a share in it.
Walter Bagehot believed in the virtue of the existence of
a leisured class, which can fulfil the function of being the
" theatrical show of society ". The hold on the working class,
which the aristocracy possesses, means the hold on certain
instincts natural to all classes, though the possibility of devel-
oping them exists only in a small minority of the community.
Leisure — that is to say, the absence of struggle for material
necessities — must be secured before this instinct can take a
palpable form, and enable our human existence to be visibly
perfected. But this leisure must be " an animated leisure,"
used for the benefit of the world at large. The great "Bar-
barian " must not isolate himself, but must bestow the benefits
of his leisure on his admirers. Walter Bagehot was averse
to the doings of all agitators who go in primarily for destroy-
ing this atmosphere which surrounds the aristocracy. He
recognised a great value in this atmosphere. He inherited
something of it in his own blood ; he possessed the influence
of an atmosphere in his own person. His genius would not
alone have given his personality the weight or charm it had.
The peculiarly leisurely manner in which he would throw out
28 LIFE OF WALTER B AGE HOT
his best sallies, his most whimsical hits, had much to do with
securing for them their triumph. His personal refinement and
choice taste were singularly innate nor was there any hint in
his natural dignity of manner either of formality or pose. He
took a lively interest in his fellow-creatures no matter to what
class they belonged. With Shakesperian geniality, he showed
the tolerance of a philosopher towards all his species. His
views of Shakespeare's nature can be quoted as those which
might justly be ascribed to himself. " In his comprehensive
mind it was enough if every man hitched well into his own
place in human life. If every one were logical and literary,
how could there be scavengers, or watchmen or caulkers, — or
coopers? Narrow minds will be 'subdued to what' they
' work in '. The ' dyer's hand ' will not more clearly carry
off its tint, nor will what is moulded more precisely indicate
the confines of the mould. A patient sympathy, a kindly
fellow-feeling for the narrow intelligence necessarily induced
by narrow circumstances — a narrowness which, in some de-
grees, seems to be inevitable, and is perhaps more serviceable
than most things to the wise conduct of life — this, though
quick and half-bred minds may despise it, seems to be a
necessary constituent in the composition of manifold genius.
' How shall the world be served ? ' asked the host in Chaucer.
' We must have cart-horses as well as race-horses, draymen
as well as poets. It is no bad thing after all, to be a slow
man and to have one idea a year. You don't make a figure,
perhaps, in argumentative society, which requires a quicker
species of thought, but is that the worse ? ' '
Walter Bagehot's health was anything but robust ; yet his
animal vitality was most buoyant. He was daring in taking
risk of every kind. To him the fun of hunting lay much in
the amount of danger attached to it. He used to terrify his
mother by climbing to the top of the Burton Pynsent Monu-
ment and running round the coping which was unprotected
by any rail or guard. Had his temperament been less well
balanced and wisely adjusted, he might have been a gambler.
Had he not possessed extraordinary right-headedness in every
moral question, he might have been a speculator. Risk was
IN TROD UCTOR Y 29
attractive to him. In early youth his exuberant spirits con-
quered all physical discomforts. He wrote to his mother,
when he was at University College, that he has cured a bad
headache by entering into an eager debate in the debating
society of the College. In the letter, already quoted, to
Sir Edward Fry, he writes : "I fancy from what you say of
my 'disappointment (having to miss a term), etc., that you
have melancholy theories about me. If you wish to keep
close to the facts of the case you had better dismiss them.
I have in general pretty good health, though at the present
time I am a good deal troubled by rather severe headaches.
But I verily believe I am the happiest person living. I
have such a flow of good spirits as no calamities I think
could long interrupt, much less exhaust. As for melancholy
without apparent cause natural to some minds, I do not
know what it means. I am not over-sanguine as to the
future in general, but I have a sort of reckless cheerfulness
that gets on very well without the aid of hope. Perhaps it
may be unfeeling and unsympathising to be so completely
happy, but I do not know how to help it."
Even in those early days the best fun he could have, the
best tonic he could take, was " to play with his mind " — his
own expression. This causeless happiness — an animal happi-
ness of the mind — has assuredly little to do with physical
health. Maybe it is the result of those intuitive impulses of
the daemon which we call genius? Those happy inspirations
which arise without any consciousness of how, or why, or
whence they come — the joy of inspiration ! What better game
could be found than to play with one's own happy crea-
tions ? What happier life is there than to play such a game ?
Sir Mountstuart Grant Duff writes : " He (Walter Bagehot)
soon learnt the profound truth that work is much more amusing
than pleasure ". No saying ever pleased Bagehot more than
that of his friend Sir George Cornewall Lewis — " the world
would not be a bad place if it were not for its pleasures " ;
pleasures that are invented as such, but so pitiably miss the
mark for so many of us !
In these days of brain-forcing, the attainments which Walter
30 LIFE OF WALTER B AGE HOT
Bagehot's parents felt to be of primary importance in his
training, are often but little insisted on. Religious faith, a be-
lief in the reality of the spiritual life, the encouragement of
natural family affections, strength and uprightness of character,
they viewed as the vital groundwork of his education. The
effect of such a training is obvious in his life's story, though
with paradoxical humour he would say, " Train up a child in
the way he should go, and when he is older he will depart
from it". Certain minds apparently feel a reluctance in
acknowledging distinct superiority in others of their kind.
Though obvious facts prove every day the fallacy of the notion
that goodness and cleverness are opposed to one another, we
often hear unthoughtful people speak as if they were incom-
patible. He may be clever — the accentuation meaning he is
nothing else ; or he may be good, and that means he has no
brains. Genius is subject to similar accusations. If the
genius is undeniable, the person possessing it must forsooth
be either erratic, or neurotic, or both. Walter Bagehot is a
first-rate example to prove that such notions are nonsense.
He was as good as he was clever, and had as much sound
common-sense as he had uncommon and imaginative genius.
There is no temptation to Walter Bagehot's biographer to be
partial. He need disguise nothing — need conceal no facts,
nor soften any actions. It is all plain sailing and above-board.
He was essentially tres bon enfant, though his nerves were of
a fragile, sensitive make. Fragile, sensitive nerves expose the
owner to much suffering in no wise conceivable by those of
blunt nature. With this species we all know the world to be
amply supplied. It inflicts the suffering and has no idea that
it has done so. If for no other reason, Bagehot's sense of
dignity would have led him to control any irritation he
felt. On one occasion only do I remember a good outburst
of temper. It was said of an ingenious and delicately-made
toy — elle est bienfaite, mat's il nefaut pas brutaliser la machine.
Bagehot's nerves were often brutalised ; but his physical health
alone succumbed under the ordeal.
If this memoir lets in any new light as to what manner of
man Walter Bagehot really was, if it is more than a key to his
INTRO D UCTOR Y 3 1
writings, or an enlargement on Mr. Huttori's admirable and
sympathetic memoir, it will be that through a knowledge of
his home life the greatest qualities of his nature are disclosed.
Sir Robert Giffen truly wrote, " Walter Bagehot was greater
than his books ". During his life the rare quality of his
character was somewhat screened from the world at large.
His family trouble was of a kind which it is especially galling
to a proud nature to see exposed to the eye of an unsympathis-
ing public. He was apt to use cynicism as an armour against
the invasion of those into his intimate life with whom he was
brought into close contact, but who were not his chosen friends.
He had no enemies but few intimates. Walter Bagehot was a
proud, though not a vainjrnan. Maybe the tragic nature of his
trouble saved him from petty vices. Unlike those whose vanity
leads them to idolise the genius with which nature has endowed
them, and by such idolatry to sacrifice their most human feel-
ings, Walter Bagehot, however independent and apart his inner
life of thought may have been, ever retained a warm, genuine
interest in the concerns of his family and early friends, and
ever showed a forbearing tolerance towards his species. He
was not lacking in ambition, but he never sacrificed home
interests for any advancement in public life. When, after my
father's death, the Government approached him on the subject
of his undertaking the then most important office of Finance
Minister in the Supreme Council of India, he did not hesitate
before refusing (few even of his own family knew of the trans-
action) ; nor would he ever have undertaken any work, however
congenial and remunerative, had it interfered with the help he
could give his father during his mother's attacks of illness.
When an unusual weight of care has to be borne it is
not uncommon to find that there exist special compensations.
This was so in Bagehot's case. Speaking of subordinate
officials, he wrote, " They have none of the excitement of
origination ". Nor have the vast majority of workers in the
world. To only a very few is accorded the delight of such a
stimulant to their labours. For the enormous majority, nature,
no less than circumstances, ordains a dull plodding on in well-
dug-out grooves of habit and thought. Walter Bagehot was
32 LIFE OF WALTER B AGE HOT
one of the lucky minority. He enjoyed to the full the " ex-
citement of origination ". " He was always full of ideas," and
these ideas were all his own. His soul — " itself by itself"-
struck the flint and brought to birth new sparks of light thrown
forth straight from the ego. Mr. Augustine Birrell, in his
Obiter Dicta, calls him " a man who carried away into the next
world more originality of thought than is now to be found in
the three estates of the Realm ".
Leibnitz wrote, " There are secrets in the art of thinking,
as in all other arts ". These words greatly impressed Bagehot
when as a youth he was studying at University College, London ;
probably because they first caused him to perceive that he
himself was divining these secrets and becoming an adept in
this art. He had a rich soil of amassed learning, which under-
lay the art and constantly fed the excitement of origination.
There is a fashion no less than an art in thinking. Ideas
guided by fashion are dated as belonging to special periods of
culture, whereas original ideas are perennial, belonging to all
times. We read the Greeks and think how modern they are ;
we read Walter Bagehot and feel that he is an ancient no less
than a modern. To have at his command rich stores of ac-
quired learning and a never-failing wealth of original ideas ;
to have divined the secret in the art of thinking, and to have
a mind always in action and unhampered by the grooves of
fashion — restricted by no prejudices of orthodox opinions, and
possessing an ever-ready power of expression in writing and
in speech — these blessings compensated much for the weight
of care that had to be borne, and which at no time in
Bagehot's life he shrank from bearing. He was reserved
with regard to the expression of sympathy towards sorrow ;
it hit too near ; it touched a sore. When a certain kind
of iron enters the soul, most of us — that is to say if we
are English — become dumb, words conveying nothing at all
adequate. Still Bagehot's sorrow, I believe, tended to ripen
all that was distinguished in his character, and stimulated,
rather than suppressed, his intellectual forces. The necessity
of having to face the inevitable, without loophole for hope, to
acquiesce in the necessity without flinching ; to learn through
INTRODUCTORY 33
experience the deeper secrets of life in which mysteries are so
closely interwoven with realities, such was the training which
ripened very exceptional qualities in a finely wrought nature.
Among the fruits of this experience were a dispassionate
equilibrium of judgment, a wide sympathy with, and tolerance
towards, those who are maimed by any of the various evils
which befall humanity ; above all, a diffidence in asserting
that any conclusive methods, any hard or fast theories, can
rectify such evils. He knew only too well that human nature
is constructed of so delicate and varied a make of machinery
that it is useless to generalise as to its treatment ; that the
mysterious and the unexpected may always crop up to confront
and confound any maker of fixed rules. This knowledge in no
wise bewildered Walter Bagehot's sense of right and wrong ;
but it proved to him how futile it is for private individuals to
dogmatise, how impertinent it is for human nature thus limited
to mount on any pedestal, or preach from any judgment-seat
whatsoever.
On 2nd October, 1877, in a letter to Mr. Hutton, whose
memoir of Walter Bagehot had just appeared, Lord Bryce
wrote : " If some of his (Walter Bagehot's) earlier writings
are, as I fancy, out of print, might it not be well to have
them re-issued, and would there not be, out of his letters or
ephemeral articles, many that ought to be printed and would
have a permanent value? His study sweepings were better
than most men's laboured works."
It was this letter which first suggested to Mr. Hutton and
my sister the idea of re-publishing the Biographical and Literary
Studies ; it was also this letter which decided me to ask Lord
Bryce, on his return to England from America, to write a few
recollections of Walter Bagehot for this memoir.
"DEAR MRS. BARRINGTON,
" In compliance with your request, I send you some
few recollections of Mr. Walter Bagehot. It is thirty-seven
years since he passed away at a comparatively early age, but
those who had the good fortune to know him still remem-
ber him as perhaps the most original mind of his generation.
3
34 LIFE OF WALTER BAGEHOT
Originality is the rarest of all gifts, and might be thought likely
to become still more rare as the world moves onward, because,
upon the old subjects at any rate, it will become more and
more difficult to find anything new to say. With him it was
a quality that flashed out in the first few sentences that he
spoke or wrote, for he was so fresh, so individual, that he could
not help seeing deeper into a question than other people. He
always made, as Aristotle says of Plato, a ' new cut ' into things.
Whenever he touched anything he brought up a crop of new
ideas on a subject that had seemed trodden hard, just as a
shower of rain in the South African Karroo will bring up
grass and flowers.
"Two features in him used to strike me which do not
always go with originality. One was his wit, which played
quickly and lightly round the least promising materials, a wit
that never seemed forced, but scintillated as naturally as sun-
shine is reflected from crystal. The other was the soundness
of his judgment. Original minds often find paradox a good
way of showing the hollowness or inadequacy of current doc-
trines and are apt to carry it to excess. Bagehot used this ex-
pedient effectively but sparingly, and only when the paradox
contained at least a substantial kernel or truth. In his hands
the method never lost its value by degenerating into a habit
Nor did he, like not a few men who have been both ingenious
and fertile, cease to discriminate between the relative import-
ance of the ideas he poured forth so profusely. His ingenuity
never ran away with him. In the midst of brilliancy he re-
mained sober, wise, penetrating. Thus it is a special charm of
his writings that while you are carried on by the sense of novelty
and vivacity you are all the time receiving the fruit of exact
knowledge and solid thought. Few books have had more in-
fluence than his in moulding the minds of students and sug-
gesting new lines or methods of inquiry. Physics and Politics
was, forty years ago, almost a voyage of discovery for most
English readers.
" But take his book on the English Constitution. There he
found what seemed the most threadbare of topics, upon which
there appeared to be nothing more to be said that was worth
INTRO D UCTOR Y 35
saying. But he who had never seen the scheme of British
Government except from the outside, had never even sat in
the House of Commons, threw so much new light upon it
that the book has now become a sort of manual and can be
read with profit and pleasure to-day when the Constitution
has passed into a very different thing from what it was in the
sixties. He pointed out that many of the things which had
been admired in the Constitution were not merits at all, and
he revealed new merits that his predecessors had not perceived.
He broke away from the tradition of those who had surveyed
it on its legal and formal side, and bade us look at its actual
working. Thus a new turn was given to the discussion of
constitutional forms and rules in general, and whoever has
since his time dealt with these subjects, has been, consciously
or unconsciously, his disciple and follower. Had he lived to
apply his method to other and still larger subjects, he might
have exercised almost the same kind of influence that
Montesquieu exerted in the middle of the eighteenth, and
Toqueville in the earlier part of the nineteenth century ; and
we feel in him the power of an intellect altogether worthy to
be compared even with that of the earlier and greater of those
two illustrious men. He was, some of us used to think far
back in the seventies, the most interesting man in London to
meet, so bright and stimulating was his conversation. It was
always conversation, never declamation or lecturing. He
could listen as well as talk. He put himself on a level with
his interlocutor, and however much you might feel his
superiority, he always seemed to be receiving as well as giving,
striking out thoughts from others as well as bringing them
from his own store. Goldwin Smith was stately and im-
pressive but rather chilling. Bishop Wilberforce was brilliant
and witty, but even if he did not exactly talk for display he
seemed not to care very much whether what he said was true
or not, but only whether it shone. But Bagehot was always
cheerful, natural, spontaneous, unaffected. You felt he was
hunting for truth, and you enjoyed the sense that he allowed
you to be his companion in the chase. Another (younger)
contemporary of his whom I recall was one of the best
36 LIFE OF WALTER B AGE HOT
talkers of his time, quick, gay, and suggestive, but not so sure
to strike deep : and there was yet another still more famous,
rich in knowledge, eloquent, altogether delightful because he
too was so perfectly free from self-consciousness, but who had
not the same faculty of always hitting the nail on the head,
and Bagehot's ideas were not only illuminative as they came
fresh from his lips, but never failed to suggest something to
be pondered afterwards. The time that has passed since he
left us does not make the loss appear any the less."
CHAPTER II.
LANGPORT AND ITS SURROUNDINGS.
LANGPORT,1 Walter Bagehot's birthplace, is a small, ancient
town on the river Parret in the centre of that part of England
which narrows between the Bristol and the English Channels
before it again widens out into Devonshire. Langport is
thirteen miles from Taunton, thirteen from Bridgwater, thirteen
from Glastonbury, thirteen from Yeovil, thirteen from Crew-
kerne, and five from Somerton, formerly the capital of
Somerset. It is quite unique — unlike any other place in Eng-
land. It reminds one rather of certain small foreign towns.
Viewed as a town it is tiny, and the inhabitants do not now
number eight hundred. Yet it cannot be called a village ; it
has a market. Its importance in history and its commercial
prosperity are the results of its being the first ford from the
mouth of the river Parret.2 It is like a town stopped short in
the making, never having expanded beyond restricted limits.
For these limitations there are physical causes. Two hills rise
out of the moors half a mile apart. The moors mean in Somer-
set those wide stretches of meadowland, flat as a lake, from
which dead level rise the Mendip, the Quantock, and the Black
Down Hills. They include the famous Sedgmoor, the scene of
the defeat of Monmouth by Marlborough. One of the two hills
1 The name Langport stands for Llan — Church, and Forth or borth
— harbour.
2 The river Parret was made the western boundary between the Saxons
and the Britons by King Cenwalch in 658 after he had gained a victory at
the Pens (Penselwood) and "drove the Britons as far as the Parret"
(Saxon Chronicle). In 845 is recorded the first inroad of the Danes in
the Severn " when the Wessex men made great slaughter and won the
battle of the Parret ".
37
38 LIFE OF WALTER B AGE HOT
was formerly covered by the ancient town of Langport, a
crowded mass of houses, within fortified walls, interlaced with
narrow alleys, and crowned by a grand early perpendicular
church built on the site of a yet earlier Norman church. The
town was entered on the eastern side through an archway under
the Hanging Chapel, built in the latter part of the thirteenth
century as the Merchants' Guild Chapel. These and the
church still exist as they were in olden times. The opposite
hill, Herd's Hill, is crowned by groups of huge elm trees,
whose rounded masses of foliage rise with stately effect against
the western sky.
As a child in arms, little Walter Bagehot was taken up
from the Bank House in the town, where his parents lived
during the life of his grandfather, to lay the foundation-stone
of the existing house on the summit of the hill.1 Between the
two hills runs the present street of Langport which dates from
some centuries back. One end is called Bow Street, Bow
being the Saxon word for bridge, the other Cheapside. It
owes its existence to the Romans who found it necessary to
make a causeway over the moors at this point between the
two hills when constructing a highway from the West Country
to London. They built nine bridges to carry the road and to
lift it over the swamps. This viaduct, the work of Roman
engineers, was solidly constructed, and houses were gradually
erected here and there on each side of it. Eventually these
houses formed a street, continuing half way up the hill towards
the church. It included the Bank House where Walter Bagehot
1 A chronicler of the last centuiy writes : " The modern House stands
on the summit of Herd's Hill whence Richard Baxter on his first campaign
as a Chaplain to the Cromwellian Army, must have viewed with Fairfax
the flight of the Royalist Army under Lord Goring after the battle of
Langport. But from that spot a history of England might be illustrated.
There, beneath is Athelney, where Alfred burnt the immortal cakes which
he was left to bake. There is Aller whither he took Guthrun, the Danish
King, to Christian baptism ; Montacute, the home of the Knightly family
with its Abbey to which the Rood of Grace was brought from Watham ;
Sedgmoor with its memories of Monmouth's rebellion and its terrible
sequel ; and just the top of Burton Pillar with its story of eighty years of
the Chatham reign."
LANGPORT AND ITS SURROUNDINGS 39
was born. This is a large, six-windowed, solidly built resi-
dence with spacious rooms and wide staircases next door
to the Bank. The ancient town on the hill surrounding the
church has disappeared with the exception of a trace here and
there of a narrow alley or a relic of the old fortification walls
embedded in some new structure. Covering the space occupied
by the ancient buildings now stands Hill House, the residence
first of the ancestors of the Bagehots, and subsequently of the
Stuckey family, from about 1750 till ten years ago, together
with various smaller residences and gardens.
The unsafe moor reaches close up to the backs of the
houses, and prevents any expansion of the town behind the
street of Langport. Till within the last few years the floods
would mount so high that the street itself was invaded, the
water rising to the first floor of the houses and turning the
street into a Venice-like canal. Means have been found to
stop this mischievous invasion of the water into Langport itself,
but no steps have been taken to stop the flooding of the moors.
The mind of the West countryman is an economical mind.
It distinctly has its limitations, and is not hastily progressive.
Where economy could be effected, Walter Bagehot pointed
out how the Langportians could, on the contrary, be retro-
gressive. Mr. Hutton writes : "In early days (Langport)
returned 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 ". Long ago means might
have been found of draining the moors and preventing their
being flooded, had not the native mind been bent another
way. These floods are potent fertilisers of the soil, and the
farmer, being anxious to fertilise his land without expense,
does not desire that the floods should be restrained. To his
mind any advantage which might accrue to the neighbourhood
from developing industries through extending the town of
Langport was problematical and far off; whereas the expendi-
ture which would be necessary in order to manure his land would
be a matter of immediate and disagreeable importance to him.
These moors give their name to the county, sea-moor-settlers-
40 LIFE OF WALTER B AGE HOT
Somersetee. There is a something curiously soothing and
romantic in the feeling which these widespreading lonely lands
inspire. Free, far-reaching, and almost uninhabited, like the sea
they are absolutely untormented by any innovation of modern-
ity. Rows of pollarded willow trees are planted along the edge
of the rough roadways that now and then cross the moors, and
by the side of the rhines, ditches which gleam in water tracks
among the meadows. Like the olive of the South, their
pointed-leaved foliage turns from grey-green to silver as they
are swept by "the everlasting wash of air " which rushes over
the flat plains from the far-away sea. Growing as luxuriantly
as they like, all kinds of lovely things flourish and bloom un-
disturbed in the water or on the edge of these rhines — bull-
rushes, the flowering rush of the delicate pink asphodel-like
flower, yellow irises, forget-me-nots, willow weed, loose-strife,
and meadow sweet, and countless other rare delights, many
of them treasures to botanists. Here and there, at long
intervals, a farmstead has found a little rise in the moor
whereon to perch itself. There is hardly a view over these
stretched-out lands which does not include at least one or
two of the beautiful square church towers for which Somerset
is famous, rising massively out of clumps of elm trees, or from
low-thatched roofs of village cottages nestled around them.
They strike the welcome note of an art allied in its quality to
all this unspoilt nature. But such incidents are but as a ship
on the wide waters of the sea ; a spot which only marks more
distinctly the contrast between the amount of work done by
nature in the scene, and that constructed by human hands.
There are three points from which the characteristic
features of this scenery can be most clearly viewed. Two of
these are specially associated with Walter Bagehot, and the
third, perhaps more particularly in my mind, with his friend,
Richard Hutton. Standing by the grave of Walter Bagehot,
but a few yards distant from the south side of Langport Church,
and looking over the low wall which separates the grave from
the steep southern side of the hill, you see the river Parret
gliding away towards Muchleney Abbey, the child of the
famous Glastonbury Abbey, nestled with its church tower among
LANG PORT AND ITS SURROUNDINGS 41
trees and thatched cottages. Past Muchleney, away stretch the
moors with their rows of pollarded willows, with here and there
a cluster of elm trees, moor and trees softening from green into
a purple middle distance ; then they melt into a blue which
gets misty and far away before the rising ground is reached,
topped by three hills marking the domain of Montacute, the
beautiful home of the Phelips family. One of these three
hills is verily a Somerset Pentelicus. From its side is quarried
the famous Ham-Hill stone which for centuries has made
beautiful many churches, mansions, and cottages all over this
part of the world. Quaintly enough it is now to be found also
in Piccadilly ! Away past Montacute again the flat land
stretches, now a faint silvery mist with here and there a blotch
of azure to show it is earth not sky, away till the blue line of
the Dorset hills determines the horizon.
On leaving the churchyard and turning to the right, passing
Hill House and through the archway surmounted by the thir-
teenth-century Hanging Chapel, one sees rising straight from
the ground one of the great glories of this country-side — the
almost unrivalled tower of Huish Episcopi Church, a treasured
feature from many points in the grounds of Herd's Hill. Like
Langport Church, it stands on the site of an older Norman
edifice. The chief entrance is still through a fine Norman
doorway. When Walter Bagehot was young one vicar
served the two churches, and the afternoon Sunday services,
to which he was taken as a boy by his mother, were held
alternately at Langport and at Huish Episcopi. Following
a road which rises from Huish on to high ground to the
north you look down on Low Ham, its ancient church and
the ruined walls of the mansion of romantic traditions, across
valleys to the Tor at Glastonbury and to ranges of the
Mendip above Wells. After passing again another very fine
church, that of High Ham, most notable for the exquisite
carving of its old oak screen, the road leads along a ridge to a
point of view over the moors called Turn Hill. This is the
widest and most extended view which can be got of the moors.
It includes the whole of Sedgmoor and, among many other
churches, that of Chedzoy, where part of the King's Army
42 LIFE OF WALTER BAGEHOT
slept before the day of the battle of Sedgmoor. Still to be
seen on the porch are the slashes inflicted on the stone where
the soldiers whetted their swords before going forth to war.
That battle seemed very remote and out of the scene on
the afternoon when Walter's friend, Richard Hutton, sat with
us on the fine close turf of Turn Hill on a day in August,
six months after Walter's death, and gazed over vast stretches
of level moor, sunlit air and space all steeped in a dreamland
charm. At one point or another, over the Quantock range,
some twenty miles away, a faint hint of Welsh mountains
could be traced. The Quantocks themselves were but toned
sunshine, such a flood of light was over it all ! It twinkled
here and there into bright distinctness as a sunray caught the
glass in a building, glistened on the water in a rhine, or struck
a cloud of steam bounding upwards from an express train far
away. Great Western expresses rush to and fro all day from
Paddington to Plymouth and from Plymouth to Paddington
past Bridgwater and Taunton along that far away distance.
Viewed from our headland, their volumes of rolling steam were
but as clouds floating across the distant landscape ; they did
not disturb the dream. In the dazzling air high above us
skylarks were pouring their
full heart
In profuse strains of unpremeditated art.
From low down — very far down on the moors — the sound of
the lowing of kine was wafted up with a faint echo of farm
life — a life in its reality as remote from the feeling inspired
by the place that afternoon, as are hints of the like mundane
occupations when you come upon them in a verse of Greek
poetry. We sat long, drinking in the loveliness of this
strange country — Walter Bagehot's country. These Somerset
moors have a strong character of their own. They give you
Nature under an aspect very gentle, but very vast. A whiff
from the sea, mingling with the delicious velvety softness of
West Country air, stimulates the quality of the breezes : it
exhilarates while it soothes.
The third notable view of these moors, three miles to the
LANG PORT AND ITS SURROUNDINGS 43
west of Langport, is perhaps the most beautiful of its kind in
Somerset. Here they are seen from a headland where stands
a landmark prominent and seen from all the country round,
the monument erected by Lord Chatham in memory of Sir
William Pynsent about the year 1759, after the property was
left by Sir William to the statesman in recognition of his public
services. On its base Lord Chatham inscribed : " Sacred to the
memory of Sir William Pynsent
Hoc Saltern fungar inani — munere," 1
Virgil's lines addressed by /Eneas to the Shade of Marcellus.
It was on the top of this column, I 50 feet high, that Walter
Bagehot performed, as a young man, the rash feats which so
terrified his mother. Till quite lately, from the hill where
rises this column, half a mile away, a lonely remnant of the
great mansion pictured in Collinson's Somerset could be seen,
embedded among great cedar trees ; purple-shaded walls of a
deserted dwelling built by Lord Chatham as a wing to the
older lordly structure. This wing was the only portion of
the mansion spared by the creditors when Lady Chatham died
and the rest of the building was pulled down for its material !
We of this generation owe the magnificence of the timber in
the Burton Pynsent Woods to "the prophetic eye of taste"
(Chatham's words about his planting mania), likewise to the
extravagant tendencies which led, alas ! to the demolition of
the great mansion. Still we ought to feel grateful. If he
recklessly threw his bread upon the waters, it is we, after many
days, in this twentieth century who are still reaping the benefit.
In Lord Rosebery's Life of Lord Chatham is the following
account of why and how the hill was planted : —
"Pitt, debarred from the sports of the field, had always
taken a lively interest in the laying out of land, in planting, in
landscape gardening. He had, to use his own felicitous ex-
pression, 'the prophetic eye of taste'. He utilised it freely
and indeed extravagantly at his own homes, for in the pursuit
of this hobby he disdained all limitations. Once, when Secre-
tary of State, he was staying with a friend near London whose
grounds he had undertaken to adorn, and in the evening was
1 Lord Chatham's adaptation of Virgil's lines: —
" His saltern accumulen donis, et fungar inani Munere."
44 LIFE OF WALTER B AGE HOT
summoned suddenly to London. He at once collected all the
servants with lanterns, and sallied forth to plant stakes in the
different places that he wished to mark for plantations. In
later life he ran to still greater extremes. At Burton Pynsent
a bleak hill bounded his view and offended his eye. He ordered
it to be instantly planted with cedars and cypresses. ' Bless
me, my Lord,' said the gardener, 'all the nurseries in the
County would not furnish the hundredth part required.' ' No
matter ; send for them from London.' And from London
they were sent down by land carriage at a vast expense."
Besides this planting, Lord Chatham erected small temples
in the Renaissance style of architecture along a wide grass
terrace which he made on the hill-side, leading from the house
to the Monument. A lordly revelling went on under his reign,
and the place is still haunted by a feeling of the grandeur and
reckless magnificence of the past. This extravagance brought
the property eventually into the possession of Walter Bagehot's
cousin, the daughter of the last Vincent Stuckey. It was re-
cently sold again, and the deserted wing erected by Lord
Chatham was added to and restored by the present owner,
Mrs. Crossley, who purchased the property. There exists
an important fact in Walter Bagehot's family history which
links him to the Chatham reign at Burton Pynsent. His
uncle, a notable personage, Vincent Stuckey of Hill House,
started his singularly successful career in life through the
patronage of Lady Chatham, who, after Lord Chatham's
death, much favoured the Stuckey family. As a youth Vin-
cent Stuckey asked her for an introduction to her son, the great
Pitt. She willingly gave it, and this introduction obtained
for him a clerkship in the Treasury and the post of Private
Secretary to Pitt. This official life he deserted in order to
found the famous Stuckey Bank.
On a midsummer evening it is good to linger into the
twilight hours seated on the fine turf, embroidered with many-
coloured tiny blossoms, on the foremost point below the Monu-
ment jutting out over the moors, and watch, as it were from
ihe prow of a ship, all the wonders of light and colour that
creep over the moors as the sun sinks behind the faint line of
LANGPORT AND ITS SURROUNDINGS 45
Devonshire hills in the west. This particular point is senti-
nelled by a group of seven wind-blown Scotch firs, clinging
on with naked, claw-like roots to the precipitous fall of the
hill-side. Sweeping backwards, and rising from the moors in
undulating folds, slopes covered by masses of the magnificent
timber of Lord Chatham's planting, roll away towards the
west, past the Vale of Taunton, into Devonshire. On one
distinct promontory far away rises the Wellington Monument
above the town of Wellington. These lesser spurs of the
Brendons are surmounted on the horizon by the Blackdown
and Dartmoor heights — the country of Lorna Doone ; to the
right, in the distance, these are joined to the heights of Exmoor
and the Quantocks, the whole forming one vast amphitheatre
of hills sweeping down into the widely spread basin of the
moors. As we watch the sun sinking, a dazzling mist, a sort of
sky repeated on the earth, divides the far distant moor from
the rise of the Devonshire hills. With a delicate gradation
the glow of fiery gold intensifies as it creeps along, touching
with a yet more vivid hue each incident of the landscape as it
travels forward, till the Burton Monument is reached. Then
the full glory of colour and light bursts forth over the fore-
ground, turning to scarlet the stems of the Scotch firs close by,
and to brilliant orange the gravelly hill-side from which they
spring. Fierce, fiery light burns into everything for a space,
then subsiding into a carmine glow, loses itself in a sheen of
dove-breast silver and pink, fading into silent shade as the
curtain of night begins to fall. As a thought of Pentelicus is
suggested by the quarried hill of Montacute, so the Roman
Campagna, as seen from the Albano hills, is recalled here in
the heart of rural Somerset from the heights of Burton Pyn-
sent. There is something that associates the dignity of a
classic world with these West Country scenes, the dignity
arising, maybe, from a feeling that all this vast unspoilt nature
is the ruling spirit presiding nobly over mundane matters.
The great spaces of uninterrupted air and sky make these
ordinary sunset effects uncommon and impressive. Certain it
is that from childhood it was on no ordinary views of English
landscape that Walter Bagehot's eye was fed. A pathos
46 LIFE OF WALTER BAGEHOT
doubtless, no less than a romantic delight, is attached to
these typical scenes of his native country. To the few inhabi-
tants who dwell on the moors, these wide expanses of sky
and field must feel at times solitary and lonely. A corres-
ponding pathos existed also in his life. Though the joys of
genius were very generously allotted to him, the anxious
family trouble caused by his mother's illness, about which a
certain reserve had to be maintained, proved an ever-present
cloud hanging over his life.
But besides the Roman Campagna-like tracts of land,
where " Nature has its way " freely and unrestrainedly, cor-
responding to the happy and wholesome spirit in Walter Bage-
hot's nature, the surroundings of Langport abound in delight-
ful rural and domestic spots, the Chaucer-like element in
English scenery. Out-of-the-way villages, such as Muchelney,
Aller, Pitney, Othery, Middlezoy, Weston Zoyland, Long
Sutton, all these and many others belong to the rural picture-
esque England of olden times, cosy villages nestled round
beautiful churches, for the most part grand, imposing structures.
Farmsteads and cottages, lovable in their old-world fashion,
are met with at every turn of the road and lanes. Modest
manor houses of yore, still retaining much architectural charm,
are now used as farm-houses, being perhaps the more attrac-
tive, to the artist at least, owing to the transformation. The
beautiful remnant of the once great Abbey of Muchelney is
now inhabited by a farm labourer. The damp in the atmos-
phere of these parts gives a softened intensity to the colouring
of everything. This is a distinct beautifier. The homeliest
dwelling, the most insignificant feature in the landscape, is
made notable to those who love colour when coming under its
spell. Twigs of trees in winter, elsewhere grey or black, put
on in these parts a juicy pink and a raisin purple. The
arbutus, decorated at Christmas-tide alike with fruit and flower,
and the leaves of the bay and myrtle trees that grow happily
in the West Country, recall the quality of jewelled enamel, so
brilliant is the green of their foliage when seen against the
deep blue of the atmosphere. In stormy weather, when the
sun burns hot between the showers, the hills will seem to draw
LANGPORT AND ITS SURROUNDINGS 47
quite close and appear like walls of pure lapis lazuli, intensely
blue against golden inlets that break a light through the storm-
clouds in the sky. The colouring of flowers, the apples in the
orchards, all growth is beautified by this soft damp which
saturates the air. It tones the amber Ham-Hill stone with
broideries of gorgeous orange moss and full-tinted lichen ; it
gives to the thatch of cottage roofs a peculiarly pleasant raw-
umber and purple hue. In the wunderschonen Monat Mai,
when in shaded orchards gay apple blossoms sprinkle the
boughs with a lively sparkle of pink and white ; when bushes
of lilac, that love this damp, and grow abundantly in it, toss
their festive plumes up against the purple-brown of a thatched
roof ; when the juicy amber of young leaves on walnut trees
contrasts with the full azure blue of moorland and hill, and
every cottage garden is bedecked with bright spring flowers,
all the world in this sweet country in the west seems to be
revelling in a sport of colour, and to have become the stage
for an ideal May Day Festival.
Such is the land in which Walter Bagehot was born and
bred, and died — the land he pined for when a boy student at
the Bristol College, and still pined for when a youth at
University College in London ; the country he rode about,
hunted over, and loved ; the world of sweet natural beauty
that early tuned his eager imagination to the inspirations of
Wordsworth, Shelley, and Keats.
This beauty in nature was the world outside Langport ;
but inside the minute old borough was a world which tuned
his mind to many other matters, matters that were treated
with vigour and enterprise in this quaint little town, and which
fed his mind with food of quite another sort. Those who
knew Walter Bagehot in his home, among his own surround-
ings, • cannot fail to find at every turn in his early writings
allusions reminding them of the influence these surroundings
had on his nature. He begins his essay on Cowper : " We
are the English of the present day. We have cows and
calves, corn and cotton ; we hate the Russians ; we know
where the Crimea is ; we believe in Manchester the great.
A large expanse is around us ; a fertile land! of corn and
48 LIFE OF WALTER B AGE HOT
orchards, and pleasant hedgerows, and rising trees, and
noble prospects, and large black woods, and old church
towers. The din of great cities comes mellowed from afar.
The green fields, the half-hidden hamlets, the gentle leaves,
soothe us with ' a sweet inland murmur '. We have before
us a vast seat of interest, and toil, and beauty, and power,
and this our own. Here is our home. The use of foreign
literature is like the use of foreign travel. It imprints in
early and susceptible years a deep impression of great, and
strange, and noble objects ; but we cannot live with these.
They do not resemble our familiar life ; they do not bind them-
selves to our intimate affection ; they are picturesque and
striking, like strangers and wayfarers, but they are not of our
home, or homely ; they cannot speak to our ' business and
bosoms' ; they cannot touch the hearth of the soul."1
1 All who are interested in Langport, Walter Bagehot's birthplace, owe
a debt of gratitude to the present Vicar, David Melville Ross, for writing
a book entitled Langport and its Church : the story of the Ancient
Borough, with references to neighbouring Parishes, "To the people
of Langport I dedicate this Labour of Love " is the inscription on the
fly-leaf. The learning and research displayed in the work are only
equalled by the love and devotion which the author evinces for his
subject. The history of Walter Bagehot's family as connected with
Langport is related in the tenth part of the book. The first number
opens with a list of portreeves, otherwise mayors, who were elected afresh
every year as long as the Corporation existed, namely, from 1456 to 1885.
Sad to say in 1886 this Corporation was abolished, for no other apparent
reason than that other country town Corporations had spent their substance
in too much eating and drinking. The late Mr. Vincent Stuckey headed
a deputation which appealed to Sir Charles Dilke to commute this sentence
of death, but to no avail. One of the duties of the portreeves was to
examine every year the nine bridges which support the present town, to
see if any repairs were necessary. There is no record of any of these
bridges having fallen in till the year 1911, when the first bridge to the
west, " Big-Bow," collapsed. Other unfortunate events have taken place
in the town which would probably not have occurred had the old constitu-
tion of the little borough still existed.
The families of Michell, Stuckey, and Bagehot were closely allied
through several inter-marriages — Michells held the post of portreeve twenty-
two times from 1658 to 1831, Stuckeys twenty-six times from 1708 to 1884,
Bagehots fifteen times from 1763 to 1882. The following is the account
given by Mr. Ross of the part which the §tuckey and Bagehot faraiUos, took
LANGPORT AND ITS SURROUNDINGS 49
Mr. Robert Dickinson, grandson of the then, and cousin of
the present owner of the large property of Kingweston, eight
in promoting the prosperity of Langport : " ' The town is described in
1673 as on the river Parret, which is navigable for barges from Bristol
from whence it has some trade. It is a well-frequented town, and hath
a good market on Saturdays for corn and provisions ' (Blome's Brit-
annia). We must now point out how largely this trade was increased
through the ability and enterprise of the two families Stuckey and
Bagehot. These two families dominated Langport for 150 years from
the middle of the eighteenth century, first through their river and sea
trade, and then through the Bank which the Stuckeys founded. In 1742
the population of England was only six millions, and the superiority of
the southern counties was passing to the northern through the rise of
manufactures in the north. But the Stuckeys and Bagehots kept prosperity
in Langport, and caused a large increase of the population through their
carrying trade.
" The Bagehot family are traced back to the days of the Norman William,
where the same spelling of the name occurs in the Battle Abbey Roll.
From the beginning of the sixteenth century to the nineteenth century they
lived at Presbury, near Cheltenham. In the Civil War Captain Thomas
Bagehot fought at the first battle of Newbury (1643), and at the Restoration
he applied for re-admission to the post of Groom of the King's Chamber in
Ordinary, which he had held under Charles I., reciting his services at
Newbury (State Papers, Domestic, Vol. XXII.). Another member of the
family, joining the Parliamentary side, withdrew to Abergavenny, where
Thomas Bagehot was born in 1717. He was trained for the Ministry at a
Nonconformist College. He came to Langport before 1747, and appears
to have built a chapel in North Street. But after his migration to Hill
House he became a churchman, and in the Churchwardens' Accounts, 1755,
we find ground enough sold in the church to T. Bagehot for a pew about
6£ ft. broad for 35. on the lives of himself and his wife and children, Anne,
Priscilla, Thomas, and Robert. The elder Vincent Stuckey (Walter
Bagehot's uncle) kept a pack of hounds in Whatley, and dwelt in patri-
archal style among his people — hospitable, free-handed, and popular. He
might be seen at times seated under the great elm on the Hill fronting
the west door of the church and chatting with his neighbours. He used
to tell how in his Treasury days he had shot snipe in the muddy fields be-
tween St. James' Park and Sloane Street (his home), now called Belgravia.
However quiet the little town might be sometimes, its carters and wharf
and barge population were early astir ; and each day the women and
children crowded expectant to their doors and to the entrances of the
courts to see the mail coaches dash in and draw up at the Langport Arms,
or to watch the banker Stuckey on his return from London driving in with
his carriage and postillions. Most people found it too expensive to travel
4
So LIFE OF WALTER BAGEHOT
miles from Langport, and Colonel Batten, a nephew of one of
Walter Bagehot's intimate friends, have been good enough to
look up the history of Stuckey's Bank and to send the follow-
ing account of it for insertion in this life of Walter Bagehot.
Interesting in itself, it is intimately connected with his family
and his own career, and therefore finds a place in the record
of his life.
" The bank with which Walter Bagehot and his father were
so long connected was variously known as Stuckey's Bank,
the Somersetshire Bank, and the Bristol and Somersetshire
Bank.
"The premises at Langport, where the bank was founded
and in which Walter Bagehot was born, were bought by the
Stuckeys in 1741. The business was first established about
the year 1772. This is proved by the evidence of Vincent
Stuckey in June, 1832, before Lord Althorp, the Chairman of
the Committee on the Charter of the Bank of England. Mr.
Stuckey stated that his bank had twelve partners with four-
teen branch banks and that they had been bankers upwards of
sixty years.
"Besides the deeds of the Banking House, there are other
deeds in Langport indicating that in 1801 Samuel Stuckey
and his brother George Stuckey were bankers in that town.
' ' There are various deeds of partnerships extant relating
to the businesses at Langport, Bridgwater, and Bristol, the
partners being generally the Stuckeys and their relatives.
" The name of Thomas Watson Bagehot (father of Walter
Bagehot) occurs in a partnership deed dated 3Oth March, 1825.
These family banks were eventually merged into Stuckey's
Banking Company in 1826. The original Deed of Settlement
of Stuckey's Banking Company is dated ist September, 1831,
and is signed among others by Vincent Stuckey and Thomas
Watson Bagehot.
" The date of this deed shows that Stuckey's was one of the
earliest joint-stock banks in the country ; and it may be noted
at that time. A journey to London for most of them would be the event
of a lifetime. They were content to go short distances by the mail, or to
travel by barge to Bridgwater."
LANGPORT AND ITS SURROUNDINGS 51
that in 1836 Vincent Stuckey was called as a witness before
the Joint-Stock Bank Committee.
" Besides the family banks the following is a list of the
various banks which Stuckey' s acquired at different dates : —
DATE
NAME. OF
AMALGAMATION.
Walters, Waldron, Timbrell & Barton, Frome .... —
Phelps & Co., Crewkerne —
Batten, John, Edmund & H. B., Yeovil, Yeovil Old Bank . . —
Woodland & Co., Bridgwater —
Whitmash & White, Yeovil —
Ricketts, Thorne, Wait & Courtenay, The Castle Bank, Bristol . 1826
Sparks & Co., Crewkerne 1826
Hoskins & Co., Crewkerne —
Reeves & Porch, Wells, Glastonbury, and Shepton Mallet . . 1835
Kinglake & Co., Taunton 1838
Tufnell, Falkner & Falkner, Bath Bladad Bank . . . .1841
Bladud & Co., Taunton 1873
Dunsford & Co., Tiverton (established 1788), Tiverton Old Bank 1883
"The growth of the business may be traced in the following
circular which was issued in 1836 : —
" ' Several applications having been made for shares, the
Directors think proper to make the following statement : —
" ' The company was formed from an old bank established
more than sixty years since which uniformly maintained its
credit and respectability. As soon as the Act 7 Geo. 4,
Cap. 46, allowed more than six partners to form a bank, four
other banks were united with the original one, and the company
may be stated to have been established by about ten or twelve
individuals. The company so commenced has gone on in-
creasing in prosperity and wealth. Its establishments are
confined to Bristol and the county of Somerset, for which it
has ample resources, having always upwards of half a million
sterling at its immediate command.
" ' At present the number of proprietors exceed forty, and
provision is made by the deed of settlement for the admission
of new proprietors of property and respectability, so as always
to have a sufficient proprietary to maintain the two great
principles of banking — viz. perpetuity and safety.
4*
52 LIFE OF WALTER B AGE HOT
'"The Directors are elected by the shareholders. New
shareholders are required to pay £50 for each share, and on the
^50 so paid they will probably get from 7 to 10 per cent, and
be entitled to all the privileges of the original proprietors or
those who formed the company. As it is not the practice to
divide the whole profits of the business, they will also partake
of the emoluments of the reserve fund should a bonus be
declared, of which there have been two since the establishment
of the company.
" ' It is not expected that new shareholders will be called
on for any payment beyond the sum originally advanced, but
in this respect, as in all others, they will stand precisely in the
same situation as the original proprietors, and the accounts of
the company will be furnished half-yearly for their inspection,
so that they may from time to time be enabled to judge of the
nature and extent of their responsibility and of the sufficiency
of the assets of the company, and that they may rest quite
satisfied that their general property can never be called upon
for any engagements of the company.
" ' HEAD OFFICE,
"'LANGPORT, y>th Apri^ 1835.'
" Stuckey's enjoyed for many years the privilege of issuing
notes — at one time one pound notes were issued and after-
wards notes of five pounds and ten pounds. This privilege
lapsed on the amalgamation with Parr's Bank in 1909. This
issue was the largest in England, after the Bank of England.
The local popularity of the notes was great, and is alluded to
by Mr. George Sampson in his introduction to Literary Studies
by Walter Bagehot as ' the famous Stuckey's Bank,' whose
notes were so familiar in the West of England at that time,
that Somerset men have been known to reject the foreign and
suspicious paper of Threadneedle Street and demand payment
in ' Stuckey's '.
"At the time of the amalgamation there were seventy
branches and agencies, and the Directors were J. R. P. Goodden,
H. J. Badcock, H. Gary Batten, R. P. Batten, — Pooll, H.
Phelips Batten, R E. Dickinson, J. M. Heathcoat, — Amory,
SJirv
LANGPORT AND ITS SURROUNDINGS 53
H. W. P. Hoskyns, C. Lethbridge, C. M. F. Luttrell, and
E. C. Nicholetts.
" At Langport the general management of the bank was
conducted by Thomas Watson Bagehot, Walter Bagehot,
Vincent Stuckey, and Herbert Butler Batten. The latter also
worked at Bristol with Walter Bagehot, and joined Stuckey's
on the amalgamation with Batten's Old Bank at Yeovil. The
Head Office of Stuckey's Bank remained at Langport till 1908
when it was moved to Taunton.
" Before the introduction of the railways, Langport was in
communication with the business of the county by the navig-
able river Parret and by canals, and it was situated on the
main coach-road to London.
" In 1892 the bank became a Limited Company,
" In 1909 the bank was amalgamated with Parr's Bank,
Ltd."
The following account of Stuckey's Bank at Bristol is from
Mr. Charles Cave's well-known work on Bristol Bankers : —
"The opening of this bank in Bristol is described thus in the
diary of a Bristol citizen in 1806 : —
" ' September I st. A new Bank opened on the Quay called
the Bristol and Somersetshire Bank.'
" The head-quarters of the bank appear to have been Lang-
port from the time the bank started ; and, as is generally
known, that place is the head-quarters of the bank at the present
day.
" Vincent Stuckey was founder of the bank, which consisted
at the time of the opening of the Bristol Branch of six
partners, George Stuckey, Vincent Stuckey, James Lean, John
Hart, John Maningford, and Samuel Stuckey ; and, as far as
I have been able to ascertain, James Lean and John Maning-
ford were the two who managed the Bristol business.
" The premises of the bank were at 50 Broad Quay, and
the London Agents were Rogers, Olding, and Rogers, of 3
Freeman's Court, Cornhill.
"From the face of a bank-note in my possession, dated
1812, it appears that the bank had a branch at Bridgwater
as well as at Langport and Bristol.
54 LIFE OF WALTER B AGE HOT
" A change of partnership took place this year ; George
Stuck ey's name disappeared and a new deed of partnership
was drawn up, dated 1st July; the partners being Vincent
Stuckey, James Lean, John Hart, and John Maningford.
No change, however, was made in the management of the
Bristol business, James Lean and John Maningford remaining
on.
" The same year saw a further change in the London Agents
— as we learn from one of the early Bristol Directories that the
bank drew on Sir William Curtis, Bart. & Co., of Lombard
Street.
" From the face of a bank-note dated this year it appears
that the bank had by this time increased its business, as besides
Langport, Bristol, and Bridgwater, it had now established
branches at Taunton and Wells.
" The year 1826 was an eventful year in the history of this
bank, as two events of importance occurred. In the first
place the bank was now formed into a Joint-Stock Company ;
and in the second place the Bristol Branch changed its premises
from 50 Broad Quay to the corner of High Street and Wine
Street, taking over the house and business of the Castle Bank,
Messrs. Ricketts & Co., who relinquished business the same
year.
" In 1851 Stuckey's contemplated moving into more exten-
sive premises.
" ' April. The Messrs. Stuckey's Banking Co. have pur-
chased of Mr. Harrill, auctioneer, the extensive premises known
as the City Auction Mart, in Corn Street, for the purpose of
erecting an extensive and handsome banking establishment.'
" These premises weie originally the Banking House of
Messrs. Ames, Cave & Co., and were sold to Mr. Harrill in
1826, when the amalgamation between the Bank of Ames,
Cave & Co. and the Old Bank took place.
" It was not till three years afterwards that the new house of
Stuckey's Banking Co. was ready, as we learn that on 5th June,
1854, 'the new Bank of the Messrs. Stuckey & Co., in Corn
Street, opened for business '.
" The same year John Maningford, who had been a manager
LANGPORT AND ITS SURROUNDINGS 55
of the Bristol business since 1806, died; and his death was
followed three years later by that of Charles Paul, the man-
agement being now left in the hands of P. F. Aiken and
W. G. Coles.
" This led to the admission of a new manager the following
year, Walter Bagehot, who continued as such until 1861.
" High Sheriffs of Bristol connected with Stuckey's Bank in
late years were : —
"James Lean, 1833.
"William Gale Coles, 1867.
"Alfred Deedes, 1892.
" Herbert Gary Batten, 1904 and 1908.
" The curious old wooden house at the corner of High Street
and Wine Street which Stuckey &Co. acquired in 1826 is said
to have been brought to Bristol from Amsterdam. It was at
one time occupied by John Vaughan the goldsmith, who was
one of the earliest Bristol Bankers.
" Another connection with the Bristol Corporation is the
legacy of fifty thousand pounds left to it by Vincent Stuckey
Lean, a cousin of Vincent Stuckey's, for the Library. He also
left a similar amount to the British Museum.
" Walter Bagehot was associated with the business at various
branches besides Langport. The close attention he paid to
practical banking may be observed in the various arrange-
ments made as to his work. The following instances of such
arrangements may be of interest : —
" In October ; 1855 — Walter Bagehot was appointed Secretary
to the Committees of Management at Langport and at Bristol.
"/# December, 1857 — with regard to the Bristol Manage-
ment it was arranged that Walter Bagehot should attend at
the Bristol Bank three or four days a week and share in its
management and responsibilities and spend the rest of his time
at Langport and elsewhere in discharge of his other duties.
"In June, 1858 — Walter Bagehot was authorised to sign
cash-notes and other such documents as one of the Managers
of the Bristol department.
" In December, 1859 — a letter was read from Mr. Walter
Bagehot stating that in Mr. Wilson's absence in India he
56 LIFE OF WALTER BAGEHOT
would be required to give some attention to the manage-
ment of the Economist newspaper, and that his duties connected
with it would take him to London perhaps once a fortnight
for two or three days which might interfere with the arrange-
ment made with the bank two years ago. His attendance in
Bristol would be the same, but he should not be able to be at
Langport so often as he had been. His attention when in
London would be given to any business of the Bank requiring it.
"1 86 1 — Bagehot resigned the local managership of the
Bristol Bank in consequence of this change of residence. He
continued to be Secretary to the Committee and Directors. It
was settled that his attention should be directed to the super-
intendence of the Bristol Bank. "
"ANOTHER BANK AMALGAMATION." (The Economist,
30th October, 1909.)
" The amalgamation of Stuckey's Banking Company with
Parr's Bank closes the separate existence of one of the oldest
banking institutions in England. Stuckey's Bank was founded
at Langport, Somerset, early in the eighteenth century.
A purely local bank for Gloucester and Somerset — its share-
holders being all freeholders in one county or the other — it
had from the first a great reputation. Among its customers
were many famous men, who came into close and some-
times delicate relations with the managers. The elder Pitt,
who inherited a magnificent palace at Burton Pynsent, near
Langport, from Sir William Pynsent, who was no relation and
a stranger to him, was at least once driven, by his own and his
wife's necessities, to borrow from the neighbouring bankers
sums which he was quite unable to pay in cash, but was able
(so a well-authenticated story runs) to settle to the satisfaction of
all parties by the exercise of a discreet patronage. The later
history of the bank contrasts strangely with that of Parr's. Both
businesses were started in the country, the one in Somerset
and the other in Lancashire, with its head-quarters at the town
of Warrington. But while Parr's Bank was always pushing for-
ward with the immense expansion of the cotton trade, opening
THE DUTCH HOUSE CALLED THE CASTLE BANK : BANKING HOUSE OF
STUCKEYS FROM 1826-1854
LANGPORT AND ITS SURROUNDINGS 57
new branches, assimilating older banks, winning for itself a
place in London and a position at the Clearing-House, Stuckey's
has hitherto remained a West Country bank, reducing rather
than increasing the number of its branches and working
until quite recently with its head office at the tiny town of
Langport, which has never numbered more than 2000 inhabi-
tants. At the same time, it has remained a strong and
wealthy institution. It holds nearly £7,000,000 of deposits ;
it has a larger note circulation than any other bank, except
the Bank of England, and the market value of its capital is
,£1,751,000. We may be forgiven, too, if we recall the close
connection which at one time existed between Stuckey's Bank
and the Economist, when Walter Bagehot filled the two posi-
tions of editor and director. His great-uncle, Samuel Stuckey,
had founded the bank, of which his father, Thomas Bagehot,
was for thirty years managing director and vice-chairman.
For several years Walter Bagehot was manager of local
branches of Stuckey's Bank, and on leaving the West Country
for London in 1861 he supervised the bank's London business
at the same time that he was writing to such purpose on
the theory of banking in the Economist and in his famous book
called Lombard Street."
CHAPTER III.
HOME AND FAMILY.
IN a large black leather pocket-book, from which Walter
Bagehot's father was seldom parted, are still to be found in
this year (1914) papers containing the certificates of Walter
Bagehot's birth and of his baptism, events which took place
eighty-six years ago. These were documents of momentous
importance to a father who regarded his son from babyhood
as his "greatest treasure". Walter Bagehot was born in
Langport in what was called the Bank House, on the 3rd day
of February, 1826.
The two families, Stuckey and Bagehot, appear to have
performed an old-dance-like " change of sides " respecting their
abodes in Langport, each alternately having lived at either
end of the town. Eventually on the summits of the opposite
hills, the Stuckeys lived at Hill House, the Bagehots at Herd's
Hill. They led lives which were immensely interesting to
themselves and to each other. Constant intercourse took place ;
a racy humour, vivid interest in public affairs, and intense in-
terest of a friendly kind in each other's concerns, kept this
intercourse very much alive. Beyond the Hanging Chapel
was the home of Walter Bagehot's uncle Edward and his
family, with whom his father and mother kept up a daily inter-
course. Beyond that again, opposite Huish Episcopi Church,
is the property of the Michell family, the squires of Huish
parish, related through several marriages to the Bagehots and
Stuckeys.
The earliest manuscript concerning Walter Bagehot's
family on the Stuckey side is the Diary of Thomas Beedall,
written by Walter Bagehot's great-grandfather, beginning
58
HOME AND FAMILY 59
Sunday, i8th September, 1768. The following extract, which
is a fair specimen of the contents of the book, does not show
any intellectual proclivities that might have accounted for his
great-grandson's genius. The handwriting is beautiful and
the volume is bound handsomely in tooled vellum.
"Sunday, October 2nd, 1768. This morning had coak for
breakfast — afterwards went to Langport Church to prayers
and partook of the Holy Sacrament. Dined at home on a
boiled leg of mutton with caper sauce, carrots, and potatoes.
Drank water and treacle. In the afternoon went to Huish
Church and heard a good sermon by the Rev. William Michell,
on this text: 2nd Chapter of Ecclesiastes, nth verse: 'I
looked on all the works that my hands had wrought, and on
the labour that I had laboured to do, and behold, all was
vanity and vexation of spirit, and there was no profit under the
sun.' Daughter Jenny drank tea at our house and in the even-
ing Daughter Stuckey went to super and spent the evening
with us with Mr. Sawtle and his wife. This day dry weather."
"Monday, October 3rd, 1768. This morning had coak
for breakfast and rachit of a kidd of cyder sold to Daughter
Stuckey, and went down several times to North Street House
with John Hoare and with Long after apples to make cyder
at Mr. Bagehot's. Dined at home on hash mutton, drank
water cyder. In the afternoon went down and picked up
apples in the orchard and spent the evening at home — this
night Betsy and Nancy went to the play. It was Hamlet,
Prince of Denmark, with a farce called Chrononhotontlologos.
Nancy is to sleep at Daughter Stuckey's. This day was
Bridgwater Fair and exceedingly fine weather."
In like manner the Diary is continued till the last entry on
Sunday, I st June, 1783. The monuments of the Beedall family
are to be found in the west porch of Langport Church on either
side of the large west window which my sister placed to the
memory of Walter Bagehot. "Daughter Stuckey" married
George, father of the notable " Uncle Vincent," and of Edith,
Walter Bagehot's mother.
For two families to have " dominated Langport for 150
years from the middle of the eighteenth century," some
60 LIFE OF WALTER B AGE HOT
of their members must have been possessed of remarkable
qualities. The dominion over which they reigned resembled
somewhat an ancient republic on a diminutive scale, the com-
mercial magnates being its rulers in every sense. In both the
Bagehot and Stuckey families we find gifts of mind and
character which, no less than their material possessions, won
for them the exceptional position they held. Walter Bagehot
would explain his family in a very amusing manner. He felt
a genuine interest in his relatives. The prominent character-
istics of the two families were entirely different. Probably
they worked together so successfully on account of this
difference. Each family had a distinctive character of its own,
and each held its own. The Stuckey nature was shrewd, wil-
ful, sociable and very hospitable. The remarkable amount of
mental and animal vitality which it possessed showed itself
more in active life than in intellectual pursuits, though Edith
Stuckey, Walter's mother, was from a child as voracious a
reader as her son. They were conscientious and masterful in
carrying through all they undertook to do, and dominated
those connected with them in business, not only through
shrewd intelligence and forethought, but because they exercised
their strong wills invariably on the side of straight dealing.
They inspired the confidence necessary to dominate the un-
reasoning but not unshrewd West Country mind.
As a family the Bagehots were more intellectual than the
Stuckeys. They were less robust, more retiring and dignified —
perhaps more highly cultured. Their ancestors can be traced
back to the fifteenth century, when one Richard Bagehot, alias
Badger or Baghott, possessed the family property at Prest-
bury, Gloucestershire — a property held uninterruptedly by the
Bagehots till the last century. Several of the members of the
family were Knights, many were High Sheriffs, some were
soldiers, others ecclesiastics. In 1684 William Bagehot of
Prestbury married Anne de la Bere, a member of the ancient
family who in 1635 purchased Southam, County Gloucester,
from Cecil, Earl of Salisbury. In 1746 William Bagehot of
Prestbury assumed the additional surname of De la Bere.
In 1828, through the female line, his descendant succeeded to
HOME AND FAMILY 61
the De la Bere estates at Southam and those also of Bagehot
at Prestbury. The former he sold to Lord Ellenborough in
1832. His brother, Sir Paul Bagehot of Woodchester, Rod-
borough and Upper Lypial, County Gloucester, was High
Sheriff for Gloucester.1
Walter Bagehot's great-grandfather came to Langport
about 1747. His great-great-grandfather left the Church of
England, probably following the wave of Unitarianism which
swept over the Midlands in the eighteenth century. As Mr.
Ross relates, his great-grandfather rejoined the Church of
England on taking up his residence at Hill House, immedi-
ately opposite the noble building — All Saints' Church, Lang-
port. But again Walter's own father reverted to noncon-
formity and became a Unitarian.
The Bagehot family influenced the people of Langport by
personal dignity and refinement, which qualities, though prob-
ably hardly recognised by the county folk for what they were,
gave weight to their position. Walter Bagehot's father had,
moreover, a most determined will of his own, though he main-
tained it with quiet obstinate tenacity rather than with any
show of power. He was a politician, a decided Whig, but he
took an intellectual rather than a party view of politics.
Though dignified and reserved in manner he was blessed with
singularly deep and warm affections. He was a great lover
of beauty in Nature. He planted and laid out the grounds
of Herd's Hill with the eye of an artist, securing delightful
vistas through the trees of the churches of Langport and Huish
Episcopi and of the distant moorlands and hills. These still
exist and make lovely vignettes from the walks and lawns. A
print of the old Langport Bridge in Mr. Ross's book is a re-
production of one of Mr. Bagehot's water-colour drawings.
There is another of the Hanging Chapel preserved at Herd's
Hill. From childhood Walter Bagehot was devotedly attached
to his father and his father to him.
When Walter Bagehot was born it was " Uncle Stuckey "
who formed the social centre for the two families, both at
1 Extracted from the Records of the College of Arms, London, and ex-
amined therewith this 3rd day of August, 1888. Albert W. Wood Garter.
62
Langport and in London. After leaving the Treasury he still
kept open house in his London residence, 126 Sloane Street,
where his relations would visit him during the season and enjoy
some of the pleasures of the town. The following is a letter
written by one Henry Savvtell, a distant cousin of the
Stuckeys, containing a few graphic accounts of Walter Bagehot
from the year 1835. It was written in answer to one from
my sister, asking Mr. Sawtell to write down any memories he
might have of him.
" CHETWODE VICARAGE,
"BUCKINGHAM, 2<)th May, 1882.
" MY DEAR MRS.; BAGEHOT,
" I reserved your letter for a day in this quiet green
spot, but with all the advantages of unwonted seclusion I can
convey nothing to paper of the evanescent qualities of the
humour which 'came off' your husband under all circum-
stances on to the surrounding facts and persons ; the over-
hanging thatch of black hair, the marvellous eyes, the play of
facial muscle, the lissom figure, the curiously impressive voice
which nevertheless declined to adapt itself to platforms, even
the preliminary gasp to bespeak attention and the flittering
sense of fun as the paradox or unsuspected analogy found its
way to the lips. While these are wanting, written description
makes that seem tame which never failed to delight — never
' hovered round the confines of a truth ' but darted at it and
stereotyped it. It was a way of taking advantage of a peculiar
state of things which was gone next minute, an insight into —
coupled with an impatience of — anything which went half-way
or missed the direct road altogether, which was half the charm
of what never seemed meant for wit but just part of ordinary
talk quaintly expressed.
" The portentous solemnity with which a Radical Aberdeen
Professor demanded at my table to know the kernel of all the
machinery by which we were governed (in 1853) — ' that is
what I want to get at, sirs,' evoked from Walter Bagehot,
after a short pause, ' My impression is that the kernel is the
consolidated fund, and / should like to get at that ! '
HOME AND FAMIL Y 63
" My own appearance, as the solicitor of a luckless hair-
seating manufacturer at Crewkerne before the Bank Committee
at Langport, to whom, on his behalf, I tendered — in aid of
some rather short securities — a heap of policies on his life of
long standing, was not rendered comfortable by the enquiry
which broke the silence succeeding my statement — ' Henry,
will your client undertake to expire as part of the arrange-
ment ? '
"These things with the accessories I have named were
fun in perfection, without them they are just nothing. I
roared when I took up Mr. Hutton's memoir the other day
and read the bit about a man's wife being his fault and his
mother his misfortune, but two persons not devoid of humour
to whom I read it separately could see little in it because the
interlocutors were unknown to them and they could not see
and hear it as I could.
" Mrs. Bagehot must, I think, have been barely eighteen
when she married Joseph Prior Estlin. She was twenty-five
when the shower of prosperity burst on the deserving head of
her surviving brother Vincent — at thirty-eight she had been
many years a very lively widow, brilliant and fascinating, and
then she rewarded with her hand a devotion which nothing
ever quenched, and which she had excited in the breast of a
remarkably plodding young gentleman of twenty-eight, Thomas
Watson Bagehot. While the son of this marriage was a very
young child one of the three sons of her first union died of
some illness, another of the effects of a coach accident under
circumstances well known doubtless to you, and the third was
growing up bereft of reason. Her own mind had been com-
pletely unhinged by these untoward events and had been but
just restored when I was first made free of the household in
I835-
" About the Bagehots a good deal of curious information
could be quarried, but I daresay the Guillaume Bagehot who
figures in the roll of Battle Abbey had settled himself in Cam-
bridgeshire, and the possessor of the silver snuff-box of the
seventeenth century was entitled to the arms there described.
(This snuff-box still exists in Walter's family.) They seem to
64 LIFE OF W 'ALTER B AGE HOT
have flourished in Gloucestershire in those days and there is a
brief pedigree of them in Atkyns. They lived for a generation
or two in the picturesque old house in Langport opposite the
church which has within the last few years given way to the
existing south portion of Hill House — then they got down by
the river into a buff-coloured dwelling with the mullioned
windows, and of the garden of which some relics yet abide in
the present garden at Herd's Hill, but which fell before the
improvements which eased the traffic and ruined the effect
of "Great Bow". The Robert Codrington Bagehot (the
Codringtons were cousins of the Bagehots) and Mrs. Bagehot
of my first remembrances had not then long moved up to Herd's
Hill, and were most remarkable for a high tone of mind, great
intelligence, an exalted standard of living and acting, and a
sense of humour which indeed seemed to pervade the very air
of the place from Herd's Hill to the Bank, and across to Mrs.
Michell's — up again to Mrs. George Stuckey's — and in full
hilarious shine kept on at the Hill.
" The parents of Walter Bagehot were then living in the
Bank house, and he was just completing his ninth year. The
first evening we met I got into trouble by proposing to
assault him for beating me at chess (as Bishop Howley did
Sydney Smith). The next day I was introduced to the scene
of his studies which were being conducted (in the room over
the entrance door of the Bank house) after a very singular
fashion and apparently with a view to induce concentration of
thought. He was " doing sums " with about twenty clocks all
ticking in unison and striking to the minute around him (such
being Vincent Estlin's whim of the hour), while his mother
read Quentin Durward in as high a key and as rapidly as was
possible, for the benefit of poor Vincent. Next year I was
there again for a short space, but I think Walter must have
been absorbed in study, as my sole reminiscence is of the Sun-
day afternoons at the Hill when after Church there was a kind
of levee on the lawn of Hill House. Everybody owed some-
thing (many, everything) to the master and mistress there, and
Mrs. Bagehot rather liked to exhibit her clever boy, who
eluded her efforts by swarming up a great tree, and there
HOME AND FAMILY 65
glaring down on the assembly from the topmost bough in a
surprising manner and to the detriment of his Sabbath raiment.
There was the Christmas of 1 838 when we were mostly flooded
in at Herd's Hill, Mrs. Bagehot administering alternate layers
of the Greek Testament (with her own annotations) and Oliver
Twist, but I think Walter was in a shy preoccupied stage just
then. Three and a half years later he was all himself, with
his standing leaps, his daring ventures on horseback, his absorb-
ing love of children, and his conversational freshness, chiefly,
as far as I was concerned, interrogatively as to what I, three
years older, learnt and saw and heard in the great city, always
with the result of making me feel that I had got hold of the little
end of the stick. The next year, I suppose, he was launched
in London, dwelling at the house of one Dr. Hoppus in Camden
Street, and getting Sunday rests at the quiet nook on Hamp-
stead Heath where his aunt and uncle, Mr. and Mrs. Reynolds,
lived, and where we always met and delighted chiefly in old
Quarterly Reviews. At this point Mr. Hutton takes him up
with consummate insight and appreciative affection.
" I don't know that it was worth while to write all this in
order to prove that my resources for the purpose in hand are
utterly barren, but it is pleasant to go back to those days, and
were it less so, I have the satisfaction of the little French
maiden who lisped out her first song because she was asked : —
' En attendant, j'ai toujours 1'avantage
De vous montrer que je sais obeir.'
" I remain, dear Mrs. Bagehot,
" Yours sincerely,
"G. H. SAWTELL."
x
Mrs. Bagehot' s principles were of the best, and her in-
fluence over Walter Bagehot was great. As it is necessary
to mention the trouble which was brought into his life
by the state of mental distress to which his mother was
subject, it is all the more necessary to be explicit in recording
the fine qualities her nature possessed. She had great charm
and fascination. She had a power of infusing life into the
atmosphere about her, of making it indeed vibrate with a
S
66 LIFE OF WALTER BAGEHOT
sense of activity and movement, very contagious in its effect.
Her presence gave a feeling of zest to the living of life. Her
intellectual vivacity brought into family life a keen relish for
intellectual pleasures ; she never failed to show an unselfish
devotion to the interest of others, and, best of all, she stimu-
lated the existence of all those about her with the invigorating
tonic of humour. Even as I first knew her, at the age of
seventy-two, she had a lovely complexion and other traces
of beauty. Her voice in speaking I recall as one of the most
delightful I ever heard. I can imagine I hear it still — the tone
soft and persuasive, but in it withal an emphatic ring which
made people attend. Both from his father and from his mother
Walter Bagehot acquired a high standard of morals. From his
studious father, who spared no thought or time in forwarding
the intellectual, moral, and religious development of his greatest
treasure, Walter acquired a solid grounding in methods of
working which without doubt helped him later. But his
humour, his happy temperament, his intellectual vitality — the
salient qualities, in fact, which stamp Walter Bagehot's genius
with so strong an individuality — were inherited from his mother.
There are doubtless disadvantages in postponing the writing
of a memoir for many years after the subject has quitted this
world's stage ; but in the case of Walter Bagehot it was
necessary that the stage should be cleared of all his nearest
relations before such a record were attempted. Even those
who cared for him, but who were less immediately involved
in the special trouble of his home life, would have shrunk from
making any allusion to it, till time had somewhat taken the
sting out of that which was most painful to him in his life,
and till it had become somewhat vague in the memory of the
rising generation. Entirely inadequate, nevertheless, would
be any attempt to write a memoir of Walter Bagehot were
the fact concealed that his mother was at times insane. This
was the tragedy of his life, the iron that entered into the soul.
" Every trouble in life is a joke compared to madness," he
would say. A tragedy it verily was ; yet, had he not had to
suffer the pain of it, the most admirable qualities in his nature
might have remained but partially developed. Very pathetic
HOME AND FAMILY 67
and beautiful was the manner in which he met the conditions
forced into his life by this calamity. The brilliant vivacity
of his nature and his genius for shining as a light among
all who were intellectually and socially of the best, was not
dimmed by the shadow cast over his life ; this home trouble
made him in no sense morbid, yet he never sought enjoyment
at the expense of any help he could give his father in the
family trial. This willingness to bear his share of the burden
arose not so much, I think, from any conscious sense of duty,
as from a yet higher impulse, growing out of the rich soil of
his natural affections. He could not have done otherwise.
Never was the burden laid on another shared and borne with
more loyalty and tender affection than was Mrs. Bagehot's in-
firmity by her husband and her son.
The effect of such a trial is naturally to isolate a family
from the ordinary social life led in most country homes where
neighbours keep up a friendly intercourse with one another.
Such an isolation in itself was uncongenial to Walter's natural
bent. He had genial feelings towards his fellow-creatures ;
still, until he married, he felt himself too much one with
his father's and mother's home life to desire to seek much
society beyond Herd's Hill. In a letter written to him by
his friend Richard Hutton we find a criticism of this dis-
inclination to attach himself closely to any one out of the
home circle.
Sunday, lotk December, 1845.
Bet der Madame Schmidt i 3 Behrenstrasse — Berlin.
" MY DEAR BAGEHOT,
" It is a great pleasure to sit down to answer your
letter which was indeed with its enclosure exceedingly welcome.
I am glad to hear you have been nearly free from giddiness
which I fear most, and not had much headache. I don't care
for your apathy much, for it is not a state likely to last Only
I wish you had more interests around you, not merely of
intellect but of feeling, which are with you too much limited
to the exclusive interests of home. In London you always
5*
68 LIFE OF WALTER BAGEHOT
appear to me to be a perfect expression of the class idea of a
young man studying in lodgings, without differentia specified.
Of course as regards social relations you go to places and to
fellow-students, but biding nowhere ; and while others seem to
be always definable with respect to some distinct circle of in-
dividuals, there is no particular distance from your lodgings
that enters more than any other into your functional equation.
I don't think this is either good for you, or your intellect ; the
apathy you describe I think arises from this absence of
positive interest and forces in your London life, which none
can help missing though in very different degrees. I know
I could never work well and with energy without real friends
near me, to whom my thoughts and attention may sometimes
turn entirely. I do not mean simply men one likes, but men
one loves ; and I should be here in a state of quiet apathy,
just like yours, if I had not Martineau near me to supply the
attractive force that intellectual pursuits must often fail in,
when the mind is ill or weary. All your friends you seem to
like, but they do not seem to be resources that instantly and
spontaneously fill the vacuum that rational, moral, and even
religious interests will often leave. And I know when this is
the case, a kind of reverie, which is not over-beneficial to the
mind, supplies the place which human interests were, I think,
meant to fill. I wish you had not simply more friends but
more attachments."
Though Mr. Hutton was so devoted and intimate a friend,
I doubt whether Walter confided much of his home trouble to
him. He stayed at Herd's Hill before and after Mrs. Bage-
hot's death, and he must have known of her mental infirmity ;
but she did not take to him, notwithstanding Walter's endea-
vour to make them friends. Mr. Hutton's noble, simple
nature was not, I think, keenly alive to intricacies in sensitive-
ness. He would have had to be told of the pain, and might
have been too explicit in expressing his sympathy, and that
would not have suited Walter's1 nerves. Walter most openly
mentioned it to those who understood more instinctively, but
who did not discuss it with him. In the letter quoted Mr.
Hutton did not guess what probably was the fact, namely,
HOME AND FAMILY 69
that the apathy from which Walter suffered was but the
reaction of over-strung nervous excitement.
He left his life in London, giving up the Bar, to which he
had been called in 1852, to associate himself with his father in
business so as to live at home. He gave other reasons for
abandoning law as a profession, and these probably might of
themselves have induced him to do so ; but the choice he
made of joining the business at Langport was made clearly
with the object of helping in the home trouble. A less un-
selfish nature, gifted with genius such as Walter Bagehot's,
endowed with such social powers that, without any effort on
his part, he could readily acquire influence over his fellow-men,
would not have probably chosen a career so distasteful as that
of the counting-house at Langport, in order to brighten the
atmosphere in a home overshadowed by this cloud. It may
appear presumption to venture an opinion as to how far the
trial that Walter Bagehot had to bear was favourable or un-
favourable to the development of his genius. In a sense such
trouble may have stimulated his faculties by adding zest to his
intellectual pursuits ; but possibly if he had enjoyed more
leisured conditions, had the constant strain on his nervous
system been at times relaxed, this might have induced a mus-
ing habit of mind more calculated to inspire work of a distinctly
creative kind. His salient gifts being imagination and origin-
ality, it is difficult to believe that some deterrent obstacle did
not exist which kept the more distinctly inventive faculties
in the background. The extraordinary physical vitality and
happiness of temperament which he enjoyed in early youth
had certainly much to subdue them in after years. The dis-
turbing influences developed doubtless fine qualities of char-
acter, but it is possible that they had also a numbing effect on
any creative proclivities that may have been latent in him.
For the full development of these, a certain spring and un-
fettered impulsiveness in the working of the mind may be re-
quired. It is possible that the subduing nature of his condi-
tions may have suppressed such an impetus ; who can say ?
In the first few pages of Walter Bagehot's essay on
Macaulay is found the description of the particular kind of
70 LIFE OF WALTER B AGE HOT
nature possessed by those who " are unfortunately born
scientific," and an amusing description it is. He further
analyses " the minds of the crowd of men ". This is also
amusingly described, and ends with the following : " The im-
pulse to busy ourselves with the affairs of men goes further
than the simple attempt to know and comprehend them ; it
warms us with a further life ; it incites us to stir and influence
those affairs ; its animated energy will not rest till it has
hurried us into toil and conflict." This impulse Walter Bage-
hot possessed in a marked degree, and so did his mother. It
might be asked why this impulse did not lead him to a more
definite public position than he ever occupied ?
He made three attempts to enter Parliament, but failed.
His genius has been more widely appreciated since his death
than it was during his lifetime. I think the true answer to
this query may be found in the fact that there was ever an
unrecognised deterring influence which slackened the issues of
success on obvious and popular lines. Insanity isolates. It
causes a reserve in the natures of those suffering from contact
with it, depriving them of the feeling of absolute sympathy
and open comradeship with those who know nothing of " the
dark realities ". Genial, sympathetic, sociable, witty, Walter
Bagehot undoubtedly was, yet at the same time profoundly
reserved. The things that touched him the nearest were but
rarely disclosed. This reserve was felt, though not understood
by the populus who ordains notoriety. It was only through
intercourse with his few intimate friends and with the great
men with whom he came into contact in later days, that his
extraordinary gifts were discerned and duly appreciated ; and
he died before such estimates had filtered through to the
multitude.
But even if his exceptional circumstances stunted his inven-
tive side and his career as regards popular success, they clearly
developed his philosophical lines of thought. The weight of
"dark realities" was ever present to test the proportion of
things, to give a standard of the relative importance of human
thought and feelings. These " dark realities " can prove to the
uttermost what is in reality sorrow, and what condition of
HOME AND FAMILY 71
mind can induce resignation. They [open the doors to many
mysteries, though, while doing so, they prove that in human
experience there is no reaching the outlet which can explain
why they are sent to bewilder and pain us. A firm faith in an
over-ruling spiritual guidance through the most troubled waters
was the ever-present source of strength to Walter's father in
his life's trial. With such an example before him, Walter, from
early childhood, gained a profound sense of the reality of
the spiritual life, a belief which he ever retained as a funda-
mental fact in our humanity. Many of the earlier essays
contain allusions to " dark realities," though probably such
allusions might not be obvious to those who were not intimately
acquainted with Walter Bagehot's home life ; but in the essay
on William Cowper every reader must, I think, feel that he had
had a personal experience of such mysteries.
It must not be gathered from the fact that this tragedy
existed, that the life at Herd's Hill was a melancholy life.
Tragic it might be at times, but never was it tame or dull.
Events were never lacking — painful events at times, but events.
There was no stagnation, there was always the possibility of
something unexpected. Anxiety in itself is a moving quantity.
Moreover, the delightful qualities in Mrs. Bagehot and Walter
gave the happy days a great charm. Never, probably, was
there a case where insanity produced a slighter permanent
effect. This, doubtless, was the result of the atmosphere of
love and affection which surrounded her.
Mrs. Bagehot was instrumental in obtaining a church for
Hambridge, a village five miles distant from Herd's Hill. She
wrote a volume of sacred verses which she sold for the benefit
of the building fund, and initiated the raising of a subscription
for the same.
People have a way of speaking of fascinating women as if
they were a species of witches, who, with black arts, bring evil
into the lives of men. The most fascinating women, on the
contrary, are those who, like Mrs. Bagehot, use their natural
gift of charm to throw sunshine into the whole atmosphere
around them ; who are, moreover, clever and endowed with a
right judgment; whose qualities of heart and head are equally
72 LIFE OF WALTER B AGE HOT
enlisted in making themselves and others happy and good.
Her maternal feelings were unusually strong. She had a
motherly affection to give to all children. A Bagehot cousin
lost his wife and was left with two children. As he was an
officer in the navy and sent on foreign service, Mr. and Mrs.
Bagehot took his boy and gave him the position of foster-
brother to Walter, and he received the same loving care
and attention they lavished on their own child. Her nature
soared above all the littlenesses often found in a small town,
and though by nature socially inclined and interested in the
lives of all her neighbours, she entered into their interests
from a larger, more human and humorous point of view than
is common. Her sense of humour carried her over many
difficulties in her relations with her neighbours, though her
principles insisted on her telling " the truth, the whole truth, and
nothing but the truth " on every possible occasion, and the whole
truth is not always welcome. Her letters, of which hundreds
are preserved, are very amusing reading. Certain subjects
especially aroused her argumentative inclinations. Prominent
among these were religion ; the Poor Law which, as it then
existed, she entirely condemned ; and the shortcomings of
the Unitarian creed. Characteristic of the style of her letters
is the following which Mrs. Bagehot wrote to Walter when he
was sixteen : —
" \Qth May, 1842.
" MY DEAREST WALTER,
"... I have been reading over many of my beloved
Stuckey's : letters to dearest Papa this week, and he and I
were much struck with the similarity of the style with yours
and in affection for his own Mamma — or rather in parental
affection I hope you resemble each other. Oh ! I have the
blessed assurance that that is a feeling which survives the grave
and lives purified and anew through all eternity.
" Now that Aunt and Uncle are gone (Mr. and Mrs. Vincent
Stuckey went every spring to London for the season), my
1 Stuckey Estlin, her son by her first marriage, was at the age of twenty
killed in a coach accident.
HOME AND FAMILY 73
popping place is to Mrs. Kent. I scold her much for caring
totally (unlike you and Papa and me now) about people and
their attentions. She has always got some little fad about
'cold manners,' default of courtesies and enquiries, and
fresh peccadilloes of the kind she punishes by a cross proud
look (entre nous), and then — there they are — all turned to
icicles, and send each other to Coventry ! She is just in this
way now with who has a tendency not to think ' small
beer ' of himself and to swell out to a barrel or a butt. How
one does wish to expand the good in humanity, to repress
the bad, and raise all hearts and minds above the petty
jealousies of life, and fix them upon the sublime views of the
immortal soul and its life to come and which is to last for
ever ! ! Instead of which the petty interests, and petty com-
plaints of the body — body, body are filling every mind and
occupying every tongue, and yet one must not wish to be
' «0-body ' either — by way of a pun for you ! "
Again three years later she writes : —
" nth June, 1845.
" Day of St. Barnabas and my
beloved Stuckefs death.
" MY OWN BLESSING,
" A line I must dash off to thank you for yours. I
was a leetle disappointed to hear that you thought we had
better not have the pleasure of your company before next
week, and, being thankful you feel well enough to stay, must
not, I suppose, say a word against it upon my principle of
' trimming the lamps ' vigorously, and ' watching in our
various duties and callings with our various talents that we
may return those " who have the rule over us " and our Lord
His own with usury ' ; but if Dr. Bright recommends a quicker
transition to purer air, which he might, as there is now quite
a change in the weather and you suffer from the heat so much,
how fervently we shall delight to welcome you. I need not
say I love and value you as much as I loved and valued
Stuckey at the same age, more I cannot ; but I think my love
for you has been happier, more roses and fewer thorns,
74 LIFE OF WALTER B AGE HOT
because you have been since your birth so much more happily
situated, and from the least boy ever joined with joy and
pleasure in the same mental pursuits I have ever followed the
most myself — not that I must ape the literature that you have
(though I have always been fond of books, since, as a child,
it was often a loud sentence of reproach to me — 'Edith
Stuckey, do not sit so lost over a book'), for when I was talk-
ing over your argument with William Wood, not only Papa
had told me I was stupid, by giving me your explanation of
the fact about Burke, but Aunt Reynolds gravely said ' now
Edith, you are not to infer that Walter was wrong because
you think him so, for you know you are ignorant,' which I am
quite ready to admit, only I thought to myself — I do like
Walter to make that clear to others what is clear I dare say
to his own research, so rapidly improving and telling; and
when he does, I think I can sense him, though profoundity in
the subject may still be wanting. I am not sure whether
Aunt Reynolds wanted to put you up or me down — both I
hope. My elastic mind is daily recovering from the loss of
my beloved brother.1 My mind, like his must be cheerful,
from its vivid enjoyment of blessings left ; but your dear
Aunt is exactly the same. I think of my own brother con-
stantly as if, in the transfer to a purer state, conversation and
communion, that I thank God I sought on earth, are still
carried on with him — and to indulge and repeat the hope
which scripture allows, as one dear friend after another is
borne to Heaven,
That through their Soul as angels bright
They hover o'er our sphere,
And shed new beams of grace and light
On those who loved them here ;
and it seems as if your dear Uncle's voice could say to you,
in better prose perhaps than my poetry, — 'Walter, you must
make yourself a clever fellow and be a stay of the family, and
a comfort to your mother when I am gone '. "
Once it was a question, when Walter was studying at the
1 Mr. Vincent Stuckey, founder of Stuckey's Bank, died in 1845.
HOME AND FAMILY 75
Bristol College, of her joining him at Clevedon without his
father. She writes : —
" Papa said, ' you can go if you like/ but upon my eyes
sparkling, and heart leaping, added, ' but I think you had better
stay at home '. Now I think both of us are aware, that with-
out him to take care of me and keep me together, as my
imagination and feelings are so prone to travel rail-road speed,
my body must be kept at a more temperate pace, and not be
allowed to do too much in a short time."
Many of Mrs. Bagehot's letters afford an interesting
psychological study. Her mind never appeared to be enfeebled
by her deranged ideas ; at times she might almost have been
said to have flirted with her delusions, not treating them
quite seriously herself. Walter told us of a characteristic
scene which took place towards the end of her life. One
morning, for some unknown reason, she got it into her head
during breakfast that she could not speak to Walter, and
therefore remained dumb; but this silent situation before
long became dull ; so she wrote on a slate something she
wanted him to know, and hung the slate round her neck and
appeared in his study where he was writing. She was stand-
ing mute in the doorway when he looked up suddenly, and
saw her and the slate, and the two burst out laughing together.
Her tongue was loosed, and they talked together in a perfectly
rational manner.
After his mother had seen my sister for the first time,
Walter writes : —
" LANGPORT, iqtk March, 1858.
" My mother was delighted with you and did nothing but
talk about your bright expression. This morning she is not
very well, and her mind will not be clear for a day or two till
it has cleared itself by writing and time. She is generally not
so well for a day or two after an unusually good day which yester-
day was. Her mind is such a strange mixture of sanity and in-
sanity that it is impossible to say what will or will not be good
for her."
In many directions Walter and his mother had much in
76 LIFE OF WALTER B AGE HOT
common. He felt a sympathy with many of her attitudes
of mind which might by others have been thought to
belong to her delusions. He was often more lenient to his
mother's views, however unusual they might appear, than to
the foolishnesses of many so-called sane persons. He had little
patience with the pompous nonsense of the worldly and self-
interested who override any sign of want of balance in others
with contemptuous pity, these being nevertheless in essential
qualities of heart and understanding immeasurably their
superiors.
With all its trials and " dark realities," the home life at
Herd's Hill was a beautiful life. Religion, affection, both deep
and real, a high intellectual standard of culture and unselfish
aims, gave to the atmosphere of this home life a distinction but
rarely found, and developed sound thought and feeling that
proved to Walter Bagehot an unusually good equipment in life.
Especially is it interesting to recognise the strong impres-
sion religion made on a mind which has proved so illuminating
to the present generation of thinkers perhaps not too prone to
receive deep religious impressions. Walter Bagehot would
say when it was a question of abolishing religious teaching in
schools, — " It is one thing to have a dogmatic religion implanted
in children from their babyhood, however less dogmatic their
views may become as they grow to be men and women,
and quite another to bring up children without any religious
creed at all. We have yet to see what a nation would be like
whose men and women had never had any religious training
whatever given to them as children."
CHAPTER IV.
EARLY EDUCATION.
WALTER BAGEHOT'S education was begun by a governess,
Miss Jones, who came into the family when Walter was five
years old, and remained a faithful and confidential retainer for
forty years. From earliest boyhood he learnt much that was
worth having from his parents. Moreover, their intelligent de-
votion engendered in him a happiness of being, a joyful play
of mind during the first years of his life which stimulated his
mental powers when they first began to move forward. It
gave him that confidence which a child wants before he dares be
himself. Much strength for the future is lost by a want of happi-
ness in childhood. Other things may be learnt through the
discipline of the cross, but for the bud to expand quite
healthily sunshine it must have, and sunshine in abundance
Walter Bagehot had as a child in his home life. Furthermore,
he grew up in an atmosphere steeped in religion — and in a
variety of views of religion.
When he was about six years old he wrote the following
letter to his Aunt Reynolds — his father's sister. The words
are written between lines, very distinct — each letter being half
an inch high : —
(Directed) MRS. REYNOLDS, LONDON.
" MY VERY DEAR AUNT,
" I thank you for the book you sent me, and
Brother thanks Uncle. I want to ask you for another Daily
Food for Christians, because keeping this sometimes in my
pocket and reading the text and poetry in it every morning,
it is nearly worn out, and I am afraid I shall lose the leaves.
77
7 8 LIFE OF WALTER BAGEHOT
Mamma is afraid you will think me a bold and troublesome
little boy, but she says I am yet so ignorant that I do not
know, but I am doing you a favour. I do not agree with her.
I hope you do not either. The new man servant James 2nd
is come to-day, our James is going upon the Hill (Hill
House). Papa and I have been playing a good game of top.
All send their love and to dear Kate too.
" Your affectionate Nephew,
''WALTER BAGEHOT."
Mrs. Bagehot doubtless thought that her sister-in-law could
not be given a greater treat than to be asked for another of
her evangelical tracts.
Walter's father was a spiritually-minded Unitarian ; there-
fore he attended the Unitarian service conducted by his father
in the drawing-room of Herd's Hill every Sunday morning.
His mother was a Church woman of decided Church of
England views, therefore he went with her to the services in
Langport and Huish churches alternately every Sunday after-
noon. His Aunt and Uncle Reynolds, to whom all his life
he was much attached, were extremely Low Church, and
from them he heard much denunciation of the Pope and the
Papists.
Mrs. Reynolds, a sister of Mr. Bagehot's, was possessed of
a happy sense of humour, and was noted as being " excellent
company ". Mr. Reynolds was an able and good man, and
had had a remarkable career. After distinguishing himself
for sixteen years in the Civil Service, from the age of thirty-
two l he devoted his heart labour to religious causes. He
Stuckey Reynolds was born on the I3th of September,
1791. His mother, who died in 1803, was a sister of the late Mr.
Vincent Stuckey, the well-known Somersetshire banker. In 1806 he
entered the Treasury, and his zeal and efficiency in the public service very
soon attracted attention ; his promotion was rapid, he received a series of
special votes of thanks from the Lords of the Treasury, a grant of money
was made to him in 1815 as a reward for distinguished exertions, and his
income was increased by cumulative appointments. He filled the office
of Private Secretary to three successive Secretaries of the Treasury, and
for a short time to the Prime Minister, Lord Liverpool ; and as Secretary
EARL Y ED UCA TION 7 9
founded the Home and Colonial Training Schools in London,
besides forwarding the Colonial and Continental Church
Society, African Missions, the Malta College, the London
City Mission, and various other religious enterprises. He
started in 1823 and maintained for many years an efficient
infant school at Fulham, and in 1828 with a few friends, Mr.
Reynolds established the Record newspaper, and for more
than forty years promoted its welfare. On a somewhat
different line Mr. Reynolds was also an authority. He was
a first-rate judge of a horse. Walter Bagehot never bought
one without consulting " my Uncle Reynolds ".
While studying law in London, Walter Bagehot paid various
visits to Oxford, staying with his friend Constantine Prichard,
a fellow of Balliol. There he came under the influence of John
Henry Newman, whose Anglican sermons he admired enor-
mously. Stuckey Coles, well known as one of the leading
lights among Anglicans, was his cousin, and established and
to the Irish Revenue Commission of 1822-3, he had a large share in re-
constituting the fiscal system of that country ; later on he was one of the
heads of the Commissariat Department, combining with that office two,
if not three others. ... Of this long career of active public life the cul-
minating point may be dated at 1823, at which time the path of ambition
seemed to present itself to Mr. Reynolds in no common degree. His
exertions and abilities had attracted the notice of an influential nobleman,
who offered him a seat in Parliament, and the whole career of high office
appeared to open before him. But at that very juncture, a sermon
preached at a village church near Dublin by the friend who has lived to com-
mit his remains to the grave, so impressed him with a sense of the spiritual
dangers almost certain to wait on worldly advancement — at all events in
his own case — that he at once resolved never again to take a step for the
furtherance of his temporal interests. On this resolution he received the
Lord's Supper before leaving the Church, and during the remaining fifty
years of his life he never recurred to that occasion without an expression
of devout thankfulness to Him who inspired the vow and gave him grace
rightly to keep it. ... Mr. Reynolds married in 1819, Mary Anne, eldest
daughter of Robert Bagehot, Esq., of Herd's Hill, near Langport, Somerset,
and in her endeared society and co-operation found, for more than forty
years, an unfailing support. A monument in the form of the Reynolds
Memorial Schools was erected when he died in 1874 in connection with
the Home and Colonial Training Schools in London." — Memoir of John
Reynolds by " A Friend ".
8o LIFE OF WALTER B AGE HOT
supported a centre for Anglican priests at Shepton Beauchamp,
eight miles from Herd's Hill, where his father was the
" Squarson ". At the age of sixteen Walter Bagehot went to
University College in London, and there met his life-long
friend, Richard Hutton, who at that time intended to become
a Unitarian Minister, as his father had been before him. Mr.
Hutton and Walter Bagehot kept up a constant correspondence,
the subjects of many of their letters being Moral Philosophy
and Religion. Theology never took a more prominent part
in any layman's life of thought than it did in that of Walter
Bagehot's, and few divines have mastered their Bible more
thoroughly than he did, thanks to his mother's insistent
teaching.
As will be seen in the following letter written by his father
while the family was at Blue Anchor spending the usual
holiday by the sea, Walter early began to try his hand at
poetry.
(Addressed) MASTER WALTER BAGEHOT, BLUE ANCHOR
(aged 7).
" LANGPORT,
" 17 th June, 1833.
" MY DEAR BOY,
" I cannot let Miss Jones go without thanking you
for your letter. I assure you I wish myself back again with
you very much indeed and should be glad to hear the sound
of the dashing waves and to climb the rocks and brave the
deep and journey about with Mamma and you picking spicata
— but I must not think of it yet, for little or great boys must
not be idle either, and I must do my work before I play. The
mail with its four horses soon took me away from you on
Friday and carried me through a very pretty country to Taun-
ton where Bob was waiting for me and brought me home just
about the time of your fifth dip as I calculated.
" Mamma tells me you are becoming a poet and I shall
look forward some day or other to our having a ' Sir Walter '
in our own family.
" Your sword is sent, and as to-morrow is the anniversary
of the battle of Waterloo, I suppose you will be very grand on
EARL V ED UCA TION 8 1
the occasion. How would you have liked living at Brussels
when the cannons began to roar and the soldiers were sum-
moned to the field ?
" I must close directly as Miss Jones is just going off in
the phaeton."
This said sword played an active part in Walter's life at
that time. He would use it at Herd's Hill to lash off the
heads of flowers with terrible force, imagining himself the
leader of hosts and the demolisher of thousands and ten
thousands of the Saracens. He lived much in his imagination,
and his mother and aunt, Mrs. Michell, who when a widow
lived constantly at Herd's Hill, recounted to us many of his
exploits as a child while led by its inspirations. His serious
education began at the age of eight or nine as a day scholar
under the teaching of the notable Mr. Quekett, for fifty-six
years the able master of the anciently endowed Langport
Grammar School, still flourishing in the old building, half way
up the Hill of Langport. During the last year when Walter
attended this school, he wrote to his mother while she was
visiting her brother in Sloane Street the following letter —
May, 1838.
" We are all going on very well without you, and Papa and
I have such nice chats about Sir R. Peel and the little Queen.
Papa has quite made up his mind since he had read our friend
the Duke's speech that the Queen did quite right and blames
' the Right Hon. Baronet ' for making the ladies of so much
consequence since they could only use the ladies' privilege of
railing against everybody and everything. I have done my
lessons most days and of course find I cannot do them nearly
as well without you, particularly the French. Remember my
French dictionary. Do you think I ever can survive two days'
holidays without you? I think 1 may say possibly ; but I
suppose, or rather am certain, that I shall miss you very
much. I have read the review of Doctor Cumming's work in
the Monthly, and like him much better since I find he thinks
Egypt a delightful country and advises some persons to go
out with the intention of building a boarding-house for the
6
82 LIFE OF WALTER B AGE HOT
sick, travellers, etc. I hope some one will take his advice. I
have some thoughts of spending a month or two there !
"And now, my dear Mamma, I must conclude with
entreating you to remember that everywhere you carry the
thought of your affectionate son,
"WALTER BAGEHOT.
" Excuse bad writing for, as Jenny Deans says, I have ' but
one and ill pen '."
Later in the year Mrs. Bagehot visits her sister-in-law,
Mrs. Reynolds, at Hampstead, and Walter writes : —
" LANGPORT,
" Thursday Evening, 1838.
" This day is the first of November. Oh, how different
from the last two ! The comparison makes me feel so happy
that you are not gone away ill. I am in a great deal better
spirits since Papa came home. I know it ought not to be so,
but I can't help it.
" The water has got up into the Moor which occasions
great commotions in the school for fear it will be too wet to
have a bonfire and let off fireworks. T. Paul surmises that
they have let the water in because the boys shall not have a
bonfire ; but the fact wants confirmation, he having, as I can
learn, no authority for it but his own thoughts. I have to
write the Life of Alfred the Great for Papa. I find it rather
difficult, more so I think than the Battle of Mantinea. I
have read his reign in Hume who doesn't of course breath
a syllable about religion but praises him most extremely on
account of his improvements in the English Law and Litera-
ture."
To his Papa, he writes : —
" Since you have told me to give an account of the battle
of Marathon in my own words, I will do it to the best of my
ability."
Then follows a short but excellent account of the battle.
On 8th October, 1838, again he writes : —
EARL Y ED UCA TION 83
" MY DEAR PAPA,
" I will now, as you requested, attempt, and I hope
to your satisfaction, the Life of Alfred (justly surnamed the
Great). I shall consider Alfred in his double character of a
prince and scholar, and to render his reign intelligible I shall
give a short account of the Anglo-Saxons down to that time."
Whereupon follows a very long essay full of instruction.
On 1 3th October, 1838, he writes : —
"Since you were pleased with my account of the battle
of Marathon, I will try to succeed better in that of Mantinea."
On 25th November, he writes : —
" My DEAR MAMMA,
" I will now attempt the life of St. Augustine of
Hippo. This bulwark of orthodoxy was born at Tagaste, a
town in Africa."
A very long account of the life of the Saint follows. On
1 8th December, 1838, he writes : —
" My letter to Mamma contained, as you know, an account
of St. Augustine; this one will contain a brief" (not very
brief) " life of Julius Caesar."
To finish up this course of six essays he writes a very
lengthy one to his Mamma : —
"This letter will contain an account of Socrates."
All six essays, written in three months, are remarkable
as the work of a boy of twelve. Walter Bagehot had already
learned how to read, in itself an art, also he had learned how
to grip the main points of his subject, and could manage his
detail with creditable skill.
It may be thought that too much space has been accorded to
Walter Bagehot's birthplace, earlier life, home and family, but
in order to convey a true likeness of him, I feel the aid of
his surroundings from his childhood must be enlisted. His
genius singled him out from his belongings ; but that genius
was moulded very directly by the atmosphere of his home life,
and by the characters of his relations. Unlike many distin-
guished men who pass out into the world from their early
home into a new atmosphere of feeling and associations,
6*
84 LIFE OF WALTER BAGEHOT
Walter Bagehot never let go in any sense the ties and interests
that bound him to the family life at Herd's Hill. Though
his intellect moved on singularly detached and independent
lines, his affections, which filled so large a part of his nature,
clung tenaciously to those he cared for, and to those for whom
he had any reason to feel grateful.
The next move in Walter Bagehot' s education was to
Bristol College, where he remained three years, from August,
1839, to the summer holidays of 1842. Here his career was
brilliant. On entering the College, being thirteen years of age,
he took up four subjects — Classics, Mathematics, German and
Hebrew — and, as a rule, came out first at the examinations in
all four ; sometimes in one subject far ahead of competitors
who had made that one their sole study. During part of the
last year of his studies there he was in a class by himself.
He worked during these three years with great zeal and enjoy-
ment, and found time out of school hours to take private
lessons with the Mathematical Master of the college, to gratify
his passion for reading, and to attend lectures given by the
well-known Dr. Carpenter on Natural Philosophy, Zoology,
and Chemistry. He made friends with two of his fellow stu-
dents and was looked up to by all the boys. His exceptional
gifts, combined with great natural modesty, high spirits, and
the curiously powerful influences his individuality and original
humour exercised, gave him from early youth a very distinct
position of his own.
His father, himself the most modest of men, inculcated
early in Walter the " charm " of modesty. " As I said in my
first letter to you," he writes, " work as hard as you can, but
be modest, for to be so is a great charm in boys, and the more
so, the cleverer they are."
With a few other students, he lived with the Rev. E. Brom-
ley at Clifton, but spent most of his non-working hours at the
houses of Dr. Prichard and Mr. Estlin, Mr. Estlin being the
brother of his mother's first husband, and Dr. Prichard's wife,
Mr. Estlin's sister. His intimate friends were Killigrew Wait,
who became a prominent citizen in Bristol and Member for
Gloucester, and Sir Edward Fry, who gives the following
EARL Y ED UCA TION 85
description of Walter's appearance as he recollects it at that
time : —
"Bagehot, when I first knew him, might perhaps be de-
scribed as a lanky youth, rather thin and long in the legs,
with a countenance of remarkable vivacity and characterised
by the large eyes which were always noticeable, and about
which he used at one time to entertain amusing conceits. He
used to say that Crabbe Robinson had got on at the Bar by
his chin, and that he hoped to do the like by his own eyes."
Two hundred and more letters have been preserved which
were interchanged between Walter and his parents when he
was at Bristol College. His father's natural tastes seemed at
variance with the work which he had chosen as his occupa-
tion in life. His conscientiousness is, however, the more evi-
dent on account of this variance. Literary, political, and
intellectual pursuits generally, and those which nurtured the
sense of beauty, were the natural bent of his mind ; whereas,
probably from a sense of duty, Mr. Bagehot chose a path in
life which was, comparatively speaking, intellectually restric-
ted. Once having chosen it, his constancy and tenacity made
him continue in it with unfailing devotion. By far the greater
part of his life was usurped by business in the counting houses
of Stuckey's Bank, and of the Merchant's business at " the
Bridge " ; and, however uncongenial such a life may often
have been, his conscientiousness never allowed him to indulge
in his more favourite pursuits in or out of business hours, if
any business could be forwarded by his attending to it. He
looked upon being ill as a great treat, for he could then indulge
in the " forced leisure " which enabled him to enjoy life. He
wrote to Walter on I ith December, 1842 : " During my illness
I have had one half day, nay nearly two, of the luxury of the
leisure forced on me, and have read some of Mclntosh's life
with great interest ; but Saturday and Sunday, when I was first
taken, were days of suffering and annoyance." In the same letter
he writes: "Her (Walter's mother) mind is in a nervous
state, which a trifle seems occasionally to excite and could ill
bear any serious burden, so I have not had so much to delight
me as in some of my illnesses."
86 LIFE OF WALTER BAGEHOT
In intercourse with his boy, however, he felt he could
combine intellectual pleasure with parental duty. Walter,
from childhood, besides being the life and fun of the home,
was also an intellectual companion both to his father and
mother. When the parting had to come and he went to
College at Bristol, this interesting intercourse was continued
through letters in which public, as well as private matters,
were fully discussed between them.
" I travelled on to Cheddar," his father writes, after leaving
Walter at College, " with my thoughts wholly fixed on you,
and with a parent's prayer for your happiness, and I believe I
have thought of little else since my return ; and both Mamma
and I are longing to hear from you. I drank tea at Cheddar
in the room in which we had so happy a breakfast the day be-
fore ; and afterwards, when the rain ceased, strolled up the
hill among the rocks, which, in the shade of the evening, looked
very beautiful and grand. I moralised a little there, and then
set off; but before I came home, both Felix and I were
heartily tired, and I had a sad headache."
Ten days later he writes : " I wish I could be with you,
but as that cannot be, we must gladden each other's hearts by
writing as often as we can, and telling each other, not only
what is passing without, but within us, and keeping up a con-
stant interchange of thought. Everything good is interesting
to us, and we long for your letters as much as you could wish.
... It must be Stummy's (nickname for Watson, Walter's
' foster-brother ') province to give you a history of the import-
ant events that are constantly, as usual, occurring here — the
Kite flying, the Gull crying, etc., etc.; but you may picture us
to yourself, wandering about at Herd's Hill, still admiring its
bright mornings and serene and beautiful moonlight nights,
although having lost in you one of its greatest charms, we
cannot feel the same lightheartedness we sometimes did when
you were at home, and I hope to do again, when you return."
Walter dutifully carried out his parents' wish that he should
keep a journal which still exists and which gave them a
detailed account of the hours, the nature, and the special
difficulties of his various studies. Much as he relished these
EARL Y ED UCA TION 8 7
studies, he counted the months, weeks and days to the holidays,
and enjoyed them when they came with intoxicating delight.
After returning to Bristol College after the first Easter
holidays, Walter writes to his father : —
" When I was reading Smollett the other day I met with a
very curious instance of the dislike political men have to
' the dreary realms of Opposition,' and how much consistency
one party is willing to sacrifice, if it can but embarrass its
opponents. When the Whigs were in office, Queen Anne
wished them to use their whole influence to pass the Bill for
the Union of Scotland and England, through the English
Parliament ; and the Tories unsuccessfully opposed it, and year
after year they went on battling, the Tories constantly bringing
forward the Bill for the repeal of the Union. At last Queen
Anne quarrelled with her Whig Ministers, and the Tories came
into power. But Queen Anne made an express condition of
their taking office that they would no longer contend for the
repeal of the Union. On the meeting of Parliament, the Whigs
brought forward a motion for the repeal of that Union which they
had so long supported ; and which Union was upheld by the
influence of the Tories who had so long opposed it.
" I cannot be sorry that you miss me, and I do not know
that I shall try. Write to me again very soon."
His father answers his letter : —
"... I was interested in the account you gave me of
what you had read in Smollett. It is sad, indeed, to see to
what extent party feeling carries both able, and in the main,
honest men ; and there is nothing which we have to learn
more difficult, and that requires more untiring watchfulness
and firmer principle, than the method of preserving the mind
from improper influences. A strong love of truth and the
seeking it for its own sake, must be the ground on which all
our endeavours must rest ; but there are too many enemies
ready to displace us, so that we must be ever on our guard,
and ready to defend ourselves. A love of ease, and an un-
willingness to examine into the foundation of things long
settled, as far as we are concerned — a fondness for our own
opinion, and a dislike of allowing that we were, or are mis-
88 LIFE OF WALTER B AGE HOT
taken — are some among the numerous enemies to be resisted,
beside the heavy and weighty troops of pounds, shillings and
pence, and patronage and power."
Mrs. Bagehot as a rule spent part of the London season
with her brother in Sloane Street. Letters relate how she
drove as far as Andover in his coach. She writes to Walter
on I st June, 1 840 : —
" HERD'S HILL,
" ist June, 1840.
"MY DEAREST WALTER,
". . . It is now fixed that I am to go to London
on Thursday next. When I walked round the garden with
dearest papa and Watson last evening which was a very
beautiful one, and the birds were singing, I thought how often
I should wish to be there ! but still, with dearest Uncle
Stuckey and all the glories of the Parks, I trust I shall do
very well."
Walter's mother keenly relished these visits and kept up a
lively intercourse by letter with Walter and her husband during
his absence from home.
" SLOANE STREET,
"$thjune, 1840.
" Having just informed your dearest Papa of my safe
arrival here, my dearest Walter, I thought I should like to tell
you, and to beg you to write.
" Uncle Stuckey looking well and cheerful, but calling
himself ' very ill ' and saying he must go out of town, so hopes
I am not going to stay long.
" Eliza (Mr. Vincent Stuckey's daughter) was close to the
Duke of Wellington the other evening at the concert of
Ancient Music, and alack ! thought he was looking very old
and shaky. He seemed very attentive to his daughter-in-law,
the Marchioness of Druro, who is beautiful. I left husband
in the midst of paint and bustle. He talks now of coming up
next week (which all hope he will do) and choosing furniture,
and then leaving me here to purchase it — and then perhaps I
may come home by way of Bristol, and call for you. Just
EARL Y ED UCA TION 89
going into Town to buy a new bonnet ! I hope you are long-
ing for the holidays, to be with your dear Papa and ever fond
mother,
"EDITH BAGEHOT.
" Heaven bless you ! I do not like being farther away ! "
In February, 1841, Walter writes: —
" I beg leave to remind you that next month I am coming
home. And that next month is nearly come. I do long to
be with you all again ; and I picture you all to myself, as I
am sitting in the long evening all alone : Watty doing his
sums, and Papa endeavouring in vain to instil into him some
small glimmering of what he is about, and ' somebody ' (query
who !) asleep sound as possible in the armchair, although my
heart smites me to talk of sleeping, since I fell asleep in the
most curious way last night over my books, and slept ever so
long, and I had not done anything particular in the day time
either. I only succeeded at last in waking myself up by read-
ing some of Rogers' ' Pleasures of Memory ' ; and here is a
beautiful simile I have hopped on ; something to say poetry,
though no disrespect either to your poeticulisings or mine.
Speaking of memory he says : —
What softened views thy magic glance reveals !
When o'er the landscape Time's meek twilight steals !
As when in ocean sinks the orb of day
Long o'er the wave reflected lustres play ;
Thy tempered gleams of happiness resigned,
Glance o'er the darkened mirror of the mind."
Mr. Bagehot, keenly interested in politics, carefully watched
the Free-Trade movement from its beginning, and writes : —
"8/tf May, 1841.
" Sir Robert Peel's name reminds me of the political (and
more especially as connected with politics) the commercial and
financial crisis to which we have arrived. Lord John Russell
gave notice a week since that the Government had come to a
united determination to recommend a revision of our com-
90 LIFE OF WALTER BAGEHOT
mercial code, with a view of adopting a course free from pro-
hibitary duties in order that our revenue (which now not equal
to our expenditure) may be increased, by the increased con-
sumption of taxed articles, to be rendered cheap by the plans
proposed, and that commerce and manufactures being freed
from monopolies may revive and extend — and the Corn Laws,
Sugar Duties, and Timber Duties, the three great hindrances to
a liberal course, are to be immediately brought under discus-
sion. Indeed the sugar duties were to be the subject of debate
last night. I expect the ministry will be defeated by the all-
powerful interests who are opposed to them, and they will no
doubt dissolve Parliament on the question that the consumers
who are to be benefited, may give them support enough if they
can. I fear they may, and will be unable to carry, even after
an election, their enlightened views, but I rejoice that the time
is come for beginning an agitation on this, the most important
subject of the time, and as we have the many on our side, and
the truth, as I firmly believe also, I will not fear that with time
we shall want success."
" BRISTOL,
" idth May, 1841.
" MY DEAREST PAPA,
" I have just received your long and most interesting
letter, and hasten to answer it. The interest on the important
question now before the House of Commons has even reached
us boys, who are certainly no politicians generally. Mr. Booth
stoutly defends the existing Corn Laws, and of course opposes
the Ministry most virulently. Somerton, Smith, and myself
have had some discussions with him, and though, of course, he
had the best of the argument, he having studied the question
which we had not, we were by no means convinced. There is,
too, at the College, a boy, or rather youth — for he is nineteen — of
the name of Pile, the son of a West India planter, who feels
very strongly against the sugar bills, very reasonably, I think,
as it will materially lessen his father's property, which is ex-
tensive. It has been quite a joke against Pile to uphold the
sugar bill, as he gets very angry, or in College phrase ' brittle '.
EARL Y ED UCA TION g i
He has enough of the planter in him, too, not to give the
abolition of slavery unqualified approbation ; though he owns
it to be a desirable measure, he says : ' Generally it has not
worked well ; it has increased begging in a good degree,' etc.,
and always winds up with saying that ' the twenty millions we
paid them was by no means an equivalent to the planters for
slave labour'."
In answer Mr. Bagehot writes : —
" 22nd May, 1841.
" I daresay the excitement of the political world, although
it had reached the college, does not interfere with or disturb
you much ; perhaps to be out of the way of a daily newspaper
is no bad thing just now for those who have occupations which
require their best attention.
" The Ministers, you no doubt know, were beaten on the
Sugar Duties by thirty-six, and have given notice that they
now mean to take a Debate and Division on the Corn Laws,
before they appeal to the Country.
" The election will probably be a very exciting one in
large towns, especially in the manufacturing districts, and al-
together the crisis is a serious one. I am not sorry that it
is come, for without this, and perhaps others still more serious,
the House of Commons, and above all the House of Lords
will not willingly vote a reduction of rents. I do not know
what may be the turn which things may take in Bristol, but
be careful, my dear, to have nothing to do with it, beyond the
quiet expression of your feelings and opinions. Partisanship
should be carefully avoided by all who have not had time or
experience for forming a sound judgment, for, if otherwise,
we are often bound by class to opinions which, if fairly
examined, would be acknowledged to be full of prejudice ; but
which cannot be so tested for fear of disrepute in deserting
your party. What makes Mr. Booth (Master of the College)
a Corn-Law advocate ? I hope he has an old rich Uncle with
many fine acres, all of which are to be his ! "
Mrs. Bagehot was at this time with her brother in London.
She writes : —
92 LIFE OF WALTER BAGEHOT
" SLOANE STREET,
"••zoth May, 1841.
"Well! my Beloved, I went to the ancient concert and
had a most delightful evening in sight and sound. We were
close to the Directors' box and the only disappointment I had
was (for the Queen, we knew, was not to be there) that we
were behind the Duke of Wellington, and that he never turned
round, and alas ! looks quite, quite old and tottery — and de-
crepit. I still hope the mind beams on, but the body is
certainly going the way of all flesh. I wanted to see his front
face and the expression of his eye, but that I could not do.
In the box were the Duke of Cambridge, his daughter the
Princess Augusta — not handsome even now in her bloom, the
beautiful Lady Wilton, Lord and Lady Burghesh, Lord Howe
and his sister Lady Susa, Lady Augusta Somerset and some
other ladies that we did not know. Lord Ellenborough and
various other stars glittering about — and latish in the evening
there was a little bustle, and in came the star of stars with his
suite, Prince Albert, who is very, very handsome, and talked
and chatted with all around in a very affable manner."
Before the Christmas holidays in 1841, Walter writes : —
" In addition to the work I told you of before, I have to
write an ' Essay on the comparative advantages of the Study
of Ancient and Modern Languages '. Not a very promising
subject I am afraid, but I will do my best. It is quite
voluntary doing it, and I should not wonder if I were the only
one who does it ; however, the practice in composition is what
I look to."
During the Christmas holidays, 1841-42, Walter writes to
his friend Fry the following : —
( Undated)
(Posttnark 1842.)
"DEAR FRY,
" What could induce you to think I wanted Barker's
Latin Dictionary ; if you will accept the brute, I ,can only say
you are most welcome to it.
" Your doubt about the old question is easily answered ;
EARL Y ED UCA TION 93
there is nothing to prevent the principle of Young's solution
answering : if you pare while the weight is suspended, it
will break at the point at which you begin ; if you take the
body away, while you pare, Professor Young's solution remains
in statu quo. By the bye, I have written to Young, to thank
him for his prompt attention to our question. My governor
said it was the respectable thing to do. Could you send me
Young's letter, as my governor wishes to see it ; it shall be
returned promptly. Have you commenced working yet ? I
am over head and ears in Plato's Apology of Socrates, and
Bourdon's Application de U Algebre a la Geometric. The
French reminds me to ask how Chalon is (Heaven only knows
how to spell the name) ; if he is convalescent, remember me to
him, and if you like, you need not say it was from me, tell him
to wash his hands. I have heard from Moline ; he had not re-
ceived my letter, and when he wrote that (6th January, 1 842)
had not received a word from England. He writes in good
spirits and says he likes his work pretty well, when it is not
standing up in water. He could not stand in very deep water,
that's certain. Is Booth gone to Dublin ? Compliments to
your brother, if your Quaker principles do not proscribe that
usage of society.
" Believe me (I had a mind to put respected friend but I
shan't),
" Yours &c. &c. &c,
"WALTER BAGEHOT.
" I hope you can decipher this scrawl."
Sir Edward Fry writes : —
" Whilst Bagehot and I were pupils at Dr. Booth's School,
we discussed certain problems of a physical character. One
which interested us much we stated in the following terms : —
" ' Suppose a spherical or cylindrical body suspended by a
rigid and unextensible thread or bar in a vacuum, and friction
(if any) being left out and that the bar increased in strength
as it approached the top in proportion to the increase of the
bar below, or, which of course is exactly the same thing, that
the thread or bar possessed strength but not weight, and
94 LIFE OF WALTER B AGE HOT
suppose the weight of the spherical or cylindrical body was
such as necessarily to break the bar or thread : where would
it break and wherefore ? ' We were unable to solve the prob-
lem and agreed to write to two eminent mathematicians,
one of whom was Professor Young of Belfast, and who replied
to Bagehot as follows : —
" ' BELFAST,
" ' 27th May, 1842.
"'SIR,
" ' The rod in your question will yield to the weight
straining it at its place of junction therewith. The reason is
that time is occupied in communicating the stress from the
lower to the upper section of the rod. As by hypothesis the
weight must break the rod, the break will take place where the
full effect of the weight is first felt, viz. at the bottom ; the
weight when thus detached can therefore carry with it a mere
lamina of the rod.
" ' I am, Sir,
" ' Your obedient servant,
" ' T. R. YOUNG.' "
On returning to College after the Christmas holidays for
his last half year, he writes : —
" BRISTOL,
" 6th February, 1842.
" I was rather dismal at first, particularly when I found
I was to be in a class by myself; and that I should not have
much companionship or association with other boys. I am
beginning to get steadily to work, which is a comfort, and
has made me much less dismal."
After Parliament met, Mr. Bagehot writes :—
" 2 1 st February, 1 842.
" In the evening after I finished my last letter to you, I
read Lord Palmerston's speech to your mother. The whole
of it was most effective, but one part of it was so eloquent
that I cannot help making an extract of it for you. A great
EARL Y EDUCA TION 95
deal, you know, has been said by the advocates of the Corn
Law about our being independent of a foreign supply of so
important an article as our food, which Lord Palmerston con-
tends is a complete fallacy, as we depend on foreign commerce
for a market for so great a portion of our manufactures ; if we
will not buy, we cannot sell, and our artisans and manufactur-
ing population may be starving for want of wages to buy food,
however abundant may be our home grown supply. He then
adds : ' But, sir, there are large grounds on which this doctrine
ought to be repudiated by this house. Why is the earth on
which we live divided into zones and climates ? Why, I ask,
do different countries yield different productions to people ex-
periencing similar wants? Why are they intersected with
mighty rivers — the natural highways of nations? Why are
lands the most distant from each other brought almost into
contact by that very ocean which seems to divide them ? Why,
sir, it is that man may be dependent upon man. It is that the
exchange of commodities may be accompanied by the exten-
sion and diffusion of knowledge — by the interchange of mutual
benefits, engendering mutual kind feelings — multiplying and
confirming friendly relations. It is that commerce may freely
go forth, leading civilisation with one hand, and peace with
the other, to render mankind happier, wiser, better. Sir, this
is the dispensation of Providence, this is the decree of that
power which created and disposed the universe ; but in the
face of it, with arrogant presumptuous folly, the dealers in re-
strictive duties fly, fettering the inborn energies of man, and
setting up their miserable legislation instead of the great stand-
ing laws of nature.' "
It was during these years when at Bristol that Bagehot
formed one of the few intimate friendships of his life. This
was with one of Dr. Prichard's sons. Of him he writes to his
father : —
" 7th April, 1842.
" Constantine Prichard is at home. I was much struck
by his beautiful forehead and brow, so very intellectual and
expressive ; certes he is by far the best looking of the Prichards ;
only time can show whether he is the cleverest.
96 LIFE OF WALTER B AGE HOT
" I am writing from Clevedon, as indeed appears from the
date.1 It is indeed a pretty place, and there are some spots
which even a Lynmouth person might think beautiful, although
it is of course more cultivated, and has in consequence not that
beautiful and picturesque wildness which we used to admire in,
' your garden '. I went last evening to a pretty little bay
(though not to be for a moment compared to Ringclip), where
the tide really came in very prettily. It was very calm,
scarcely ' a breath the blue waves to curl,' only alack ! there is
precious little blueness, and mud is not a necessary ingredient
in sentiment. There is a universal petition that you would
come up here, I think. You would like the inland scenery very
much indeed ; do you not think you could manage it for a day
or two, just a glimpse ? Our dear friends are kindly pressing
me to come down next Saturday, if you could come up ! I
walked over a most beautiful hill yesterday, and scrambled up
another, and saw a most lovely view on one side, most beautiful
inland scenery, rich and cultivated, and on the other, the sea
and rocky hill, between which, and the one I was standing
there was a most beautiful wooded vale, ' looking serenity ' as
Shelley has it — I did so wish for you ! "
There is a pathetic ring in the last letter Mr. Bagehot wrote
to Walter when at Bristol College. His bird is now fledged
and about to fly away from the nest into a wider sphere of in-
tellectual attainments than that which his father can reach.
"HERD'S HILL, \\thDecember, 1842.
" Sunday Morning.
" The education required in the present day must be laid on
a wide foundation, and ample time given for raising the struc-
ture. A tree and its roots and branches is a better figure.
The roots must be deep and firm if the trunk is to grow high
and its branches spread widely, and all its parts must grow
together. A man's character must be gradually forming re-
ligiously, morally, and intellectually, which cannot be done, I
1 This visit was the first Walter paid to Clevedon, which was destined
to be the place where he and my sister lived for three years after their
marriage.
EARL Y ED UCA TION 9 7
think, but through the influence of time and the circumstances
which accompany it. If one part of the character be forced
too much, it will generally be at the expense of some strength
in another, and I often think that we may trace some of the
faults of young and old collegians to the too exclusive pursuits
of collegiate honours. In saying this, however, I know you will
think that I under-rate the exertions that must and ought to be
made by them. Temperance is all I wish to inculcate and a
wide view of the blessings of education founded in wisdom and
virtue. Every day do I feel how much I have lost in not
having had such an education as I wish to give you, and you
need not therefore fear that anything will be wanting on my
part to secure to you its advantages. I do not repine although
I feel that there is a world beyond my ken, and that that world
of knowledge and usefulness may bring with it more happiness
than can be mine. But thankfulness and not mere content-
ment is the deep sentiment of my heart for the blessings of my
lot, and as I have education enough for the immediate duties
of my station, and for growing wiser and better for that world
where light and truth and peace reign now and for ever, I
must be more anxious to make a right use of the talent I have,
than disappointed that it is not larger."
To his intimacy with Dr. Prichard, whose researches in
Ethnology early attracted Walter Bagehot's attention, can be
traced the awakening of a class of ideas which were developed
in Bagehot's mature writings. His fellow-creatures, and all
that it is possible to find out about them, were ever subjects
of great interest to him. Dr. Prichard's researches had dug
deep, and he could throw light on many hitherto obscure
questions concerning the Physical History of Mankind, the
title of his best-known work. There was much science going
on at Bristol in those days, the days when Dr. Carpenter, Dr.
Prichard, Dr. John Addington Symonds, and Mr. Estlin lived
there, and formed a learned social centre. Indeed in those
days the whole atmosphere of the social world of Clifton
seemed steeped in the culture of science.
Walter Bagehot, when out of college, lived continually in
thei midst of this circle of scientific magnates. Throughout the
7
98 LIFE OF WALTER B AGE HOT
years of his life of thought, and this life of independent thought
began when he was a very small boy, his mind collected with
eager interest every species of sound knowledge, and used it
as the raw material, the groundwork for his own original ideas
to work upon. When at Bristol he was too much occupied
with his college work actually to study the subjects in which
his learned connections were such adepts, but he seized with
avidity any information gathered through the conversations he
heard at their houses. In a letter to his mother he writes : —
" I dined at the Prichards a day or two ago. The Doctor
had two friends there talking about the Arrow-headed character
and the monuments of Peutapolis, and the way of manufacturing
cloth in the South Seas."
From a boy Bagehot showed one unmistakable mark of a
sound understanding. He intuitively recognised ideas, thoughts,
and feelings which are in conformity with actual facts, and the
facts which underlie and promote all progress in knowledge
and civilisation ; likewise he distinguished, equally intuitively,
the worthlessness of all shams and counterfeits of such ideas,
thoughts, and feelings. As a child he knew what was sense
and what was nonsense, what was humbug and what was
not, without going through any process for finding out which
was which. The knowledge he gleaned from the learning
and researches of Dr. Prichard was food which he found
nourishing, and it proved fruitful later when he worked in his
own channels of thought. l
1 An interesting account of Dr. Prichard's distinguished life and attain-
ments is contained in the pamphlet written after his death by his friend,
John Addington Symonds, M.D., a distinguished physician, and father of
the well-known author : " Some account of the life, writings, and character
of the late James Cowles Prichard, M.D., F.R.S., M.R.I.A., Corresponding
Member of the National Institute in France, etc., etc. (being the substance of
a Memoir read at the Meeting of the Bath and Bristol Branch of the Provincial
Medical and Surgical Association, in March, 1849), by John Addington
Symonds, M.D., Consulting Physician to the Bristol General Hospital, 1849."
Dr. Prichard was born at Ross in Herefordshire, in 1786. As a boy he was
remembered by his companions for his love of fun. He was a linguist from
early days, and enjoyed, when he went to Bristol, talking to the foreign
sailors who came to the port, in their own languages. " Once he accosted a
EARL Y ED UCA TION 99
Dr. Prichard was, moreover, according to Dr. Addington
Symonds, " a Christian Philosopher ; no tone knew him inti-
mately without being aware of the strong influence which piety
maintained over his mind, and how it actuated his conduct ".
The influence, therefore, which his special subjects exercised
on Walter Bagehot's line of thought, was, as regarded religion,
entirely in harmony with his home teaching. Mr. Bagehot
fully appreciated the value of Walter's intimate relations with
Dr. Prichard and his family. He writes on 22nd February,
1840 : " I was glad to hear of your intellectual employment at
the Red Lodge (Dr. Prichard's house at Clifton), and hope you
will avail yourself of every opportunity of acquiring the habits
and tastes that pervade the house. I know enough of the
pleasure they afford to regret that I have formed so few of
them."
Dr. Addington Symonds writes " that fancy and imagina-
tion were not prominent faculties in Dr. Prichard. He was
never at a loss for a suitable illustration to enrich his style
which was affluent as well as terse and vigorous. Yet there
was not that conscious enjoyment in the pursuit of analogies
and likenesses which belong to men in whom the faculties I
have adverted to are strongly marked, and correspondently with
this, I think that he had no decided aesthetical tendency, no
such sensibility to the beautiful as would lead him to dwell on
Greek sailor in Romaic, and the man was so delighted, that he caught the boy
linguist in his arms, and kissed him heartily ! " He studied in Edinburgh,
Cambridge, and Oxford, and received nearly every honour accorded to
science in Germany and in France no less than at home. The work
through which Dr. Prichard's name is best known, Researches into the
Physical History of Mankind, was published in three editions, in the
years, 1813, 1826, and 1847. Each was a greatly amplified edition on the
last. Other works, " with which," says Dr. Addington Symonds, " his
name will be ever associated were on 'Nervous Diseases' and ' Insanity' ;
The Natural History of Man, Egyptian Mythology, written chiefly
to disprove Professor Murray's opinion that the Egyptian people were
peculiar to themselves and to Africa ; The Eastern Origin of the Celtic
Nations, and The Review of the Doctrine of a Vital Principle, in which
there is ' a very masterly disposal of Dr. Priestley's well-known argument ;
•viz., that the phenomena of mind and those of matter belong to the same
substance '."
7*
ioo LIFE OF WALTER B AGE HOT
the enjoyments of poetry and the fine arts ; though he was too
much of a scholar, and in every way too well informed not to
be able to converse on these subjects."
Precisely the quality — imagination — which Dr. Addington
Symonds denies to Dr. Prichard, Walter Bagehot possessed to
a very uncommon degree. Since the days when, as a small
boy, he flew about the lawns of Herd's Hill with his sword,
ruthlessly slashing off the heads of the flowers, exclaiming,
" And he cut off the heads of the Saracens by hundreds of
thousands," imagination was ever a salient characteristic
in Walter Bagehot. Take almost any page of his book,
Physics and Politics, and you can trace with what effect his
imagination dealt with, and recast into modern trains of thought,
the knowledge and research of scientific authorities. Dr.
Prichard and other explorers dug out of the dim past, and ex-
posed to light, actual facts concerning the history of human
races, stopping short, nevertheless, of inspiring any impulse to
use the past in order to elucidate the present. Walter Bagehot
emancipates the principles evolved through such research from
the storehouses of learning, and gives them renewed vitality by
turning them on to modern conditions and modern develop-
ments, applying them especially to the subjects which were his
own pursuit. The grasp which imagination alone can give of
the substance and evidence of things not seen, was clearly the
power which gave Walter Bagehot a very distinct position in
the world of modern thought, and gave also his individuality
the peculiar influence it possessed over his fellow-men.
CHAPTER V.
UNIVERSITY COLLEGE.
OXFORD and Cambridge were debarred owing to Mr. Bagehot
objecting on principle to all doctrinal tests which were then
required of the undergraduates at the older Universities.
Mitigating the chance of dangers and temptations in London
was the house of the guardian angels, " Aunt and Uncle Rey-
nolds " at Hampstead, which was to be treated as a second
home. University College, London, afforded the best school-
ing for youths whose fathers objected to doctrinal tests.
A certain Dr. Hoppus, a Unitarian, had a house for pupils
studying there, and it was decided that to University College
Walter Bagehot should go, and that he should live with Dr.
Hoppus at 39 Camden Street, Camden Town, where father and
son presented themselves in the beginning of October, 1842.
" I must confess," he writes to his mother after a few days'
residence there, " to having felt rather dismal, when Papa left
me at the University in the midst of a thick London fog ; and
I cannot say but I felt rather dismal occasionally since, when
I think of Herd's Hill and you all sitting quietly and happily
down amid all its beauties, while I am toiling here in the
midst of dust and smoke. More especially I prefer the even-
ings at home, with Papa reading aloud Sir Samuel Romilly, to
those we have here, although I have managed by dint of hard
work to get through them pleasantly enough."
About a month after he had been at College, Bagehot met
with his first real trouble.
"CAMDEN TOWN,
"30//& October, 1842.
" MY DEAREST PAPA,
"I sit down in great perplexity of mind to write to
you ; I do not know whether the course of conduct I am now
10 1
102 LIFE OF WALTER B AGE HOT
taking, will appear to you right or not, but I can only say
that it has not been taken without the most anxious considera-
tion. I hope I am doing right, certainly I am not doing what
is pleasing to me ; and I feel it is to be my duty to take a step
before the distance between us will allow me to consult you,
which would have been the greatest comfort to me." He
then describes a state of things highly reprehensible which
had been going on in secret in the house of Dr. Hoppus, and
which he had suspected for some time, " although," he writes,
" I have tried to disbelieve it as long as I could ". When he was
fully convinced of the wrong conduct of two of his fellow-
students which involved lies and deception, " I feel," he writes,
" that it cannot be my duty to allow this state of things to
continue ; I do not think it would be doing right either to Dr.
Hoppus or to himself; yet the office of tale bearer is so
invidious and in general so contemptible that I confess I am
exceeding loath to undertake it" He then explains why im-
mediate action is necessary, and continues, " What makes it
still more painful to me is that (mentioning the chief culprit)
has so much good feeling and is altogether so pleasing, that I
like what I have seen of him, except in this unfortunate affair,
I have expressed my abhorrence of it to him, when I only sus-
pected it. I am now going to seek a conversation with Dr.
H. ; I need not tell you how much anxiety this has cost me,
or how much I dislike the duty I am going to perform, but
my resolution has not been taken without the most careful
deliberation, and I may add earnest prayer. It will give me
much comfort to hear from you."
Later — " The conversation is now over. Dr. H. was much
shocked, and seems inclined to sift the matter to the bottom :
further indeed than I had supposed, as he intends, if he finds
my information correct, to send away immediately. For
this, I shall, in some respects be sorry, although I cannot but
think it essential to 's welfare that he should be immediately
removed from London. I cannot say more, as it is more than
time for me to go to college, and I have a racking headache,
caused, I think, in great part by my not having slept well for
the last night or two, scarcely at all last night, which was
UNIVERSITY COLLEGE 103
spent in resolving and doubting on the step I have nowtaken.
I need not say how much good it will do me, to know that
you think I have done right. Dr. H. assured me that he was
greatly obliged to me for stating it to him, which makes me
hope that I have done so."
Mr. Bagehot writes in answer a letter of sympathy and
approval.
" Many, many thanks for the kind sympathy of your note,"
Bagehot answered. "Many difficulties have arisen out of this
most painful affair. . . . The step I have taken has, of course,
made my companions exceedingly angry, and for this I was
prepared. They do not, however, break forth into any abuse,
nor have any painful scenes of a quarrelsome nature occurred ;
on the contrary, they do not speak to me ' either good or bad '.
This perhaps is the very best course for all parties which they
could have pursued. 's father is coming here to-day, and
Dr. Hoppus informed me that he should probably wish me to
repeat in his presence what I stated to him. The scene to-
day will probably be an exceedingly painful one . Friday
morning. The painful scene of last night is over ; it was try-
ing to all of us : 's father seemed at first inclined to be very
angry, but after talking with Dr. Hoppus for some time, he
became much calmer."
The result of this action of Walter Bagehot's was that Dr.
Hoppus sent both culprits away. " It is my first taste of the
troubles of life," Bagehot wrote. " Henceforth I shall perhaps
never be wholly free from them, and although overcoming one
may render the others more easy, I felt the other day with
some beautiful lines of Wordsworth : —
Yet why repine we, created as we are for joy and rest,
To find them only, in the bosom of eternal things.
" I must say good-bye as I am scribbling, when I ought to be
reading Mr. De Morgan on ' the square roots of unity ! ' '
In the beginning of the next term Bagehot writes to his
father : " I went to breakfast with Smith Osier, this morning,
and on his offering to perform his promise of proposing me
in the Debating Society, I told him frankly that I thought my
104 LIFE OF WALTER B AGE HOT
being able to get in exceedingly doubtful, and on his inquiring
told him the reason. He said that if I would put him in
possession of the circumstances of the affair, he would try to
get me elected."
In a letter written at the time of Walter Bagehot's death
Mr. Smith Osier says : " The first thing I knew about him
when he was not long emerged from boyhood was an act of
great moral courage".1
Walter Bagehot seldom had other than friendly relations
with those with whom he came in contact, but his real friends
were few. Three of his fellow-students at University College
were among these few.
The lasting friendship he formed there with Richard
Hutton proved to be one of the important events in his life.
Both were sixteen years of age when they first met. There
was little similarity in their natures, but a mutual affection
sprung up from the first days of their meeting, no less than a
strong sympathy in intellectual and spiritual aims. They were
bound also by the tie, perhaps the strongest, most lasting tie
that can bind the friendship of two men. They lived and
worked closely together in the springtime of their mental
energies, in the years when wide portals were opening to
splendid avenues of intellectual activity. In his memoir Mr.
Hutton describes what they were to each other when receiving
"the shock of mighty thoughts — with a pure natural joy".
No two students were ever fired with a purer enthusiasm in
starting on that voyage of all voyages the most momentous in
life, that of exploring the vast fields of knowledge accumulated
in the past, and of seeking through such knowledge what this
world of ours ought to mean to us — whither its teaching ought
to lead. They enjoyed together higher ranges of thought and
feeling than could be inspired by intellectual studies alone.
To apply Bagehot's own words, each possessed the " intense
and glowing mind — the vision and faculty divine ". Soon also
this friendship with Mr. Hutton enriched his life on the side
of sentiment. Intellectually Mr. Hutton was at that time at
1 See Chapter " Tributes from Contemporaries ".
UNIVERSITY COLLEGE 105
least Walter Bagehot's equal, but the character of Mr. Hutton's
devotion for his friend was one of dependence rather than of
equality. Originality of thought and a striking imagination
were Bagehot's special characteristics ; they were not Mr.
Hutton's. Very many letters exist filling large pages with
minute handwriting, written one to the other, exhaustive
ponderings on philosophical, moral, and religious problems,
evincing mutual interest, sympathy, and affection. But this
correspondence makes it evident that, though both were
equally independent in their views, Walter Bagehot's nature
dominated over Mr. Hutton's as being the more robust and
confident. Mr. Hutton's nature leaned somewhat towards an
over-scrupulous, over-exacting conscientiousness. He would
ever doubt his own conclusions, he was ever his own most
severe critic.
In a letter to his father deprecating his nature as wanting
the definite unscrutable mark of genius, the late Lord Lytton
writes : " There can be no doubt about real genius. It is sure
of the world, and the world sure of it." The difference between
the manner in which Mr. Hutton's and Walter Bagehot's
minds worked was shown in the fact that any moral or
intellectual light came as a flash of truth to Bagehot with this
certainty of genius ; whereas with Mr. Hutton, who had no less
a powerful intellect, truths would work themselves out through
thought and conscience. Throughout his life his conscience
was extraordinarily sensitive and exacting. Walter's influence
on him was bracing, invigorating, joy-giving ; the influence to
which he owed, perhaps more than to any other, the power ot
moving on in life, and of advancing to firmer standpoints.
One humorous sally from Walter, one conclusive witty criticism,
would clear the air for him, he felt, better than days of solitary
pondering and dissection. Mr. Hutton had an ample sense of
humour wherewith to enjoy any joke against himself, and to
feel his mind the crisper for it. In personal intercourse it was
most often through the medium of humour that Walter's advice
was administered. Mr. Hutton accused his own mind of being
ponderous and wanting in elasticity, and felt that it was the
buoyant elasticity in Walter Bagehot that helped him so
io6 LIFE OF WALTER B AGE HOT
greatly. With affections feminine almost in their tenderness
and tenacity, his intellect was remarkable for an insight which,
through its uncompromising, crude directness, made his con-
clusions appear at times almost brutal. Whereas no fault he
ever discovered in a friend could make the strength of his
affection waver for a moment, his critical acumen made him
severity itself when his disapproval was aroused towards faults
in others which jarred on his moral sense. He displayed no
satisfaction in exercising the severe side of his critical
faculties ; but no arguments could ever modify his condem-
nations. You might plead for extenuating circumstances for
any length of time — all the same at the end Mr. Hutton
would repeat the words with which he had begun the dis-
cussion, "But you must admit he (or she) is dreadful!"
The moral disgust he felt for certain defects was incurable,
and so instinctive and conclusive was this abhorrence that he
did not trouble to give any reasons to justify it, though it
appeared strangely opposed to the very Christian spirit which
was characteristic of his nature generally. This uncom-
promising attitude gave his character a quaintness which
amused Walter Bagehot, who, when with Mr. Hutton, would
assume a cynically tolerant view towards most of the weak-
nesses of human nature. Mr. Hutton's earnest devotions and
his equally earnest disapprobations made a delightful play-
ground for Walter's humour and statire.
In letters which he wrote from Heidelberg in 1846, Mr.
Hutton expressed the feeling of dependence with which he
clung to Walter Bagehot : —
" HEIDELBERG,
August^ 1846.
"... Of one thing I am certain that your mind will not feel
the want of our daily discussions and conversations on sub-
jects so deeply interesting to both of us nearly so much as
mine. I have always thought it one of the most happy
circumstances of my life that at college I was thrown with
a mind so well calculated, not only to afford intellectual
sympathy, but intellectual guidance, for to that has your
UNIVERSITY COLLEGE 107
influence on my opinions quite amounted. I have always
found myself arrived at the same stage of opinion and progress
that you have passed sometime, but through which I am
following you, and have always felt that any beneficial
influence I may have had upon you can only be in compelling
you to re-traverse and re-consider old ground, while your
influence on me has been that of one well able to strike out
new paths for himself, on one who requires as an intellectual
necessity, the aid of some more original thinker. This inter
alia made me so anxious to carry you with me into the new
region of German thought where I feel sure without you that
I shall be a hopeless wanderer unable to discern the tracks of
law."
Later he writes : " You do not know how pleased I was to
see your letter yesterday. The promptness of your reply is,
I fear, but a slight induction on which to ground any augury
for the future; but if it continues it will be some consolation
or rather substitute (however slight) for our conversations.
Your description of my state of mind ' you know and believe,
while I speculate and doubt,' would have been much more
accurate had you omitted the verb of knowledge. That I do
believe long before I have the data for knowing, is indeed a
peculiarity and no enviable one of my mind, one which is apt to
lead me to take up creeds first, and find arguments with which
to defend them afterwards, the essential peculiarity of an un-
philosophical mind."
This attitude of dependence on Walter Bagehot's friend-
ship was not in Mr. Hutton a mere ebullition of youthful en-
thusiasm. When writing to my sister on 1st October, 1877,
referring to the memoir of Walter Bagehot he had just com-
pleted, he says : " The feeling that so much of the best part
of my literary interests had vanished with him made me feel
that in finishing this my career was closed. It is hard to put
so much of life behind one ".
In the same autumn, in sending my sister this article
for the Fortnightly, Mr. Hutton wrote: "I came across this
sonnet which I wrote in 1 847 to Bagehot, I fancied you might
like to see it. Though I don't think it's good at all (it is very
io8 LIFE OF WALTER B AGE HOT
young), it shows you, as nothing else could, the strong feeling
he excited ".
" To W. B.
" Written at the foot of the Marlins™ and, near Insfruck^ 1847.
" Dearest companion of my life and thought,
How often in thy spirit's nobler power
My weaker soul has aid and comfort sought
In converse with thee at this twilight hour —
" Deep in the solemn mysteries of life,
Sad in the shade by darkest problems cast
Thy faith has triumphed in the mental strife
And light has beamed upon my soul at last.
" And now while here beneath the awful shade
Cast by this barren mountain's rugged face,
I watch the sullen shadow slowly fade
As star by star shines out upon its base,
It seems as though that giant form were doubt ;
Thy thoughts the stars that cast its horrors out."
The other two intimate friendships which started from the
University College days were with William Caldwell Roscoe,
grandson of the historian of the times of Lorenzo de Medici
and Leo X.,1 and with Timothy Smith Osier. Both were
senior to him by a few years. The organising of a new Debat-
ing Society, of which Mr. Hutton, Walter, and Mr. Roscoe
were the chief promoters, first brought them into close contact.
"We have been getting up a new Society to supersede the
old one," Walter writes to his father, " Roscoe, Hutton, and
myself are the chief prime movers. We have had one meet-
ing to organise the Society, in which / was in the chair.
Roscoe was unexpectedly prevented from attending the meet-
ing and Hutton fought shy of the honour, which accounts for
my elevation. I am to be replied to on Capital Punishments
by a Mr. Stowell, whom I don't know personally, but who is
reckoned a crack speaker. My motion was Very reasonable as
1 Mr. Roscoe was also a first cousin to the Right Hon. Sir Henry
E. Roscoe whose eightieth birthday was notably commemorated on 7th
January, 1913.
•mtrp.-U.ia.
UNIVERSITY COLLEGE 109
there was a lack of subjects at first starting, De Morgan just
beginning."
A strenuous life of intellectual effort shared together was
the bond which commenced the friendship between Walter
Bagehot, Richard Hutton, and William Roscoe, but beyond
this bond, interests of a character deeper than those purely
intellectual were shared by the three friends. Literature was
to all three more than a mere intellectual enjoyment. In
choice books they found a stimulus which nourished feeling
as well as mind. They had early learnt the art of reading the
best things in the best way. Also, they had early caught
vivid impressions from the aspects of nature, and through
intimate companionship with Wordsworth and the poets who
discern in nature meanings which arouse a sense of the spiritual
life, they had awoken to the twofold joy felt by inter-weaving
the delights of the eye with throbbing aspirations of the soul.
After Walter Bagehot's death Mr. Hutton wrote in a letter
to my sister — "You remember that sonnet of Wordsworth's
Bagehot was so fond of, beginning —
Surprised with joy, impatient as the wind
I turned to share my rapture — oh ! with whom ?
" It often comes back upon me now when I have something
I want to talk to him about, and I remember I shall never
hear his step coming up my stairs again."
Beyond this again was a still firmer ground of union. A
sense of the reality of the spiritual life was ever present in
their lives. The parents of each were Unitarians, with the
exception of Mrs. Bagehot. Walter Bagehot was never a
Unitarian. Referring to those College days Mr. Hutton
writes, " On theology, as on all other subjects, Bagehot was
at this time more conservative than myself, he sharing his
Mother's orthodoxy, and I, at that time, accepting heartily
the Unitarianism 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 posi-
tion." Many of the ideas which Walter Bagehot threshed out
no LIFE OF WALTER B AGE HOT
in conversation and in letters in those student days, are re-
called in his Essays on Bishop Butler written in 1854, and on
The Ignorance of Man written in 1862. The moral aspect of
religion was ever prominent in the discussions between these
friends ; but what is perhaps the most salient mark in their
attitude towards religion as suggested in their writings and
letters, is the scrupulous conscientiousness with which they
weighed and sifted all the influences affecting their belief,
taking nothing for granted but the one all-important fact,
namely, the reality of the spiritual life. Walter Bagehot
writes in his Essay on Bishop Butler : " In every step of re-
ligious 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 supernatural religion is removed ; and with-
out granting it, that difficulty is perhaps insuperable. It
follows from the very idea and definition of an infinitely per-
fect 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
nature as well as warning with the pain of conscience — ' sine
qualitate, bonum ; sine quantitate, magnum ; sine indigentia,
creatorem ; sine situ, praesidentem ; sine habitu, omnia con-
tinentem ; sine loco, ubique totum ; sine tempore, sempiter-
num ; sine ulla suit mutatione, mutabilia facientem, nihilque
patientem '. If we assume this, life is simple ; without this,
all is dark."
In a letter to my sister written shortly before their marriage,
Walter writes : —
" HERD'S HILL,
" tfh January, 1858.
" I assure you I still like to talk theology very much when
I am started, but I am lazy — and quiescent in all intellectual
conversation. I like talking and do talk a great deal some-
how, still I require a stimulus — a nudge in my elegant native
UNIVERSIT Y COLLEGE 1 1 1
dialect — from without, or I do not begin. I am afraid, how-
ever, you give me credit for more digested and elaborated
ideas on the subject than I really have. The faith of young
men is rather tentative. Some points, of course, are very
fixed, but a good many are wavering — are rather tendencies
than conclusions. I have perhaps an unusual degree of this
myself. From my father and mother being of different — I
am afraid I might say — opposite sentiments on many points,
I was never taught any scheme of doctrine as an absolute
certainty in the way most people are. What I have made
out is a great deal my own doing, and naturally it seems to
require testing more than an hereditary belief would. I have
always had an individual feeling that my inner life has been
too harsh and vacant to give me an abiding hold of some
parts of religion. At any rate, the outline wants deepening
and the colours softening — you never know the intellectual
consequences of a new moral experience. It is a new premiss
and may combine with any one of your previous results.
Women arrive more easily at their conclusions on these subjects
because their spiritual experience is gentler and more con-
tinuous— less of a seizure, in fact. They are therefore often
puzzled at the way men go to and fro, apparently settling a
conclusion to-day and unsettling it to-morrow, and think it
is aimless wandering and nothing is being gained. But it is
not so. A new spiritual consciousness naturally recalls the
mind to consideration, and if sometimes it brings us back to
old opinions, and teaches us that our last opinions are not so
well founded as we thought them, yet the ' old ' opinion is
really a new one because based on and cleared up by a new
spirit — perhaps from God, and it is necessary for thinking
men at each stage to think out the data they have, although
they know that data may change to-morrow. If they did
not do so, they would not know how to appreciate each
change or be sure of its effects — the mind would become
confusion. ( On a sudden ' I have become metaphysical, I
fear. "
Mr. Hutton's published writings suffice to show what were
his ultimate beliefs — and the haven to which he reached after
U2 LIFE OF WALTER B AGE HOT
passing through many perplexities and phases of doubt and
speculation which were discussed in these early days. He
writes of William Roscoe : " His religious faith was, indeed,
rather the deepest of his personal relations than a field either
for moral or intellectual questionings to his mind ".
Mr. T. Smith Osier was a distant cousin of Walter Bagehot's.
A pedigree of the Osier family shows that a Priscilla Osier,
his great-grandfather's sister, married a Thomas Bagehot, and
her niece, Christian Poole, married another Thomas Bagehot.
Walter knew Smith Osier before entering University College,
but did not study there together as Mr. Osier was his senior by
some years. Later, when Mr. Osier was practising as a barrister
and Walter was reading for the Bar, they appear to have seen
much of each other.1 Mr. Osier expressed with such forcible
truth in the paragraph quoted by Mr. Hutton in his Memoir
of Walter Bagehot, what many people felt about his talk, that
it may be well to repeat it here : " As an instrument for arriv-
ing at truth, I never knew anything like a talk with Bagehot.
It had just the quality which the farmers desiderated in the
claret of which they complained that though it was very nice,
it brought them ' no forrader ' ; for Bagehot's conversation did
get you forward, and at a most amazing pace. Several in-
gredients went to this ; the foremost was his power of getting
to the heart of a subject, taking you miles beyond your starting
point in a sentence, generally by dint of sinking to a deeper
stratum. The next was his instantaneous appreciation of the
bearing of everything you yourself said making talk with him,
as Roscoe once remarked, ' like riding a horse with a perfect
mouth '. But most unique of all was his power of keeping up
animation without combat. I never knew a power of dis-
cussion, of co-operative investigation of truth, to approach to it.
It was all stimulus, and yet no contest." No words that have
ever been written about Walter Bagehot recall better than these
the peculiar entrainement and charm of his talk, and the
stimulus which his genius gave to it. Ideas seem to spring
1 Mr. Osier married a Miss Roscoe, a sister of Mr. Button's second
wife and a cousin of his first wife.
UNIVERSITY COLLEGE 113
forward recklessly with a great leap — but always to alight on
just the right, convincing spot.
Much had Walter Bagehot, Richard Hutton and William
Roscoe in common, but one of Walter Bagehot's striking
characteristics these two friends did not share. In his essay
on Macaulay we find the delightful description of the nature of
the Cavalier. In reading it we feel Walter Bagehot could not
have written it had there not been a strain of the Cavalier
in his own blood — a recurrence probably in his veins of his
royalist ancestors, the Bagehots of Prestbury, that had filtered
down to him through his more immediate Puritan grand-
father and great-grandfather. He was a strange mixture of
the Royalist and the Puritan, though he seemed to have
realised the true nature of things more profoundly than do the
minds of those who are typical examples of any isolated class
or creed. Having inimitably pictured the Cavalier, he writes :
" It might be thought, at first sight, that the insensibility and
coldness which are unfavourable to the appreciation of the
Cavalier, would be particularly favourable to that of the
Puritan ". Quoting the Jloge M. de Montalembert pronounced
on the French historian, Droz, which wound up by the sentence
— ' ' he was hardened at once against good and evil" Walter
Bagehot proceeds, in one of the most stirring passages he ever
wrote, * to prove that this is not so. The limitations which
blind a cold nature to the virtues in the Cavalier equally blind
it to the spiritual passion of the Puritan. Deep underlying
the surface of his intellect, Walter Bagehot possessed very con-
sciously what he writes of as " the intense, peculiar, simple
impulses which constitute the heart of man ; the eager essence,
the primitive desiring being ". This he felt to be the real
moving power in human life, far and away more potent than
any mere brain effort can be. " Try a little pleasure," he ad-
vises as the best way of communicating and establishing the
creed of Conservatism. How well he himself knew the in-
ebriating effect of high spirits, the power they are, and how
much of the world succumbs to that power. His was a nature
1SeQ chapter 16.
8
114 LIFE OF WALTER B AGE HOT
stirred by beauty on the surface no less than by the beauty
beneath. He could be thrilled by a deep spirit of human en-
joyment, he could be alive as a child to the simple outward
charm of the world — equally touched by the visible and the
invisible — and it was at times with a wild reckless Cavalier
spirit that he tasted this " deep spirit of human enjoyment".
Neither Mr. Hutton nor Mr. Roscoe had, it may be pre-
sumed, anything of the Cavalier in their nature. Their love
of the visible was of a Wordsworthian character and certainly
nothing in Wordsworth suggests the Cavalier. Unitarian
principles may preclude making for pleasure on principle.
Nevertheless I believe it was the " Cavalier " in Walter Bagehot
which in great measure was the magnet wherewith he drew his
serious-minded friends so closely to him. The rollicking
element was very refreshing when felt to be but an offshoot of
a passionately religious nature, of a delightful character, of a
sound understanding, and of a personal refinement quite re-
markable. If his friends could not rollick themselves, they
could be fascinated by rollicking in such a companion. What
won for Walter Bagehot the position he is said to have held —
namely that of a " sort of demi god " among his fellow students
at the University College — was doubtless this finishing stroke
of charm, the overflowing joy and strength of " the primitive,
desiring being," united with the power of running over a course
of hard 'Study with brilliant success.
Bagehot was consistently pessimistic as to his chances of
success in passing examinations. He collapsed the day before
the event — he came out with flying colours on the day itself.
On loth July, 1843, he writes: —
" MY DEAREST MAMMA,
" I have just come back from Somerset House, and
beg leave to inform you that, in spite of all croaking and fore-
bodings, I am actually past and in the first-class. Also that I
have been further recommended to go in for honours both in
Classics and Mathematics. We had no business to hear this
till to-morrow, but Hutton and myself with some others, by
dint of bothering officials, got admitted to Dr. Jerrard's
UNIVERSITY COLLEGE 1 1 5
august presence. He was kind indeed, I think affectionate is
the only proper word, and especially congratulated Hutton
and myself on our ' distinguished success ' hitherto ! He said
that he strongly recommended us to go in for Classics, and
said that though he could not personally give any opinion on
Mathematics, he assured us that the Mathematical examiners
spoke very highly of us. "It is rather an awful circumstance
that out of 80 who passed only four had the courage to put
their names down, namely Hutton, two King's College men and
myself. One of the King's College men was faint-hearted at
the important moment, and gave it up, so that we are only
three candidates. I think I shall probably — almost certainly —
be the last on the list if I get on it at all."
On 1 7th July, he writes : —
" I have chosen not to go in for classical honours and this
is the case. After writing that note to Papa on Saturday I
determined on a last trial to see how I should get on. But
after an hour's work I got thoroughly exhausted and went
to sleep over my books, and when I awoke, really felt as if
I had not two ideas — and this decided me. I had persevered
all day against a pain in my shoulder, and a slight difficulty
in breathing, which are by no means incentives to hard study.
It would have been useless to go on without learning a whole
book of Thucydides, which in the interval there would have
been just time for — and butjusf — in my usual state, and not
time sufficient in my present state."
On the same day from Somerset House, he writes : —
"A change has come o'er the spirit of my dream as will
be observed from the date of my letter. I got remarkably
better last evening, and have ventured on trying on a forlorn
hope. I don't expect to get placed at all, as I have had no
preparation or cramming whatever. There are seven of us
trying." The result of the forlorn hope is conveyed from
Herd's Hill to his Aunt Reynolds.
"26M/«/x, 1843.
"Mv DEAR AUNT,
" Being in a state of very great excitement, much in
the way of epistolary correspondence is not to be expected.
8*
n6 LIFE OF WALTER B AGE HOT
The result for which you will be kind to turn over is most
amazing. After all the pros and cons I had no right to ex-
pect anything of the kind and did not. The result in
Classics : —
Barry (Exhibitioner), King's.
O'Reilly, St. Cuthbert's, Ushaw.
fW. Bagehot, University College ^
Ec^ud \R. H. Mutton, University College) J
Hodgson Pratt, University.
These were the only five mentioned. I could scarcely believe
my own eyes when I found myself equal to Hutton. I think
you have heard me speak of him, and if you have, you will
know that I consider being equal to him no slight honour. I
believe that my English essay was the cause of a good deal of
my success. Dr. Jerrard told Hutton that his essay and Mr.
Barry's and mine were by far the best, and mine was the best
of all. The subject was the character of Socrates, and the
influence of his teaching, and we had to do it without reference
to books, and without cramming, as the subject was only
made known when we entered the examination room."
The state of Walter Bagehot's health at this time caused
anxiety to his parents and it was settled that he should not
return to University College till the New Year, 1844, thus
missing the autumn term. A horse, "the grey" mentioned
in his letters, was acquired, and, much to his enjoyment, he
rode and hunted it during the five months he was at home.
Mr. Hutton wrote to him : —
" NOTTINGHAM,
September, 1843.
" I am indeed sorry to hear of your cough as the cause of
your only attending three classes, but I think it a very prudent
measure and rejoice to hear that it is going off; be sure to
mention it in your next letter and tell me whether you have
ever taken laudanum since I forbade it. With respect to your
remarks on Cobden, I partly agree with you ; I think that he
has not devoted his time very much to the study of any part
of politics but political economy ; but still from allusions to
UNIVERSITY COLLEGE 117
other points which I have read in his speeches, from his voting
with a small minority so consistently in favour of all the liberal
motions, from seeing his name amongst the supporters of Mr.
Roebuck's motion ' that in all public schools supported by the
state secular education only should be given and the religious
left to the wish of the children's parents,' from seeing his
name in all the divisions against the Irish arms bill, and from
his support of Mr. Christie's motion in favour of the admission
of Dissenters to Cambridge, and last, but not least, his support
of Mr. Sharman Cranford in his motion for an extension of
suffrage to the people, I should say that he would be likely to
extend to all other subjects that enlightened and liberal spirit
which he is now showing in his patriotic (in the true use of the
word) exertions to root out monopoly from this country. My
objections to Lord John Russell are numerous but chiefly
these, that I think him a man who votes against Sir R. Peel
more for the sake of opposing the Tories than for the sake of
promoting liberal principles, and it is this which is the cause of
our never seeing his name in conjunction with the Tory party,
even when the measures which they propose are really good.
Then, too, he seconds Lord Palmerston in his hateful war policy,
and I think Lord Palmerston is one who has done more harm
in the Government by his war policy than Lord John Russell
would ever be able to do good by his half and half measures.
But you will be tired of my political talk, and I will mention
Roebuck another time. I am now a teetotaller as far as total
abstinence without taking the pledge goes. I think you are
also one, are you not ? Send me word if you have taken the
pledge. I think I shall return home in a few days, so please
to direct to me next at 5 Hamilton Place, King's Cross. Do
not you pity me for being at home again, in beautiful London,
so soon? But I must conclude this prosy epistle and will
conclude as thou didst, by begging that you will write soon to
your affectionate friend,
"R. H. HUTTON."
On Qth January, 1844, Walter Bagehot returned to Uni-
versity College. Two important events mark this year. Mr.
n8 LIFE OF WALTER B AGE HOT
Hutton and he attended the meetings of the Anti-Corn Law
League and for the first time heard O'Connell speak, which
Walter considered a very " remarkable event " : and, consequent
on the anxiety respecting his health, he made his first journey
on the Continent. Mr. and Mrs. Reynolds arranged a tour for
the autumn vacation, and Bagehot besides other friends were
asked to accompany them.
Though forcing himself to do extra work for the examina-
tions had told injuriously on Bagehot, as a rule intellectual
effort seemed to have acted as a tonic. Work was enticing to
him — he seems to have felt a keen sense of satisfaction in using
the powers of his fertile, elastic brain. He greatly enjoyed his
mathematical studies though they were among the stiffest.
"... De Morgan," he writes, " has been taking us through
a perfect labyrinth lately ; he was quite lost by the whole class
for one lecture, but we are, I hope, getting better, and more
gleg at the uptake. We have been discussing the properties
of infinite series, which are very perplexing — one is harassed
by getting a glimpse of theorems and then to find that they are
to be taken with so many limitations, that one has still greater
difficulty in seeing them at all. My father will understand the
difficulty, when he is asked to see how - 1 = 1+2+4 + 16
+ 32 ... to an infinite number of terms."
"39 CAMDEN STREET,
" il th January, 1844.
" MY DEAREST FATHER,
" I took a holiday on Thursday evening to go to
the Anti-Corn League in Covent Garden Theatre. It is
reckoned to have been a very good meeting though neither of
the usual great guns, Cobden and Bright, were there. Mr. Fox
however was a host in himself. Parts of his speech were very
fine, and made very impressive by a peculiar but striking
manner, and a deep and well modulated voice, and he made
the most of the opportunity of going out of the beaten track
of Corn Law speeches, afforded him by its being Burns' birth-
day. He said ' nature made him a poet, and aristocratic pro-
tection made him an exciseman ' — a very effective parenthesis
UNIVERSITY COLLEGE 1 1 9
in his declamation against protection in general. Many pas-
sages in his speech were in very bad taste, arid though they
were those that told best in the pit, they certainly marred its
effect on the more cultivated part of his audience. His
invective is very stinging and he has the art to make passages,
that are really, I have no question, very elaborately and care-
fully prepared, seem as if they were struck off the moment
without the slightest effort. He had not a single note, and
never left a sentence unfinished or went back to begin one
again through the whole speech, which lasted a full hour.
The other speakers were Bouverie (I am quite sure that every-
body who heard him could not blame the Salisbury electors),
a Dr. Burnet and Mr. Milner Gibson. The last spoke next
best to Fox (though there was a great difference between them),
and very like a gentleman, in which respect he was unrivalled.
The great want in all their harangues was argument, which
cannot be mended by any quantity of wit or declamation.
One is always tempted to ask, as the landlady did Falstaff,
' What, not a halfpenny-worth of bread to all that sack,' and
in treating of a great practical question, and one which as they
are themselves striving to show, requires immediate decision,
sound and comprehensive reasoning would seem the most
essential requisite, though it is not the one most readily found.
Such eloquence as Francis Horner's is what one wants, dealing
with the existing question with great precision, but at the same
time and by the help of well-grounded and enlarged prin-
ciples. I have just been galloping over a volume of his life
with some of his speeches at the end, which Mr. Reynolds
kindly lent me, and which has been an agreeable diversion at
times, though I could have wished to have given it more fixed
attention as it is well worthy of being studied. He quotes in
one place a striking thought from Leibnitz : ' There are
secrets in the art of thinking, as in all other arts,' and surely
seeing accurately how such minds as his were trained to ex-
cellence, is not bad education in the art of reflection, and more
likely to initiate one into its mysteries, than almost any other.
At anyrate it is very pleasant to see great minds in their leisure
moments, and when they are off the stage ; but it certainly
120 LIFE OF WALTER BAGEHOT
does not place genius one whit more within the reach of those
who have not it by nature, nor, properly received, does it lessen
their greatness, though it lets us into the secret of many faults,
which one would not otherwise know of."
" Wednesday ; 17 th September.
" There are but two events to characterise this day ; the
first is of a negative character, that I have not had a letter,
but the second is that I have been to a Repeal meeting, and
have heard O'Connell — a very remarkable event, to describe
which I ought to invoke the aid of every god in the Pantheon,
and every saint in the calendar. In sober prose it was a great
treat. I never heard any eloquence at all to be compared
with O'Connell's. The meeting lasted from two to five, and
more than two-thirds of the time was occupied by his speech,
or rather speeches, for there were several, as he spoke on every
subject which came before the meeting, and these were many.
The business commenced by the secretary reading some letters
from various branch societies, some of them wordy, which
were applauded in proportion to the amount of rant they en-
closed. One of these was from the Southern States of America,
in which slavery still exists, and which in alluding to some
expressions of O'Connell on the subject of Negro slavery,
called the god of justice to witness that in opposing ' Eman-
cipation,' they were actuated by no motive save a regard to
the highest ultimate interests of mankind. All this the meet-
ing heard in perfect silence, until O'Connell rose, and observed
that he was perfectly indifferent to the terms of reproach in
which the writer of that letter chose to mention him, but he
would not allow the cause of Irish Freedom to be sullied by
an alliance so unhallowed. He was quite willing to hear;
nay ! he gloried in the name of fanatic (this was one of the
epithets in the letter) if to be a fanatic was to love, and honour
the cause of freedom, however it might be opposed by dis-
tinctions of man's erecting, whether they were of sect, party,
or colour. The invocation to the god of justice seemed to him
something like blasphemy. It amounted to imputing to the
Ruler of Nations, distinctions between one man and his fellow,
UNI VERS1TY COLLEGE 1 2 1
founded on the bodily difference of colour, which the most en-
lightened of his creatures had agreed to disregard. I can't
pretend to give his words, and even if I could, I could not give
you any idea of the voice in which they were uttered. Its
higher tones are very dignified and impressive, and the lower
ones very sweet, and are heard distinctly in every part of the
room. There was much, too, on a proposition made by a
Mr. Connor, that no Rent should be paid by the Repealers ;
O'Connell quite hinted that he was an emissary of the Tory
Government, and desired to be informed, whether it would
not have been but justice to himself, if Mr. Connor had waited
until his return before he made a proposition so important,
being in truth nothing less than treason. Thence he branched
off into a discussion of the present state of the connection be-
tween landlord and tenant, and advocated very strongly a plan
of which the main feature was to take away from the landlord
the right of immediate eviction on the non-payment of rent,
and thus to put him on the same footing with other creditors.
The second part of his plan was to prohibit by act of parliament
leases for any time shorter than twenty-one years, and to give
by this means to the tenant a firmer assurance that he would
enjoy the fruits of his industry. The audience consisted prin-
cipally of the Irish not remarkable for the goodness of their gar-
ments, and more good-tempered than genteel. At each
proposition made by the ' Liberator,' there was an impressive
aye. It was a very tumultuous ' aye ' when he proposed that
Mr. Connor's name should be effaced from the list of their
members. The room was hung round with inscriptions of
which these are specimens : ' A people strong enough to be
a nation should never consent to be a province ' ; a better one
is : ' Whoever commits a crime, strengthens the hands of our
enemies '."
Later Bagehot writes : " I was at the Anti-Corn Law
League meeting at Covent Garden Theatre on Wednesday
evening and witnessed their enthusiastic reception of O'Connell.
It was a very imposing sight to see the whole house crammed
full as it was in every corner, pit, stage boxes, and galleries,
rise at once at his entrance, and remain standing for more than
122 LIFE OF WALTER B AGE HOT
ten minutes, cheering him the whole time, some waving hats
and pocket handkerchiefs, and very many shouting welcome.
What made it still more striking was that the crowd outside,
which must, from the loudness of their shouts, have been very
large, began to cheer several times under the mistaken impres-
sion that he was coming, and the audience inside rose each
time and cheered, to the very great annoyance of Mr. James
Wilson. O'Connell's speech was witty enough, and he con-
tinued to express more by the tone of his voice than by any-
thing which he said, the gratitude which he felt for their
sympathy when he most wanted it. No man was ever under
more disadvantageous circumstances for making a fine speech,
as his audience would hardly let him say ten words consecu-
tively without interrupting him by their applause. Certain it
is that he was very quiet, nor did he venture on anything half
so violent as I have heard Mr. Fox say in the same place,
who wound up a long invective against the aristocracy, and
the great Pro-Corn Law League, as he calls the House of
Lords, with saying that ' he would hurl defiance in their teeth '.
The number of people who went away without being admitted
was immense, as they posted on the walls of the neighbouring
streets in less than half an hour after the doors were opened,
that there was no more room. I was on the front of the crowd
on the stage, and I could not see a vacant place in the boxes,
galleries, or the pit, and we were so crowded that after a great
deal of rolling backwards and forwards we carried the platform
by storm, very much I have no doubt to the annoyance of
those who had tickets for that part of the house and who,
relying on the sacredness of the place, came late and found
their places occupied. I had to stand the whole evening, but
as I heard very well and was very near all the ' dons,' I had
no reason to complain. It will give you some idea of the
enthusiasm that is felt for him in London, when I tell you
that they began to issue tickets at half-past twelve on Monday
and that at a quarter before one they had none left in the outer
office, and numbers of people were going away without them.
Hutton and myself, however, by dint of very great exertions,
and contempt of the repeated refusals of all inferior satellites,
UNIVERSITY COLLEGE 123
made our way to the head committee room and by dint of
eloquence obtained a ticket apiece there. I don't know
whether you have not reason to complain of all this descrip-
tion, but I was very full of it for a day or two, as it was a
scene quite new to me, and write now to let off the steam. I
must add that I had hardly ever so distinct a notion of the
greatness of London, as when I came out, and saw how little
interest all this great assemblage seemed to excite three streets
off, and how little effect it had on either the numbers or
direction of the throng of passengers."
On 1st March, Bagehot writes to his mother: —
" I can communicate no intelligence on any matters of fact
whatever, except that I went a few evenings ago to hear a
chartist lecturer on the present state of the country. His name
is Vincent. He is a clever and eloquent man, and by no
means wholly in error as to his views of political matters. He
is very opposed to the use of physical force, and is half his time
talking about Christian principles. I have been reading some
more of Carlyle's French Revolution which I think I told you
I had begun. His political opinions are very strange. In
fact, I think he utterly disbelieves in the usefulness of any
institutions. For Hereditary Monarchy and Hereditary Aris-
tocracy he has a thorough contempt. Representative as-
semblies he commonly calls National Debating Clubs, the right
of suffrage, the power to send the ^nr^ part of a dumb voice
to the central spouting club. Political science is a hard sub-
ject, but this rejection of all the common expedients for
governing a community strikes one as strange. He, I think,
is for a Natural Aristocracy as he calls it. He thinks that it
would be an advantage if the highest minds in every genera-
tion were engaged in the actual direction of the state power.
But I cannot see why the highest intellects should not be
employed rather in communicating new truth to mankind, or
labouring to illustrate known truth and to instruct the mass of
the population in old and valuable knowledge. This is, I
think, a far higher way of influencing the happiness of the
world, than the application of physical force to protect men's
lives and properties. It is a not unfrequent source of error in
124 LIFE OF WALTER B AGE HOT
such reasonings to confound the influence exercised by the
finest minds over their fellow-men by persuasion and convic-
tion with the Government by laws and Acts of Parliament.
The two things seem very distinct, but I could quote from
writers of very high reputation instances of their being con-
founded. As far as I understand Dr. Arnold's theory that
Government ought to be sovereign over human life, it seems
grounded on nothing else but the assumption that the Govern-
ment by argument and the Government by force must neces-
sarily be the same. We had a debate on a subject very like
this a few days ago in our Debating Society. The question
was 'whether Government ought to interfere with the dis-
semination of basphemous or seditious publications '. I took
the negative. The debate was spirited. More like a real
description of actual business than I ever knew in a society for
the purpose of speaking. Everybody seemed to feel the ques-
tion to be one of interest and importance. If you or my father
are interested about it, I will send you my speech in a day or
two. Mr. De Morgan has lately had an amusing feud with
one of his lower classes. Some students would come late, and
the professor, to keep them out, locked the door, which
has made him rather unpopular. It is not so bad as last year,
however, when he told the same class with much bitterness,
that they were robbing their parents and insulting him ! The
rest of the students thought of asking him to take the Chair of
Rhetoric in consequence. "
Subject discussed at the Debating Society, University
College, February, 1844 (address by Walter Bagehot alluded
to in preceding letter), "Whether Government ought to inter-
fere with the dissemination of blasphemous or seditious pub-
lications".
" MR. PRESIDENT AND GENTLEMEN,
" As no other gentleman seems to wish to address the
society, I will endeavour to set before you as clearly as I can
what I deem the true view of this interesting question. Before
enquiring what Government ought to do, we must answer the
preliminary question, 'What can Government do ? ' We must
UNIVERSITY COLLEGE 1 2 5
ask ' What means has a Government as a Government of influ-
encing the minds of its subjects in matters of opinion ? ' The
answer is plain, I think ; laws as laws neither convince nor
persuade but threaten ; they address neither the intellect nor
the conscience, but fear and the will. An Act of Parliament
presents with a catalogue of actions, and states that those who
do them shall pay certain stated penalties ! Nor does it appear
that laws can do anything more than this. They might indeed
reward certain courses of conduct, although they have in general
failed in the attempt But then it would be only physical
rewards which would come within their province. It is so
obvious, that were it not very important for the present argu-
ment I should not state it that no law can promise the mental
pleasures, arising from the acquisition of the truth nor from the
peace of a satisfied conscience. Now if these facts are so, what
means has Government for influencing the convictions of its
subjects ? Let it threaten and bribe as much as it may, a man's
belief is not influenced by such means. Motives addressed to
the Will may and do direct the conduct, but arguments ad-
dressed to the understanding alone determine conviction and
opinion. It seems very clear then that over belief in Government
as Government is utterly powerless. And if this be granted,
the room for dispute is very much narrowed. For it can be
the duty of no one, be he ruler or subject, to influence profession
without influencing conviction. I need not, I suppose, go
through the forms of a proof for so fundamental a theorem in
morality. No one will deny that it is every man's duty to
say what he believes to be true. Can it then be the duty of
any other to make him swerve from so clear a duty ? Are
rulers ex officio to be tempters? This argument is somewhat
abstract, but if it be sound, and I believe that it contains no
flaw, it justifies the conclusion, that Government being unable
to guide the minds of its subjects to what opinions it deems
true, must not presume to meddle with their professions. But,
say the advocates of restriction, are not men's moral feelings
to be protected ? Is blasphemy to be publicly allowed ? Is a
practice so shocking to go unpunished ? I answer that it is
already punished. If the moral feelings of mankind are, as
126 LIFE OF WALTER BAGEHOT
the objection implies, insulted, most assuredly there will be
moral indignation against the offender. If any persons wish
this increased, let them employ with all their vigour, the re-
sources of Christianity and natural religion, moral science and
any other co-operating forces which they can discover, to de-
velop the natural indignation of the human heart against the
degradation of what is noble and the profanation of what is
sacred. Let them not with such weapons at their command,
think to add anything worth placing in comparison with them
by the legal infliction of physical suffering. Beside this, I
cannot help pointing out a notable inconsistency in those who
advocate the laws of this country in relation to blasphemy.
Written blasphemy is punished, spoken blasphemy is allowed
to go untouched. Where is the use of a complicated machin-
ery to protect the eyes, when the ears are offended in every
street at every hour ? It was also well observed by the replier
that no one knows what blasphemy is. That no exact defini-
tion can be given of it adapted for legal scrutiny. Is it wholly
absurd when invincible obstacles are found in applying a prin-
ciple to practice, to suspect that there is a lurking unsoundness
in the principle itself?
" I come now to the case of seditious publications. The
opener made many observations as to the excellence of the
general principle of the freedom of the press. In fact, his
whole speech was only an able development of the triplet
which T. Moore in the Fudge Family puts into the mouth of
a court lawyer,
From my soul I love and bless
The sacred freedom of the press
My only aim's to crush the writers.
" It appears to me that there is a very simple dilemma to
which those who maintain the expediency of curbing the
license of the press may be easily reduced. If the existing
Government is the best for the people, all assaults on it by
means of paper exhortations to rebellion will assuredly be
easily encountered. If there be one fact about man's nature
proved by an extensive induction it is this : that nations are
UNIVERSIT Y COLLEGE 1 2 7
much more likely to suffer too long the tyranny of a bad
Government, than be unwilling to acquiesce in the rule of a
good one. But if on the other hand the existing social
organisation be injurious to the nation, seditious publications
are doing good service in inciting the nation to reform it or
change it. In fact, to a wise Government seditious publica-
tions afford an important assistance by showing what griev-
ances are really weighing heavy on the community. The
value of such involuntary aid and the impolicy of renouncing
it, have been eloquently expressed by Mr. Macaulay, who
cannot see that the danger is to be measured not by discon-
tent which comes out of the public mind but by that which
stays in ; is there anything more terrible than the situation of
a Government which rules without apprehension over a people
of hypocrites — which is flattered by the press and cursed in
the inner chambers ; — which prides itself on the affection and
attachment of its subjects and knows not that those subjects
are leagued together against it by a freemasonry of hatred,
the sign of which is every day conveyed, in the glance of
10,000 eyes and the pressure of 10,000 hands. Profound
and ingenious policy, not to cure the disease but to remove
the only symptoms by which it can be certainly known ; to
leave the serpent his sting and take from him -his warning
rattle.
' ' If the rules of debate permitted it, I should have liked to
put a question to the opener. There exist in this country a
sect of persons who deny that the use of physical force in
cases of resistance is at all justifiable, who are logically con-
sistent enough to deny the lawfulness of all Government as it
now exists. What would the opener do with these persons ?
On his principles they ought to be severely punished.
Nothing can be more seditious, for they distinctly avow that
a// laws ought in their judgments to be abolished, and further
that they pay the state taxes only as they would give their
money to a highwayman. Yet I think the moral feelings of
all would revolt at inflicting suffering on peaceable persons,
all of whom are perfectly unoffending, and one of whom at
least has a mind of no common order. Yet surely if those
128 LIFE OF WALTER BAGEHOT
are not to be punished who would abolish all Government,
with what consistency are those to suffer who only desire the
abolition of some particular constitution ?
" Again, is a writer on Government in theory to leave a
blank filled with asterisks for the constitution of his own
country? or are we to adopt the test proposed many years
ago for Mr. Windham, ' That what was not treason in quarto
and folio was treason in duo decimo ? ' and as to irreligious
books, are we to say with a counsel on a recent trial, ' That
dear blasphemy was to be exempted, but that cheap blas-
phemy was to be rigidly punished ' ! All such opinions carry
to my mind their own falsehood written in very legible
characters. Nor shall I weary you with discussing them at
length.
" If it were said, as it might be, that the interference of the
state was not to restrict the dissemination of any opinion as
such, but only the improper method of propagating opinions,
my answer is, that if this were so, Government ought to inter-
fere with the improper ways of maintaining all opinions. At
least, nothing can be more one-sided than that Government
should interfere with one side of a controversy to preserve
proper decorum, and let the other be as abusive and
slanderous as it pleases. This is no imaginary state of things.
Even Christianity itself has often been defended in a manner
for which all true Christians must deeply grieve. If the state
were to interfere at all, it ought, I think, to be to make the
advocates of what is holy confine themselves to weapons that
are pure. There are few, I suppose, who would not rather
see calumny and fraud used against the truth than for the
truth. But it is always thus. The law steps in only to assure
to the advocates of received opinions a monopoly of slander,
and to put a differential duty on truth that comes from
obnoxious quarters. Far different was the spirit of Milton.
Two hundred years ago he said in arguing this very subject :
' Seeing no man who hath tasted learning, but will confess
the many ways of profiting by those who, not contented with
state recipes, are able to manage and set forth new positions
to the world, and if they were but as dust and ashes under
UNIVERSITY COLLEGE 129
our feet, so long as in that notion they may yet serve to
polish and brighten the armory of truth, even for that respect
they were not utterly to be cast away '. The advocates of
suppression would do well to consider the fact that the works
of Shelley (the poet of all others upon whom the mantle of
Milton appears in the last generation to have descended)
cannot be legally published in this country. We are not yet
entitled to despise the licensers who wished to mutilate
Paradise Lost.
" This subject is almost endless. Because I clearly see, that
it is impossible that Government should ever interfere with the
indecorous expression of all opinions ; because I see that the
effect of all legislative interference in controversies has ever
been to make an approximation to candour compulsory on one
side but to encourage on the other side violence, calumny, and
bigotry ; because the instances are unnumbered in which this
power has been abused and that there is every probability that
so long as the power exists it will continue to be unemployed ;
because many of the writings that would be suppressed by
legal penalties have an important part to play in the removal
of social encumbrances ; because no one knows what blasphemy
is nor what sedition is, but all know that they are vague words
which can be fitted to any meaning that shall please the ruling
powers ; I should deem it demonstrated from these considera-
tions of expediency that all restriction is unwise, and all sup-
pression impolitic. But still more, because I cannot avoid
perceiving that Acts of Parliament neither by penalties nor
rewards can influence a conviction that is regulated by argu-
ments and arguments alone ; and that all attempts to guide
the expression of opinions, without first directing the belief,
are so many incitements to insincerity and hypocrisy, I con-
sider myself justified in asserting that these laws are not
only inexpedient but unjust, and above all especially incon-
sistent with a religion whose glorious office it is to reduce
to their minimum the coarse influences of force and fear, and
to raise to their maximum the nobler powers of truth and
virtue."
130 LIFE OF WALTER B AGE HOT
" 39 CAMDEN STREET,
" i8A4 March, 1844.
"MY DEAREST FATHER,
" I shall begin with observing that the literary taste
of the family is, I fear, at a low ebb. I yesterday received a
note from my mother (I have received none from anyone to-
day) in which she enjoined on me not to say anything about
the meeting at Covent Garden the other evening on the in-
sulting ground of you being able to see it in the papers. Now
it is too bad to have one's powers of description put on a level
with a newspaper reporter's! It is degrading to have it
thought that one has no better eyes and ears for whatever
passes than a man who is the whole time scribbling short-
hand ! ! ! ! In spite of all injunctions the meeting was so
curious, that I shall expend a word or two on it. The ' Friends
of Ireland,' as the advertisement set forth, would appear to be
Irish, or at least Celtic for Repealers, of whom the meeting was
for by far the most part composed, and of which the speakers
all expressed themselves advocates. Certainly if good coats
and clean linen were taken as the best tokens of the strength
or weakness of a political party, the Repealers would be weak
indeed, for as Dickens somewhere says, the greater part of
them seemed to have quarrelled with their washerwomen in
earlier youth and to have taken a fixed resolution never to
make it up. Two striking peculiarities in the assembly were
the unaccountable disposition of the people in the dress circle to
go down into the pit, and their striking familiarity with the
Irish accent and the Irish howl. Nevertheless the chairman,
a heavy man in a white waistcoat, called the meeting ' most
respectable'. O'Connell's speech will be in the papers for
certain, so that I must not lay hands on it, and indeed, ex-
cepting its strong Repeal character, there was very little about
it remarkable. He spoke with his hat on, and seemed quite
at home, though he was looking, I thought, wan and haggard."
In this session Bagehot began studying etymology with
Mr. Key. " My head," he writes, " is now full enough of queer
etymologies, and examples of all manner or changes of all
manner of letters. It is not easy to recollect at a moment's
UNIVERSITY COLLEGE 131
notice a number of words in many languages, yet it is necessary
to compare the different forms, and thence to rise to more
general laws. The subject is yet in its infancy, for the science
is not thirty years old, and this adds much to its difficulty.
There is no connected system as yet to help the memory. I
will write more fully on Monday which I believe is a holiday."
On 26th May Bagehot writes to his mother : —
" I had no doubt of your liking Dr. Arnold. I never knew
or heard of anyone who did not like him very much, except
the editor of the Record. A writer in that paper in a Review
of Dr. Arnold's life said it was a book to do more harm than
good ! ! ! If your pleasure in the book makes you sceptical
as to this intelligence, I am sorry, and I should hardly have
believed it of a ' religious ' periodical, if I had not seen the words
myself in its columns. They were so angry as to what he said
as to the narrow-mindedness of the Evangelicals, and their
neglect of the cultivation of the intellect, that they were utterly
unable to separate what they thought unjust in his censure
from their general impression of his character. There are con-
temporaries of Arnold superior to him, I think, in quickness of
imagination, and subtlety of discrimination and vigour in the
reasoning power, but there would be few claimants to a superi-
ority over him in moral energy and wwfanatic zeal. My father
seems in doubt if he would have approved of the Dis-establish-
ment Bill. I have no doubt that he would have done so. He
says in his life, that the Irish Church ought to be a Catholic
Church in three-fifths of Ireland at least. His system would
have come to the French plan of paying the preachers of
every scheme of Christian doctrine. He would also have com-
pelled those who are not Christians to support some form of
Christianity. I do not apprehend that he saw any particular
advantage, moreover, in the contributions of individuals pass-
ing through the hands of the tax gatherer, and would therefore
have been satisfied with making each man pay not less than a
given sum to the support of some form of Christian worship.
But this is too moderate a theory of Church establishments to
be much in favour with their usual supporters. Bigots for the
voluntary principle (among whom I fancy that I ought to in-
9*
132 LIFE OF WALTER B AGE HOT
elude myself) may doubt whether coercion by legislative enact-
ment is even to this extent a fit way of spreading the influence
of religion. I am not, however, going to write an appendix to
this letter on Church establishments."
In his Essay, "The Ignorance of Man," Walter Bagehot
writes : "The higher part of human belief is based upon certain
developable instincts, not the most important but the most
obvious of these, is the instinct of beauty ". This instinct is
" an obvious unmistakable instinct which does produce effectual
belief though sceptics explain to us that it should not ". This
instinct of beauty Walter Bagehot possessed in an uncommon
degree. Beauty in Nature, beauty in Art aroused in him fervid
feeling. From childhood the beauty of his own county and of
Devonshire inspired in him a sort of enchantment. In the
Bristol College days he describes his delight in the scenery
about Clifton and Clevedon, and when at the age of eighteen
he reaches the Rhine, Switzerland, and the Alps, a passionate
rapture seizes him. Works of art he saw in Belgium arouse
in him likewise profound enthusiasm. Walter Bagehot's
rapture may be taken as an expression of very genuine en-
thusiasm. He would have found little fun in echoing orthodox
admiration. Objects themselves had to arouse it, unaided by
any second-hand authority however notable.
During his travels he kept a copious journal for the benefit
of his parents from which the following are fragments. It be-
gins 24th July, 1844: —
BRUGES.
" 26th July. — A day of sightseeing which begins at six in
the morning and ends at nine at night, gives one much to set
down, but leaves little time or inclination for doing so. ...
We went to the hospital of the Sisters of Charity, whom we
saw in full costume, and it was considered pleasing to see them
go round to the sick people in the wards, and give them
gebdckte meat. I have no notion of that kind of pleasure. It
is pleasing no doubt to know that from a sentiment of piety
towards Him who is higher than the highest, these women go
through a laborious course of trial to be allowed to wait on the
meanest of His creatures, but watching them in the lowest
part of their functions is not the way to have the most favour-
UNIVERSITY COLLEGE 133
able ideas of them. Cutting roast beef, and putting it into
plates with the fingers is no doubt a very useful operation, but
I should prefer the general notion that a person went about
doing good, to knowing that they did this, and seeing them
about it. ... I have left myself little room to speak of what
I consider much the most beautiful object I have seen on the
continent. I mean, a statue supposed to be by Michael Angelo
in the Cathedral of Notre Dame of the Virgin and Jesus. The
delicacy of the figures, the infantine simplicity of Jesus, and
the motherly anxiety of Mary who is looking down at him as
he sits on her lap give a grace to the whole group too impres-
sive to be forgotten, but which I can't put into words. ..."
From Bruges the party went to Antwerp. " The Cathedral
at Antwerp is the most delicate Gothic building in the world
according to the guide-book, which also states that Napoleon
compared it to Mechlin lace, and Charles 5th said it ought to
be kept in a case. At Ghent we saw a beautiful likeness in
wood of Charles 5th of the most spirited kind on a celebrated
chimney piece in the Palais de Justice. Whoever wants to get
an admiration of Rubens let him come to Antwerp. It has
thoroughly converted my Aunt Reynolds who is not in most
cases, as the family know, a convertible person. The descent
from the cross, of which you have the print in the drawing
room, is beautiful as far as colouring is concerned. The body
stands out from the canvas which is the more remarkable as
being on a white ground. The raising the cross is also fine.
None of the paintings by Rubens in the National Gallery, and
none that I have ever before seen, give any idea of his full
strength. A minute examination will often discover defects
in the details of his pictures, and one or two of his faces want
expression when one would have imagined he would have put
forth all his powers, but for striking and instantaneous effect,
I have never seen his equal, and I cannot imagine anything
that in this respect would be an improvement on him."
After describing five great pictures in the Antwerp Museum
Bagehot says: "The last painting which I should wish parti-
cularly to recall is a painting of Jesus dead and on the knees of
Mary with the Magdalene and the other Mary standing beside
134 LIFE OF WALTER B AGE HOT
her. Mary Magdalene has in a paroxysm of sorrow lifted the
hand of Jesus, and is weeping over it. To contrast this with
the deep and settled grief of Mary without tears or passion
was a noble conception. The tears of the Magdalene and the
other Mary are flowing over their countenances, and in the
latter it is only a single tear which is beautifully executed.
To convey in language a good idea of this picture, and that of
the crucifixion by Rubens would require no small share of
those powers required for the effort of producing them. The
imagination ought to have recourse to every source for the
most expressive images of sorrow and suffering, and a yet
higher flight in search of illustrations for the suffering and
despair of the impenitent thief. The best tribute I can give
to them is a statement of the fact that after the rest of the
party were gone to look at some Antwerp silk — which, by the
way, they lost their way and didn't see — and after throwing all
attempts at criticism aside I tried to enter into the conception
of the painter, the tears came too fast to my eyes to let me look
any longer. I didn't state this publicly for it might look like
affectation, yet why it should, I can't see. They are few who
would be ashamed of weeping over Lear or Othello, and to
come more exactly to the point I am convinced that fewer still
would read the narratives in the Gospels, especially St. Luke's,
if they were not so familiar, without much emotion. In spite
of the number of times we have all read them, those who read
them in private with attention will find it hard not to pay the
same tribute to their deep knowledge of the human heart. "
"... When at Mechlin we afterwards saw another church
whose name I have forgotten, in which we saw the picture by
Rubens of the Scourging of Jesus, of which we have the print
at home. We saw here a priest preaching in Dutch. The
meaning was lost on us, though the sound at a distance had
an effect remarkably like English. I believe it is less guttural
than German to which it is nearly allied, which would make
the elementary sounds very much the same as in English, and
account for the resemblance I have mentioned, which was felt
by all our party. The audience were mostly of the lower class,
and the manner of the preacher seemed calculated to attract
UNIVERSITY COLLEGE 135
their attention and did so. All who can read the sermons of
Bossuet will not have to learn that eloquence of the highest order
is at the command of the Roman hierarchy. Yet it is singular
that the art which has for its object the setting forth in at-
tractive and enduring colours and labours of the human mind
should be at the service of a system, which sets out with denying
the right of private judgment in matters of religion — that is the
right of exercising the highest of its powers on the noblest of
subjects."
From Brussels Bagehot writes to his father : " An English
gentleman who had resided some months at Mechlin and whom
we met in the railroad described the authority of the Roman
Catholic priests in that city as so great that a shopkeeper who
should offend them would within a week find his shop deserted.
If this be not literally true, the clergy must have great power, if
a person who had good opportunities of information, and ap-
peared to be an intelligent man, could entertain such an opinion
of them.
" This uniformity is what many persons in our country are
sighing for, but the best description of it is Lord Bacon's, —
that all colours are alike in the dark. Ignorance is the surest
means of attaining it. While walking amid the lofty arches
of Antwerp Cathedral I could not be otherwise than astonished
at the skill with which architecture, and all the fine arts are
pressed into the service of Catholicism."
From Aix-la-Chapelle Bagehot wrote : ' ' Mr. Reynolds and
myself in enquiring about the English service met with a queer
character, who seems to act as leading churchwarden. He
talked theology at a great pace, but professed never to have
heard of the evangelical party, or anything at all contrary to
the Church of England being one and indissoluble ! He com-
menced a full detail of the churchwarden's employments in
the midst of which we came away. He proved satisfactorily
that every subject of conversation could be brought round to
a churchwarden's business."
Of Cologne he writes : " The streets are gloomy and dirty
and narrow, but these are nothing here. Whoever would
learn the full strength of the human imagination, the loftiness
136 LIFE OF W 'ALTER B AGE HOT
of human hopes, and the littleness of their fulfilment, let him
look on the Cathedral of Cologne. When the original architect
drew that plan of the original structure which still exists, and
is deemed the finest conception of the Gothic school, he must
have felt some swelling pride at leaving behind him a name
connected with a structure so magnificent, and some nobler
anticipations of the glory his labours would bring to Germany,
and of their stimulating effect on the genius of future ages.
His name has been lost, and grass has long grown on the un-
finished towers that only show what the whole would have
been. It is not commonplace declaration to dwell for a
moment on so complete a wreck of such aspiring hopes. The
Cathedral was begun in A.D. 1248 and received additions till
1509, when the work was stopped, till in 1824 the King of
Prussia gave money for continuing the work on its original
scale. The choir is now finished, and the rest of the work
going on fast, though at the rate of 100,000 dollars a year,
the work would last fifty years. The height of the work is
well seen from the bridge of boats over the Rhine where the
unfinished towers, and also the lower portions are seen far
above every other building. The effect of the whole by moon-
light, from time to time obscured by heavy masses of dark
cloud, with a reflection of the lights on shore in the ' wide and
winding river' might, I should think, bear no very distant
approach to the celebrated sight of Venice by night from a
gondola. I am too much aroused by the beauties of what I
have just seen, to be a very fit former of comparisons between
it and what I really know — much more than with what I have
never seen. They show the skulls of the Magi (or five Kings
of Cologne) in the Cathedral and some antiques, but they are
too little to be seen or remembered as being there ; anywhere
else they might have a better chance, but, — I will not break
forth again ! "
" %th August. — Still at Nonnenwerth where we mean to
linger another day. A place of pure enjoyment of natural
scenery is not good for a journal though a happy one to live
through. In the morning we ascended Rolandseck — the scene
of Schiller's 'Knight of Toggenberg,' and in the afternoon we
UNIVERSITY COLLEGE 137
scaled the Drachenfels. The beauty of catching the same
landscape in different points of view is very striking at the
time, but can only be very generally stated on paper. The
obvious points of the scene are on the right bank of the Seven
Mountains of which the Drachenfels is the most striking,
especially when by twilight it is dimly seen lowering over the
river. The hills have generally a peaked appearance which is
said to mark their volcanic origin. On the left bank is the
hill of Rolandseck with a broken arch of the ruin on the top,
which is in exact keeping with the fragments of a tower and
wall left standing on Drachenfels. These ruins of feudal
strongholds bring to one's imagination the times when these
scenes were valued for other qualities than their beauty.
Cultivation has covered all their country with green — except
these relics. Barbarism has left these stranded wrecks to make
us remember that there was a time when her dark waters
covered the earth. The windings of the broad river, with
island and the old nunnery upon it, complete the meagre out-
line of the picture."
" NONNENWERTH, 7//Z /«//, 1844.
" 6 o'clock in the evening.
" MY DEAREST MOTHER,
" I am on an island in the midst of the Rhine, my
window opens on it, and the sound of its rushing volume of
water is in my ears, and I have been for the last three hours
watching the sunset first, and then the shadows deepening
over the castle and rock of Drachenfels. If under these cir-
cumstances you expect a letter of anything but rapturous
enthusiasm you will be disappointed. The very room where
I write is strange for it was once a nun's cell. I got so far and
only so far last night when I was in a very excited state, and
as I am now sitting in the garden beside the Rhine with
Rolandseck on my right, and Drachenfels before me I am
not now much more endowed with common sense. Roland-
seck is famed as the seat of a hermitage built by a lover named
Roland, within sight of the nunnery, now turned into a hotel
at which I am writing, where his lady love had taken the veil.
138 LIFE OF WALTER B AGE HOT
Schiller has made a very beautiful ballad out of this story,
which I have just been reading, and which adds not a little to
the interest of the scene. After I wrote to you from Brussels
we went to the field of Waterloo, and returned to Brussels in
time to go to Namur by the railroad. The field of Waterloo
is not particularly striking as a scene now, though every year
of peace adds to the interest of all that is associated with the
price the world paid for it. We had a short abstract of the
battle by a sergeant engaged in it, found a bullet, examined
the holes in the wall at Huguemont, and achieved all the other
orthodox and difficult things that have been done by all
English tourists since the time of the battle. Mr. Reynolds
had so thoroughly forgotten the scene that he could not
tell whether any alterations had taken place since you were
there. A comparison of dates proved that a large mound of
earth with a lion on the top 200 feet high, and very nearly on
the spot where the Duke ejaculated, ' Up guards and at em '
has been erected since that time. It will be a very enduring
memorial and I like it, though my aunt was angry at things
not being let stay as they were on the day of the battle. We went
from Namur to Liege by the Meuse, which we had heard was
beautiful, but which we should not have found out for ourselves.
One gentleman said he thought it prettier than the Rhine, but
rather neutralised the effect of this, by observing, ' it will be
better presently, there won't be so many rocks '. I never under-
stood what the real enjoyment of scenery meant before, and
I never expect to experience more of it. Byron has shown
most exquisite taste in his selection of Drachenfels as the
point of view for his bold description of the Rhine in ' Childe
Harold' — the scene is a noble one in itself, the lines in the
poem are nervous and impressive when read in England, but
it would require a power of illustration as copious and exact as
the poet's, to describe the pleasure the poem gives when you
can turn from it to the scene it paints. No higher praise can
be given to descriptive poetry than that it pleases most when
thus read. It is a likeness which looks best side by side with
the original. The Rhine does not foam, however, as he says
it does, at least not at this spot. It is the calm swift rush of
UNI VERSITY COLLEGE \ 39
a large body of water, which though not perhaps so imposing
in reality when spoken of, because not so easily described, har-
monises better with the characteristic attributes of the scene
which are repose and grandeur."
" BOPPART,
" i2tk August.
" By staying at Nonnenwerth we have, we think, got
a pretty good notion of what Rhine scenery really is, and a
much higher opinion of it than do most racing tourists. We
mean to go over the rest of the Rhine considerably faster, and get,
we believe, to Schaffhausen, and there to enter the north-east of
Switzerland, which, always subject to Murray's direction when
we have him, we intend to make our object. Seeing Switzerland
is not to be done in a fortnight. If I were left to myself I am by
no means sure I should leave the Rhine. The beauties of nature
are not written so that those who run may read them, and I
would not run the risk of losing the full advantage to be
derived from a few weeks on the continent by dissipating my
attention over a great number of dissimilar objects. More
grandeur I shall, I believe, assuredly see there, but 1 can
hardly expect more pleasure than I have already had."
" loth August. — We this day left Nonnenwerth with great
regret. The lonely stillness of the island in its most se-
questered retreats, the ' frowning ' grandeur of the Drachenfels
and the greener and softer beauty of Rolandseck with the
single arch on its summit, took a speedy hold on my admira-
tion, which, in spite of the usual transient nature of such
feelings, I hope they will long retain in my memory. We pro-
ceeded to Coblenz by the steamer — incomparably the worst
way of seeing scenery that could be devised. The river is
quite lost. One is hurried from one point to another so fast
that one cannot gain an adequate idea of the height of rocks,
which everybody that knows scenery at all very well knows
to require time, and what is hastily seen leaves few lasting
traces on the mind. I must delay till I have Murray at hand
to secure accuracy as to names, the account of the places
which most struck me in descending the Rhine to this place.
I mean to set down the places that have most struck me in
140 LIFE OF WALTER B AGE HOT
the ascent of the Rhine. Briefly, both because I could not
adequately describe them if I would, and I am too tired to do
if I could. Nonnenvverth needs no mention in this list ; that
and the whole scenery of the Seven Mountains are so associ-
ated themselves in my mind with the ideas of pleasure and
peace, that before I forget them my mind must undergo many
organic changes for the worse. Except my home, and some
other scenes that I have visited with those I love best, there
is no scene that I have ever regarded with so much affection .
Stillness and retirement have always a strong hold on me.
The flourishing towns now covering the banks of the Rhine,
compared with the huts of the serfs which in the middle ages
occupied their sites, show the futility of praising more barbar-
ous times at the expense of our own, because their remains
with the marks of age on them have the grandeur of antiquity.
A scoffer might sum up the remark, that the pleasure these
ruins give us, as it arises from its reminding us of other times
and modes of living with their pleasing contrast to our own,
by saying that we admire them because we haven't to live in
them, or to be near their founders. My tendency to prose, or
as I call it speculate to-night is so great that I shall adjourn,
especially as it waxes late.
" The only day lost since I came out, by a blunder (not
of our own, but of the constituted authorities) we lost the
steamer from Mayence to Mannheim in the morning. The
dullness of the passage in the afternoon with a drizzle, and an
ugly country is no pleasing subject of recollection. We stayed
at Mannheim instead of Heidelberg, our appointed stage.
" To-day we richly effaced yesterday's disappointment.
We came out to Heidelberg, and saw the castle, a magnificent
architecture built at different times, on different plans. Archi-
tectural critics lay down their rules against all mixtures of
styles, but are hardly sanctioned by the taste of mankind.
Those who are fond of seeing how rich in resources the human
race have now become, will look with pleasure on a building
where many ages have sent their representative : those who
are more habituated to look on works of art, as produced from
the imagination of a single mind, and those who like to
UNIVERSITY COLLEGE 141
figure to themselves their builders as a single generation, into
whose feelings they are to enter, and whose habits they are
to realise will not be gratified by finding their usual tastes,
illusions, and criticisms wholly disturbed. There is a portion
in the rich Italian style, and some parts are very old and rude
Gothic. In 1764 it was struck by lightning, and some part
was blown up by the French. The large masses of ruin in
which the latter lie, especially where shaded with underwood,
have a noble effect. I bought a print of the ruin in the state
it was in, about 1764, at the period of its most perfect
completion.
" On Wednesday morning we proceeded to Thun. It was
our plan to get on to Lauterbrunnen or Interlacken at the
least. But we were so taken with the sight of the lake of
Thun, and the Muen, a bold and lofty promontory jutting out
into the middle of it, with the glaciers behind it and setting off
its sombre colour, that we stayed there, and strolled up to the
summer house to see the sunset. I have seen many finer as
far as clouds are concerned, but I never before watched the
pink tint gradually fading from the ' Alpine snow '. It by
degrees crept up the mountains as the sun descended till just
before it descended the summits only partook of it. Accord-
ing to an old national custom in Switzerland still, I believe,
preserved in retired valleys, this moment was seized to blow
the Alpine horn which was re-echoed from hill to hill, and
whenever the sound was heard, the shepherds fell on their
knees to render thanks to God for the day's light, and their
preservation. A similar custom of choosing sunset for a
public act of adoration is very prevalent in the East. The
fire- worshippers are now well known to every reader of poetry,
and Mahomet, whose followers were the exterminators of the
fire-worshippers, enjoined on them this same usage.
' ' At Lucerne is to be seen the famous statue by Thor-
waldsen erected to the memory of the Swiss guards, who
defended the Tuilleries on the day of the tenth of August
against the populace of Paris. The Swiss lion in the agonies
of death has his paw on a shield that bears the ' French fleur de
lys'. It is hewn out of the solid rock, and reflected in a pond
142 LIFE OF WALTER BAGEHOT
artificially made in front of it. The dimensions are colossal,
but it is only on approaching it very nearly that this is seen.
The illusion is so perfect that the most natural feeling is
wonder that the lion in the death grapple should be so per-
fectly still Over the monument is written
Helvetiorum, Fidei et Virtuti.
Underneath are the names of those who in the words of the
inscription did not shrink from their military oath. Seven
hundred and fifty-six were killed and 301 saved — of these last
one is now alive, and shows the monument. In such a scene
the works of art are put to the hard trial as having to be seen
immediately after gazing on the most magnificent of the
labours of nature. But I felt here nothing like inferiority, the
monument is every way worthy to be placed beside the Alps.
Of the deed to which it is erected there can be only one
opinion — it produced not one single result. The king had
taken refuge with the National Assembly, and it was to his
weakness that the bloodshed was owing. Yet every one feels
a sentiment of admiration for these men, ' for their faith and
valour,' and the moral feelings of mankind are as usual in the
right, and as usual paying homage to what is in the highest
degree beneficial. The habit of mind that leads to the
courageous execution of what is required by fidelity to en-
gagements, will always be most useful to mankind. I say
this to obviate what an objector might induce against the
justice of my admiration from my admitting the inutility of
the act. He might say how much better for the world and
themselves if their lives had been spared by flight. The
feelings of mankind are shocked by such reasoning. The
intellectual answer is that they themselves had been in the
course of their good lives much more benefited by the habits
of mind that led to the self-sacrifice, than they suffered by
their painful death, and that the world is incalculably more
benefited by these habits than by any others."
After returning to University College, Walter writes to his
mother, 25th October, 1844: —
" Have you seen the article in the last Edinburgh Review
UNIVERSITY COLLEGE 143
on Lord Chatham ? It is a splendid article, and any person
who has read the pages of Macaulay's former essays can be at
no loss to discover the author. There is some curious matter
about Burton and Sir William Pynsent — of which it is a
wonder that there is no tradition in our neighbourhood.1
There may be to be sure, though I have never heard of it.
Pitt's purity and incorruptibility seem to have made a great
impression on the English nation, although he certainly con-
nived at many practices which would now be thought, as Lord
Ashburton says, ' not over scrupulous '. There are some noble
passages in the article, to which I have alluded, especially the
concluding page ; and this remark of the singular fact, that the
last debate in which Chatham spoke was the first in which
Burke spoke. ' It was indeed a splendid sunset and a splendid
dawn.' 2 The Reviewer would have contributed to the orna-
1 About this time took place one of the most singular events in Pitt's
life. There was a certain Sir William Pynsent, a Somersetshire baronet,
of Whig politics, who had been a member of the House of Commons in
the days of Queen Anne, and had retired to rural privacy when the Tory
party, towards the end of her reign, obtained the ascendency in her
councils. His manners were eccentric. His morals lay under odious im-
putations, but his fidelity to his political opinions was unalterable. During
fifty years of seclusion he continued to brood over the circumstances which
had driven him from public life, the dismissal of the Whigs, the peace of
Utrecht, the desertion of our allies. He now thought that he perceived a
close analogy between the well-remembered events of his youth and the
events which he had witnessed in extreme old age ; between the disgrace
of Marlborough and the disgrace of Pitt ; between the elevation of Harley
and the elevation of Bute ; between the treaty negotiated by St. John and the
treaty negotiated by Bedford ; between the wrongs of the House of Austria
in 1712 and the wrongs of the House of Brandenburg in 1762. This fancy
took such possession of the old man's mind that he determined to leave
his whole property to Pitt. In this way Pitt unexpectedly came into pos-
session of near three thousand pounds a year. Nor could all the malice
of his enemies find any ground for reproach in the transaction. Nobody
could call him a legacy hunter. Nobody could accuse him of seizing that
to which others had a better claim. For he had never in his life seen Sir
William ; and Sir William had left no relation so near as to be entitled to
form any expectations respecting the estate." — Macaulay, " The Earl of
Chatham ".
2 " The House of Commons heard Pitt for the last time, and Burke for
the first time, and was in doubt to which of them the palm of eloquence
144 LIFE OF WALTER B AGE HOT
mental effect, and the instructive tendency of this article if he
had quoted some of the many bursts which tradition ascribes
to Lord Chatham, and in which his great strength lay. If I
remember right he does not even quote Chatham's celebrated
declaration, ' that it mattered not to him on which bank of the
Tweed a man's cradle had been rocked '. We find some diffi-
culty now in seeing the real grandeur of this saying. It should
be remembered, that this was the same year with the publica-
tion of the No. 45 of the North Briton, and that Chatham was
struggling to overthrow Lord Bute's ministry, whose unpopu-
larity in the country was principally grounded on his Scottish
origin, and then we can see whether it did not require much
nobleness of character to reject the support of this illiberal pre-
judice. Of the authenticity of this saying there is no doubt,
for it occurs in a public letter of Lord Chatham's written at
the time. The explanation of Lord Chatham's views on the
question of the right of the House of Commons to tax America
(which he altogether denied) throws light on the well-known
peroration of his great speech in the House of Lords : ' My
Lords, if America falls she will fall like the strong man, she
will lay hold on the pillars of the constitution and pull down
the whole fabric along with her '. It is always a pleasing
task to quote such sayings of high-minded and highly gifted
men."
Having returned home for the Christmas vacation, Walter
writes to his friend Edward Fry : —
"HERD'S HILL,
" 26th December, 1884.
"MY DEAR FRY,
"... My health is much mended. My Mother's
family has suffered from hereditary consumption, and as my
chest was delicate, my friends were alarmed perhaps need-
lessly. I have never read any of Lord Bacon's Latin works, but
his essays ('Advancement of Learning' and the 'New Atlantis ')
are old favourites of mine. To ask in his day, ' is truth ever
should be assigned. It was indeed a splendid sunset and a splendid dawn."
— Macaulay, " The Earl of Chatham ".
UNIVERSITY COLLEGE 145
barren?' required a nobleness of soul, which I know not how
to characterise. His trust in the progress that would be
made by unshackled human reason is not to be measured
by ours. He may be thought to have lived in the primary
formation of civilisation, to have taken his stand on the barren
granite, and predicted the rise of luxuriant vegetation and
exalted intelligence. I am getting very metaphorical this
morning. The breaking up of the frost has set me think (sic]
again. Macintosh says that diffused knowledge immortalises
itself, and I believe he says so truly — are you acquainted with
Macaulay's essays ? They are very noble works, very eloquent,
and I think for the most part wise. His views of English
history are very good, and though perhaps a little borrowed
from Hallam, are more original than so hackneyed a theme
would have seemed to have promised. Perhaps, however, his-
tory ought to be continually re-written as each age gets larger
views of truth, and more discriminating accuracy in the allot-
ment of praise and blame. No age ought to be content with
the views taken by its predecessor of past times, though it
ought to be acquainted with them just as much as the bound-
aries of science are extended by those only who have surveyed
the cultivated interior. Write to me as often as you can. I wilt
not insult you by more promises, but I will do my best in
future to make my promises more worthy of confidence."
In the spring of 1845, Walter's health had again caused
great anxiety to his parents. In the following letter from his
mother the first indication is given in the family correspond-
ence of what eventually led Walter to leave London and join
his father in the Bank and in the " Bridge " business, namely,
the strong wish of his mother that he should make their home
his home, their interests his.
She writes : " I am glad to remember that I always thought
and said, the classes you had chosen were the most difficult
and also the most abstracted from these general subjects of
capacious, just, good, common and elevated sense, which I
could better understand and was the most anxious about, since
many a mathematician is certainly a learned booby. I used
to say too, dearest, that if you could not bear the necessary
10
146 LIFE OF WALTER BAGEHOT
hard study now, you could not bear the hard study and work
of the Bar hereafter, and I think Mr. Estlin seems to think the
same, and gives a hint about business, whither, as you know,
my wishes have always somewhat turned, though I would
never for the world say so to slacken or contract what I do
hope you will have, a thoroughly good education. But turn
your attention a little to business when you are at home, try
to understand Papa's cleverness in it, and if very or totally
inferior at first, do not be depressed. If he were to die now,
which God forbid ! I am sure I should at once wish you to
understand what business is. I have often told dearest Papa,
it was a fault more of his habits than his intentions, that he
had not, as a matter of course, made you better acquainted
with its practical details and mysteries ; but all paths are open
to good sense, good feelings, good intentions and industry,
and, as deep and abstract study is now thought so bad for
you, you must seek to apply the stores already acquired in
lighter converse and associates, and in more of the practical
details, friendships and usages of daily life, and not be so much
the studious, mawkish scholar any longer."
Again later Mrs. Bagehot writes: "Your health, my
beloved, I trust is not worse. I often hope and pray that it
will humble you where you ought to be humbled, namely, that
as you must not strain your mind after very high and abstruse
attainments you will 'exercise yourself clearly to comprehend
and express those which are obvious and easy. Your letter
was spelt quite rightly. Mr. Reynolds says your faults at
present remind him of his at your age, namely, that you are
much fonder of finding out and attacking all authorities where
they are wrong than you are of humbling yourself to obedience
and deference, and learning of them where they are right.
This is true, I think, at least I thought it becoming alarmingly
true, but when you were at home last you were all sweetness
to me, and I thought there was a manifest improvement (ex-
cepting in being so silent when the thoughts of your heart
and mind should have expressed themselves), and in your
letters of late, excepting this one, which does remind me of
some of Mr. Reynolds about you. However, as you say, it is
UNIVERSITY COLLEGE 147
much better than none, and clever letters, like clever people,
bear being pulled to pieces and found fault with."
In October, 1845, Walter writes to her : " My Aunt Rey-
nolds was looking very well, and very brisk. She said, how-
ever, that she had been ill, but I never saw her looking better.
She believes that Newman is most likely bribed to become a
Roman Catholic — at all events that he will be no loser in
money matters by the change. As the Pope is a bankrupt it
seems unlikely he should have much spare cash to send over
to bribe English heretics. I never could understand what
you told me in your letter about Mrs. J thinking it re-
quired great grace to be a nun or monk. If it means simply
retiring from the world and living a life of contemplation in
one place, I do not think there are many things easier and
pleasanter. It is completely realising the laissez faire system
of grappling with the evils of the world. Every one knows on
a small scale how easy that is. That bodily penance is con-
sidered by most men easier than the everyday work of duty
is quite evident from the history of all religions. Then
Catholics would say that to live a life of prayer was difficult.
But it is surely not so difficult as to live in the world a life of
prayer and labour also. A monk's life is very captivating to
my imagination as you know, but I do not think I could per-
suade myself into its being right. I do not think Mr. Newman
will fill England with monasteries. A monastery beside a
railroad would be a curious mixture of the customs of different
ages. The extreme of physical inaction and the extreme of
bodily exertion would be side by side. Nothing passes here
of much moment. I have a good deal to do of various kinds,
and shall be obliged to take some work with me to Hampstead
this evening."
Bagehot, following his doctor's advice, did not go in for
his B.A. degree that year. For the first time since he entered
the College he did not compete with Mr. Hutton, who was
placed in the first class and obtained the scholarship. In a
letter to Bagehot at that time he writes : —
" Read the Chimes. I think it the finest thing Dickens has
ever written. There are one or two passages quite sublime.
10 *
148 LIFE OF WALTER B AGE HOT
Public opinion has formed (I think) a judgment on it totally
erroneous. I like it much better than the Carol ; perhaps it
may have appeared so beautiful by contrast to Pkelps Optics,
not improbable ! "
In a letter Bagehot writes in May, 1845, he analyses
what he feels to be natural defects in the constitution of
his mind. Though nineteen years of age, in writing carelessly
his spelling was often erratic, and for such lapses he was
criticised by his mother, and even his father, probably in-
cited to notice them by Mrs. Bagehot, mentioned the matter
to him.
In May, 1845, Bagehot writes to his father : " I think I
mentioned to you in answer to a letter in which some months
ago you asked for an account of what I was doing, that in
classical matters I had found it necessary to make some
selection ; and that I had determined to attend less to the
niceties of grammatical constructions, which differ but very
little from one another, to the different readings found in
different manuscripts of the same classical author, and the
researches of etymology, than to the historical instruction,
literary beauty and speculative philosophy which after all are
the real sources of the value of the records of antiquity. I do
not in the least undervalue that precise acquaintance with every
detail and every nicety in the classical writings which forms
the pursuit of profound scholars. It is absolutely necessary
that some persons should become well acquainted with them,
and thoroughly investigate and discuss their difficulties. But
my taste does not lead me in that direction, nor is my mind
fitted especially well for such pursuits. Yesterday I took a
holiday and went with the Prichards and Mary Estlin to
Hampton Court. There are many excellent pictures at
Hampton Court beside the cartoons. The great strength of
the collection is in the portraits. The originals of Kneller's
portraits of Newton and Locke are there. I never saw any
engraving that gave at all adequately the fixed, penetrating
expression of Newton's eye. I had not very long to look at
it, but the eye seemed to me almost poetic and even a little
wild. Newton was certainly under some sort of mental aber-
UNIVERSITY COLLEGE 149
ration for a short time in one part of his life, and all his great
discoveries were made before that period."
Some discussion about Disraeli took place in the letters
between Mrs. Bagehot and Walter about this time. Mrs.
Bagehot did not understand Walter's arguments, and took the
opportunity of sermonising him in her own characteristic
manner : —
" HERD'S HILL.
" MY DEAR BLESSING,
" Your letter of this morning so anxiously expected
(on my part I confess fearfully, so I was a little prepared)
failed to impart the sunshine some of them bestow, either with
regard to your body or mind ; but may God chasten and
renovate us all through His spirit and send us a happy meeting
on Thursday. I cannot argue further on the points as you
are your own authority, and are in dear Eliza's opinion and
mine, one of the difficult writers whom we must first under-
stand before we know whether we agree or not, and we quite
fail to do this first in the letter of to-day. But, in the mean-
while, till Bagehot's grammar and dictionary supersede the
old ones, we must spell and divide not according to sound, but
the common usage of the schools.
" I tremble now for the mathematics, since, as I told
Babbage, trying the sense of the obscure and difficult which
I did not know, by the sense and reasoning which I did, I was
afraid. But this will not improve your headache, darling, for
you are never well, nor I either, when you and I have had
' any bit out break '. Let it not disturb the joy of our meeting
for there is nothing like ' speaking the truth from the heart '
even where people differ, and between parents and children
these are the only discussions which really make correspon-
dence interesting and valuable for time and eternity.
" Since I came from church I have been telling your dear
Uncle that dear Papa, though he thinks you are wrong, scolds
me for saying you are so, and said I abused everybody, and
Uncle said 'so you do, you are the "Senior Wrangler" of
the family'. Well ! I dare not say ' peace, peace when there
ISO LIFE OF IV ALTER B AGE HOT
is no peace,' but sincerely do I pray that all mankind should
follow the example of the great humility of our Saviour."
The most notable event which occurred in Walter Bagehot's
family in 1845 was the death of his "Uncle Stuckey". Mr.
Vincent Stuckey was not only the centre of the business and
social life of Langport and its neighbourhood, he was also the
lord bountiful to the poor and needy of the town and country
round, and his generous hospitable instincts made him beloved
by all, rich and poor alike. Moreover, he had been in touch
all his life with that far-away big world in London. This
cast a glamour over his existence in the eyes of those folk in
little Langport who had never seen London and knew they
never would. Mr. Vincent Stuckey was the link between
them and this great distant metropolis, and, as Mr. Ross re-
counts, " women and children crowded expectant to their doors
and the entrances of the courts to watch the banker Stuckey
on his return from London drive in with his carriage and
postillions. . . . Mr. Stuckey kept a pack of hounds in
Whatley, and dwelt in patriarchal style among his people,
hospitable, freehanded and popular. He might be seen at
times seated under the great elm on the Hill fronting the
west door of the church and chatting with his neighbours."
After passing the season in London he would bring down
distinguished visitors to Hill House, well-known personages
in the great London world. All these grand proceedings put
no distance between him and his countrymen. He was none
the less genial with his poorer neighbours, entering into their
interests as keenly as if he had never himself known a wider
sphere than that which he shared with them. His death
therefore was the great event of the year to many people out-
side the circle of his relatives — and to many of his relatives it
meant a momentous change in their lives. There appears to
have been a competition among these as to who would write
the epitaph for the tablet to be placed in Langport Church.
A roll of attempts exist signed by various members of the
family, in which are set forth his worldly distinctions no less
than his virtues. As might be supposed, Mrs. Bagehot's
fluent pen supplied one of these. The actual epitaph chosen
UNIVERSITY COLLEGE 151
is not among them, and expresses admiration for his religious
feelings, his character and virtues, rather than for his worldly
successes. Though all mourned the loss of this notable person,
his influence survived him. His cheery humour, his whole-
some vigour, his encouraging sympathy produced a lastingly
bracing effect on all who had known him. In some character-
istics there was a striking resemblance between Walter Bagehot
and his uncle. There was the same tendency in both to take
a large wholesome view of every question, to dislike hair-
splitting, and rather to prefer the broad aspect than the
minutiae of a subject.
Mrs. Bagehot felt her brother's loss greatly. Walter
writes to her : " Please to remember me very kindly to all on
the hill. I have no doubt that now you and my father are
left alone, you will feel very much the real greatness of the loss
you have sustained. But I think you will soon feel, as those
to whom the hourly vacancy is less, already feel, that it is
hardly possible long to think of my dear uncle with anything
like gloom. All our associations with him were also associa-
tions with cheerfulness, happiness, and gratitude, and it is only
the natural sadness of recent loss which can render such
remembrances melancholy. Gloom cannot long linger round
the memory of one whose presence always dispelled it." Mr.
Stuckey frequently helped Mr. Bagehot very effectually in his
home trouble by taking his sister on travels with him and
his family, and by inviting her to pay visits to them in
London. These changes were invariably found to be bene-
ficial.
At the age of twenty Bagehot was considered an authority
in criticism by his friends. In the spring of 1 846 Edward Fry
sent him poetry written by his brother, asking Bagehot his
opinion as to its merits. " Your brother's poetry is very grace-
ful and pleasing," Bagehot writes, " and what is more uncom-
mon quite genuine and unaffected. From my former knowledge
of him I should have thought quiet, good-natured satire the
species of composition for which nature had intended him. I
do not know whether either he or you, however, think satire
right. To me its best forms seem no unfitting expression of
152 LIFE OF WALTER B AGE HOT
reverential thoughtfulness. I do not think your brother will
take it amiss if I venture to recommend condensation to him in
any thing which he may write hereafter. I do not mean that
there is anything in this piece which I want shortened or omit-
ted, but diffuseness seems to me to be the besetting sin of our
recent literature. In poetry it is worse than in prose, for when
the intellect is addressed, it is no harm to follow out principles
and reasonings into their most minute applications. But in
poetry, and indeed in eloquence where the feelings of the poet
are expressed, and the feelings of the orator's hearers are ad-
dressed, to give numerous details and to repeat the same
details more than once seems like a botanist who, in delineating
the beauty of flowers, should recount the number of stamens
they possess. Some details are essential in poetry, because no
affections cling to general ideas, and to pale unhealthy looking
abstractions, but the poet's genius and taste are shown in their
combination and selection, not as some poets seem to imagine
in their accumulation. I hardly know any recent poetry not
chargeable with too great prolixity except perhaps the lyric
parts of Campbell, and the very best parts of Shelley and
Byron. The last (Don Juan excepted) is not very chargeable
with this fault perhaps. What a command of language and
illustration is shown in ' Childe Harold ' ! What a pity that
he had nothing better to say than what an uncomfortable place
this world is ! After all he might have written a great work
if he had lived till now. He was just setting himself to work,
and the true cure of despondency and moral scepticism is
action — that is right action. Do you know Hood's poems?
Of very recent poetry I think they are perhaps the best. They
show quickness and delicacy of feeling, and a very happy
fancy capable of very good ornamental work. The great
depths of the human heart are only for those of a great
creative imagination, and where among living poets shall we
find that greatest of Go.d's gifts. However, Hood was a man
who took his knowledge of mankind not from tradition but
from his eyes.
" I shall have to read some physiology for my degree, but I
am as ignorant of natural history as I used to be. If I have
UNIVERSITY COLLEGE 153
any leisure time after taking my degree, I hope to remedy this
gross defect in some measure at least. I have been most
occupied for the last year in ' science ' and metaphysics. I do
not know whether the latter science has engaged your attention
much. In these days of universal controversy we are con-
stantly required to know the ultimate principles of belief on
which the whole superstructure of knowledge rests, and also
to be able to detect any false claimants to the title of self-
evident truths which cannot be proved from others and carry
their own certainty with them. These truths having their
root in the structure of the mind itself can only be known by
a metaphysical enquiry. I have been reading some of Kant,
the founder of the modern school of metaphysics in Germany
and France. He appears to me to have been a man of preter-
natural acuteness, no little confidence in himself, to have been
very fond of the complexities of an artificial system, and to
have been defective in the power of diffusing simplicity over a
subject by the constant application of master truths. How-
ever he has greatly advanced the study of mental philosophy
and to anyone who wishes to cultivate the power to acute dis-
crimination his works may be recommended as constantly
requiring the exercise of that faculty. It is a great pity that
he had so little power of explaining his meaning. His vast
and barbarous terminology is enough to terrify any English-
man, but one who like myself is a fanatical devotee in the
service of metaphysics."
In the same month Bagehot wrote a letter on certain points
of political economy to his father.
" I have just caught sight of a passage in Mr. Disraeli's
speech in the House of Commons last night where he seemed
to be referring to John Mill's Essay on the laws that regulate
interchange between nations in favour of reciprocity, meaning
to apply that principle to all duties whatever. I cannot be-
lieve however that even Mr. Disraeli would make such a fla-
grant misquotation. The fact is that John Mill very carefully
draws the distinction between duties for revenue and duties
for protection, and only applies the principle of reciprocity to
the former. But Mr. Disraeli seemed to be arguing from the
154 LIFE OF WALTER BAGEHOT
authority of John Mill that Lord G. Bentinck and himself
should not be treated with such contempt. The essay begins
with an allusion in the highest terms of eulogy to Mr. Ricardo's
chapter on foreign trade, of the principles of which the essay
by John Mill only professes to be a development. Ricardo's
chapter John Mill thinks, is the foundation of everything which
is known with scientific accuracy on the subject. Of John
Mill's opinions there can be no doubt as he has been writing
articles against the Corn Laws for many years in the West-
minster Review. I yesterday accidentally met with an article
by him written at the time of the passing of the Tithe Com-
mutation Act, which he says ' takes the tithe off the consumer
and lays it on the landlord. Tithe will no longer operate
as any discouragement to cultivation. It will no longer be
one of the expenses of production which the price must be
sufficient to repay ; but a fixed proportion of the rent, that is
of the surplus after the expenses are paid. It will be liable
indeed to increase, but only as the rent increases, and can
never under any circumstances be anything but a deduction
from the rent.' As this opinion so exactly coincides with
that to which you came when you were considering the subject
when the Corn Law Bill was first introduced, I thought you
would be interested in seeing it. Mr. John Mill thinks that
the reason of so c unlandlordlike a proceeding was a wish to
keep up the Corn Laws ' ; and if I understand him rightly
maintains that the increased advantage, which the removal of
the Tithe unaccompanied by an alteration of the Corn Law,
would give to the home producer over the foreigner, would
cause an increased cultivation of poorer soils, and therefore a
rise of rent. So that the landlord would be indirectly counter-
balanced for the burden of the tithe which he was taking upon
him so long as the Corn Laws were maintained. Mr. Mill
therefore though approving of the provisions of Tithe Com-
mutation regretted that from not being accompanied with a
corresponding reduction of the duties on foreign corn, it oper-
ated as an increase of ' protection to domestic industry ' and
therefore to a comparatively unprofitable employment of
English capital. Apropos of all this political Economy would
UNIVERSITY COLLEGE 155
you be so kind as to send me the reference to Mr. McCullock's
article or articles in the Edinburgh Review on ' Absenteeism '.
1 have engaged to make a speech to prove that the expendi-
ture of the income of absentees in a foreign country does not
diminish the wealth of the country from which they emigrate.
Brady who is an Irishman is to take the opposite side. From
Ricardo's chapter on Foreign Trade, and an essay by John
Mill on the ' Influence of Consumption on Production/ I have
a clear notion of the general argument, or I should not have
undertaken to bring forward the subject. But there are some
parts of the questions that seem intricate, and that will require
some thought to be able to put clearly in a speech. It will be
very good practice, however, and I mean to take pains about
it."
Substance of a Speech on the question, " Does the Ex-
penditure of the Income of Absentees in a Foreign Country
diminish the Wealth of the Country from which they emi-
grate ? "
" I have troubled you, sir, to read the question a second
time in order that it may be well understood by all present,
that the question under discussion is a purely economical
question. We have nothing to do with the moral effects of
the emigration of absentees which indeed we could hardly
discuss without knowing something definite of their moral
character. We are only concerned with the effect of their
expenditure on the National Wealth. I certainly admit that
the assertion ' that the removal of absentees from one country
to another does not by withdrawing the expenditure of their
income, cause a loss to the country from which they emigrate,'
is generally considered to be a paradox. Indeed I uncondi-
tionally concede that if as is the common case the absentee be
a rich proprietor in the country, it will generally be found that
the neighbouring village or town at which he has been used to
purchase articles, will in general suffer and dwindle away in
his absence. Yet if this opinion were admitted to be a para-
dox, the opposite opinion lies under a similar reproach. For
that opinion derives a clear increase of national wealth from
' the expenditure of income '. Political Economists and
156 LIFE OF WALTER B AGE HOT
people of common sense have been accustomed to look to
labour and saving as the sources of accumulation. To the
sentimental idolence that loves to bewail the perpetual hard-
ships of human toil it will be consolatory to find that they
have been mistaken. It is delightful to learn that consumption
and expenditure are sources of wealth not perhaps of equal
but certainly of rival importance, assuredly in spite of the
popular opinion it would seem, that the true paradox, if para-
dox there be, is in the opinions of those who expect an aug-
mentation of wealth, not from production but from expenditure,
not from labour but from consumption. In the outset of the
discussion I call attention to the fact that we are only con-
cerned with that portion of the income of absentees which is
expended, and that we have no concern with the portion of it
which may be saved. I beg gentlemen to keep close to the
real subject as defined by the terms of the question. If the
savings of an absentee are added to the capital of a foreign
country they increase its wealth, and then the native country
of the absentee suffers by not having these savings added to
her wealth. But this is quite distinct from any assertion as
to the expenditure of the income of absentees.
" For some purposes it will be convenient to speak of the
country to which absentees emigrate, and I apprehend it will
be conceded that if they do no good to the country to which
they emigrate, they will do no harm to the country from which
they emigrate. Suppose then a certain number of absentees
emigrate from Ireland to France, would the expenditure of
their income be advantageous to France? or would it be in-
jurious to Ireland that it should no longer be the seat of their
expenditure ? If the absentee had all the articles which he
required exported from Ireland, would his consuming them in
France and not in Ireland be any way injurious to Ireland ?
Is Ireland injured by an Irishman's eating Irish beef and Irish
potatoes on board a Cork steamer ? Surely if she is not, no
one will maintain that there is any harm done to Ireland, if
the absentee take those same articles on shore in France and
eat them there. I go on to prove that what really happens is
scarcely more than this ; with only the additional complexity
UNIVERSITY COLLEGE 157
necessarily arising when a great number of commodities cease
to be distributed in one way by being distributed in another,
and when this change makes a corresponding change in the
departments of industry necessary to produce them. There
are some people, I believe, who think that the fact of the ab-
sentee's not using the Irish commodities, but French com-
modities which he had received in exchange for his own Irish
commodities, gives an advantage to France. But let the
French commodities and the Irish be laid in two parcels. We
know them to be of equal value for they were received one in
exchange for the other. It is admitted that the absentee's
using the Irish commodities is no injury to Ireland, and no
advantage to France. If then he consumes instead an equiva-
lent amount of French commodities, is there not the same
amount of wealth in France and the same in Ireland ? Those
then who concede that an Irish absentee's eating and consum-
ing in France the goods he had been used to consume in Ireland
would not be hurtful, cannot without obvious absurdity main-
tain that his exchange, those Irish goods for French goods,
and consuming the last is hurtful to Ireland, or advantageous
to France. The fact of the Irish goods being given in exchange
for French goods makes then no difference and we can con-
clude that in a state of barter there would be injury done to
Ireland.
" I do not know to what extent my honourable friend in-
tends to complicate this subject by introducing into the discus-
sion disquisition on money and bills of exchange. I believe
that here as elsewhere bills of exchange are mere means of facili-
tating interchange, that they are mere inventions for the conveni-
ence of traders and travellers, and introduce no new elements
into this question. As to money, it is obvious that the incomes
of any numerous body of absentees could not either safely or
conveniently be transmitted in the precious metals. But as
there must be something exported from Ireland, or Irish ab-
sentees could not derive the means of subsistence from their
Irish estates, it is clear that what they require will be exported
from Ireland in those commodities which it is at the particular
time most advantageous to export. There is indeed another
158 LIFE OF W 'ALTER B AGE HOT
process differing in its details, but coincident with this that I
have been describing in its effects. The French exports, to
come back to our former instance, may be diminished, and the
amount of Irish exports being undiminished, we shall have as
before an increase of commodities in France, and diminution
of commodities in Ireland exactly corresponding to the amount
of articles which the absentees require for the purpose of con-
sumption. This remains exactly as it was, before the con-
sideration of money was introduced into the subject. In case
my honourable friend should throw dust in your eyes with bills
of exchange I will read a clear statement taken from a writer
on the subject of what I believe to be the real facts of the
transaction between absentees and the persons with whom
their emigration brings them into contact. The writer is sup-
posing that an English landowner emigrates to the Nether-
lands, and observes : ' The operation of a bill of exchange in
connection with the absentee landlord would be this ; he prob-
ably requires many articles of English produce from habit, but
whether or no, there must be an export of English goods to
the amount of foreign goods he consumes, otherwise his re-
mittances could not be made to him. This bill represents his
share of the corn and cattle upon his farm, but the merchant
at Antwerp who does not want corn and cattle transmits it
to London in payment for the cotton and hardware which he
does want, or there may be another process. The agent in
England of the absentee landlord may procure a bill on the
merchant at Antwerp recognising in that bill the representation
of a debt he has incurred in England, and hands over the pro-
ceeds to the bearer of the bill. In either case the bill represents
the value of English commodities exported to foreigners.' I
beg that it may be distinctly understood that these complex
matters are not introduced into the debate as essential to my
argument. I should like nothing better than that there should
be an agreement entered into by all speakers not to name
money or bills of exchange in this connection. I want nothing
more than the conclusion that money and bills of exchange
only shorten and facilitate transactions which would go on
without them in a state of barter. I merely want you to keep
UNIVERSITY COLLEGE 159
the fact before your eyes that (in our former instance) an
amount of Irish commodities is exported to France exactly
equivalent to the French commodities which the absentees
consume ; and that as what is consumed by the absentees is
exactly equivalent in consequence of their emigration, no ad-
vantage accrues to France ; and that as what is exported from
Ireland is exactly equivalent to what they would have con-
sumed if they had remained in Ireland, their emigration causes
no diminution in Irish wealth."
After returning to London from Herd's Hill in August,
Bagehot began working for his degree and describes to his
father the course of his studies.
" I am principally engaged on Pure Mathematics at present,
and am going over carefully all the necessary ground — I am
going rather slowly perhaps, but I do not wish to leave any
enemies in my rear. It is best, of course, to take the Pure
Mathematics before the applied, since unless you know a
science well applications will certainly be obscure. After I
have finished the Pure Mathematics, I shall read the classical
books thoroughly, and then go to the Natural Philosophy, that
is to say to the applied Mathematics. Of course I shall also
read the Physiology, Logic, etc., but the main contention and
difficulty is in the other, and therefore I thought you would
like to know the order in which I had taken the subjects. I
took the classics in the middle for the sake of the variety
which will be refreshing. I have been reading some of the
Theory of Numbers, which De Morgan says is the best exer-
cise for the head possible, and certainly is a hard stretch for
my reading powers and memory."
On 1 5th August, 1846, Bagehot writes to his father : —
"... Yesterday I went out to wish Hutton good-bye,
and he asked me to walk with him into the city, and as I shall
not see him for a year at least, I thought you would not object
to his infringing on your time. I shall miss him a great deal.
Apropos of the law, I have just been reading in Foster's life two
letters very strongly disapproving of the profession. He seems
to have had a dislike of ' lawyers ' generally, and to have thought
their standard of morality and their practice decidedly inferior
160 LIFE OF WALTER BAGEHOT
to those of the rest of the community. He does not allege
any proof of this however, nor does he say what branch of
the profession he means by ' lawyers,' which may mean attor-
neys or barristers or both. I believe there is an impression
of the sort among many well-intentioned persons, and from
conversations which I have had with Dr. Hoppus at various
times, I should think that a dislike of law and lawyers was
rather general among the independent dissenters. This seems
too to be an old notion, as Cromwell, who in general spoke the
opinions of religious and scrupulous dissenters in his day, used
to say that English Law was ' an ungodly jungle full of snares
for the feet '. Do you think there is any ground for saying
that the average morality of barristers is lower than that of
the rest of the community ? If it were so there would arise
a presumption that there was something not right in their
occupations and perhaps in the practice of advocacy which
(though Foster does not mention it) is certainly the most
disputable part of their calling. But surely public men who
come from all ranks and all occupations are a fair test of the
morality and honour of the different classes to which they
belong, and it would be very difficult to prove that during the
last fifty years distinguished lawyers had been found more
wanting in probity and public spirit than other eminent public
men. Indeed until very recent times Sir S. Romilly and
Francis Horner, who were both lawyers, are the very
strongest instances of a reputation depending very much on
moral worth. Nor do Lord Eldon and Lord Stowell, to take
men very inferior morally to Romilly and Horner, at all, I
imagine, fall short of the average probity of the statesmen of
their time. If Brougham's youth be allowed to compensate
for the aberrations of his old age, Lord Lyndhurst is the only
instance that occurs to me of a lawyer in recent times
gaining very high eminence, and being notoriously destitute
of character. It is probable that lawyers are opposed to altera-
tions in law which unprofessional philanthropists think so ob-
viously advisable, that they impute unfairly moral obtuseness
to all their opponents. But this seems like the mercantile
men who came to Mr. Huskisson and asked for free trade in
UNIVERSITY COLLEGE 161
every part of commerce but that in which they were concerned.
No one who has fitted his mind to one system likes to take
it out again, and shape it to a new one ; nor can a disinclin-
ation to see the possibility of this change being for the better,
be justly imputable to any one as a moral fault. The more I
think of it, the more I incline to think the principle of ad-
vocacy quite defensible, though of the details I can of course
know nothing. Indeed I am staggered more by the difficulties
seen in it by Arnold and persons partaking of his deeply con-
scientious character, than by anything which I can see myself
in the practice.
" I cannot close this without telling you that my letters
from my mother have been very comfortable ones, although
I see the want in them which you point out. One cannot
wonder that her mind should be jaded by what she has gone
through. It brings before one very strongly the loss of my
Uncle Stuckey who would so easily have given her mind some
of the freshness and elasticity which it wants now. Yet how
much better is it than we expected six weeks ago."
He writes to his mother : " I have got a long essay to
write about ' Causation,' and the metaphysical theories about
it, of which there are not a few. The subject is very
mysterious, though most writers say their view of it is com-
plete and exceedingly simple. I am reading a long discus-
sion of the subject by Dr. Brown who thought that he had
explained the whole subject, but I am afraid he left the
matter exactly where he found it, in the most material points.
The main difficulty is in analysing the ideas of cause, power,
agency, efficiency and efficacy, etc., and in applying them
correctly after the analysis to the external world, and to the
mind. There is no reason, however, for turning this letter
into a metaphysical essay.
"... It will be a great thing for good thorough Whigs if
we get rid of the Irish Church, and if, as you say, Lord Ashley
says Sir R. Peel is prepared to destroy it. I wish I could
believe that Lord John Russell was ready to pull it down, but
he did not used to be ; and I think he would prefer endowing
the Catholics as well as the Protestants. Lord Grey would
ii
162 LIFE OF WALTER BAGEHOT
go to work in a more complete manner perhaps, and perhaps
the cabinet would find it pretty nearly as hard to agree about
the matter, as you do at Herd's Hill. Nevertheless as Arnold
used to say energetically something must be done. What the
dominance of Protestantism has brought Ireland to, we see ;
and one sees small wisdom in keeping the spiritual instruc-
tion of the Irish people in the hands of those under whom the
lower classes have grown up to their present frightful condi-
tion. When things are at the worst, some change seems
likely to be for the better."
Later he writes : —
" MY DEAREST MOTHER,
"You would do the state a great service if you
could point any way in which the state could teach religion
to all its subjects, when those subjects held different creeds,
and believed many of them that the creeds of others would
doom them to misery for ever. The religion taught in a
national system of education ought in my view to be a
national religion. But in England we have no national
religion. One part of the nation believes one thing, and
another believes that the creed of the first is fatal to their
salvation. Why the very rulers who are to select the religion
have every sort of diversity of opinion, and are we to postpone
all education till they agree? What you say about religion
being ' the one thing needful ' is true in one very important
sense ; but religion is not the only thing needful to make
people intelligent and instructed. That reading and writing
are quite necessary to give any degree of intellectual activity
in this age, I cannot suppose that you doubt, though your
expressions about religion being the only thing required would
certainly seem to imply it. Really one does hope with
Carlyle that after ' a thousand years of ineffectual considera-
tion, England really will find courage and capacity to teach
all Englishmen the alphabet. It is (he continues, I quote
from memory) the belief of the present writer that such a task
does not require superhuman powers.' It may be very true
that in planning a Utopian community, one would give to
UNIVERSITY COLLEGE 163
Government supposed to be religious and agreed in opinion
the task of providing a religious education ; but here in
England what are we to do ? One thing at least experience
and fact seem to show that unless the people are instructed,
they will not be religious. Are they religious now? Can
teaching the alphabet make them worse?"
As the examinations for his degree drew near the usual
despondency is expressed. " I have never been without fears
and I am now entirely without hopes," Bagehot writes to his
father, " though as the time draws near my fears increase
faster than my hopes."
Mr. Hutton writes : " Do get the scholarship. I know
you can if you try."
The day before the examinations Bagehot suffered so much
from giddiness, headache, and pain in his side that Dr. Hoppus
advised his not going to Somerset House. However he did.
" The examiners," he writes to his father, "have been very
kind, and seemed very sorry for my illness yesterday. Mr.
Jerrard said that in my papers on Tuesday I showed myself
very well prepared, and as this is all the good I am likely
to get from this examination, I had better make the most of
the compliment. I am convinced that the papers I sent up
yesterday were so bad, that no honours can be awarded to me."
"... There is no use in writing my own opinions and con-
jectures on the matter however, as the event will soon show us
certainly how the matter really lies. I never met with anyone
who was a good judge of how he had done at an examination,
and of course no one can know how those who are competing
with him have done. Mr. Grote is going to preside at the
distribution this year in compliment, I suppose, to the history
of Greece which he has recently published. Is it not singular
that a Benthamite politician should publish two bulky volumes
on the poetical legends of ancient Greece? I have heard that
it is rather imaginative in some parts which no one would have
guessed from the author's speeches on the ' Ballot '. I hope
to be able to get out of town either to-morrow or Saturday
week. I have some work to finish for Mr. De Morgan which
will detain me till that time, It is no compliment to say that
164 LIFE OF WALTER B AGE HOT
I want to come home exceedingly ; for I am so tired of Lon-
don that I should be glad to be out of it on any terms. My
dislike of London came on quite suddenly, as it always does,
two or three days ago. I know from experience that it
will not go off till I have had a run in the country for a short
time. I shall, as you know, soon have to come back to bricks
and smoke, but this must be endured. I think the people
who come up to London ' for the season ' must be insane ; or
they must have different tastes from mine. I will now collect
all the necessary information about the Inns of Court. I
suppose you are watching the slow, but sure progress of the
Corn Bill through the House of Lords with considerable in-
terest. I have not read any of Ld. Ashburton's speeches in
favour of his 'amendments'. Does he still adhere to the
doctrine that wages rise and fall with the price of corn ? In
1815 it is remarkable that this was the universal opinion.
One man did say something that indicated a doubt about it.
But Horner put him down by saying he hoped the house
' would hear no more of such heresies '. Ld. Ashburton, who
does not seem to get wiser as he gets older, may have in this
instance kept to the creed of his youth ; though he is now
doing all in his power to destroy the credit he gained by op-
posing the passing of the Corn Law thirty years ago."
Notwithstanding his confidence in having failed Bagehot
passed in the first class and obtained the scholarship.
CHAPTER VI.
AN INTERREGNUM.
THUS ended the days at University College. Bagehot left
Dr. Hoppus and took lodgings in Great Coram Street.
Intellectual and moral philosophy were the subjects he then
took up for special study, being those in which he wished to
take his M.A. degree. Mr. Hutton notes in his memoir, how-
ever, that " 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 dis-
posal ".
Mr. Hutton was at Heidelberg in 1847 studying theology,
and falling in love with Miss Mary Roscoe. Walter missed him
greatly. He returned to England in September, 1847, to
study at the Manchester New College. Dr. Martineau was at
that time the head of theological learning at the College, and
accessible Liverpool was the residence of the Roscoe family.
He writes to Bagehot : " I shall certainly not go in for my
M.A. next time, perhaps not for two or three years. I have
little or no time to spare for extra reading, and if I had every
day vacant, I might as well talk of beating you, as of confuting
a Chinese on a metaphysical question in his own language.
Martineau's lectures on Moral Philosophy are very splendid,
even more able than I hoped. He is lecturing now on Neces-
sity and Causation."
The following, from among many letters, may be quoted
to show the kind of discussions which Bagehot and Mr. Hutton
carried on in their correspondence with one another : —
165
1 66 LIFE OF WALTER B AGE HOT
" 6 GREAT CORAM STREET,
"20/A September, 1847.
" MY DEAR HUTTON,
" I have left your letter so long unanswered, that I
fear you will have forgotten the points which you told me to
write about. I concur with you in thinking, that minds not
self-conscious must be comparatively deficient in aspiration in
the sense of being but little occupied with the future state of
their own minds. I do not know exactly how far to agree
with you about J. H. N.'s (John Henry Newman) personal
character. I rather doubt his having less than the average of
self-consciousness. Do not you unconsciously take Martineau
as the standard whose self-consciousness is many million sizes
above that of ordinary mortals ? I do not think F. W. N.'s
(Francis W. Newman) much, if at all, below the average : he
(and his brother perhaps also) has quite enough to make him
a much better metaphysician than he is : but it seems to me,
that perhaps owing to over-activity and restlessness of mind
both the Newmans combine with a great facility of analysing
to a certain extent, a great disinclination (and almost an inability)
to analyse further. Also I think he is quite imaginative enough
to realise futurity or anything else as definitely as he pleased.
I am not sure that he does want aspiration (much at any rate)
in the sense of not desiring to do his duty better. Martineau's
aspirations very often amount to wishes for harder or higher
duties than those which he has at the time : and these M.
would not think it right to indulge ; he would think it his duty
to put forth his strong will and drive them off. To finish
about Newman, I do not think his want of self-consciousness
can be the reason for his wanting precise moral convictions.
Arnold, who"Vas not self-conscious at all scarcely, had very
precise notions of duty. I think in Newman's case the reason
is that his intellect is more subtle than his sense in discrimi-
nating : he can conceive finer shades of feeling and motive than
his conscience will confidently estimate.
" As to the peaceful nature of Protestantism. I only meant
that it repudiated the characteristic work of the Catholic
military ages ; viz. the organised living authority to be obeyed
AN INTERREGNUM 167
in all points of faith and practice ; the notion of ' an oracle ' is
essential to a positive Revelation ; and I do not imagine that
the Protestant belief in this is to be accounted for from the
circumstances of a period but simply from the truth of the
doctrine. If by the construction of the human intellect truth
has an advantage on the whole, we need only seek in social
circumstances for the sources of error. I have just read (in a
charge of Archdeacon Manning's) rather a good sentence on
ecclesiastical history. ' The world persecuted the church in
the beginning ; espoused her in the middle ages ; is disowning
her now.' It must have been an immense gain in the middle
ages that all their systematised thought was Christian and
spiritual. Ever since Hobbes in England, there has been a
systematic unchristian philosophy constructed by men of this
world (i.e. men who have not much cultivated the moral sense) ;
and one picks up scraps of this in one's infancy, and it takes
much trouble to be rid of them. There was much worldliness
in the middle ages no doubt, but there seems to have been no
organised philosophy to keep it in countenance. However,
anyone who can understand Hume, will not be in a hurry to
believe any irreligious philosophy. The choice for a man is
whether he will believe in God and duty, or whether he will
believe nothing. I agree with you quite in saying that the
Saint's Tragedy is deficient in severity of moral feeling.
Does not this amount to saying that there is a Germanism
about it ; I mean is not this the point in which the German
character is defective ; a severe discrimination as to voluntary
acts ? There is (as it seems to me, but I am a poor judge) a
rich overflow of feeling, but a want of strictness in the details
of action. Please to answer this. I am inclined altogether
to disbelieve the thesis which the Saint's Tragedy is to prove
about celibacy. I think it may be held, that the highest life is
an imitation of Christ's not only in its spirit but in its char-
acteristic circumstances. For perhaps these circumstances
comprise the maximum of opportunities for self-denial and for
a form of action that will morally improve mankind.
" About celibacy I think St. Paul argues satisfactorily that
it is essential to an absorption in the highest end of human
1 68 LIFE OF WALTER B AGE HOT
action : this is undoubtedly the teaching religion in such a
manner as effects a diminution of sin among mankind. This
cannot be the unremitting pursuit of anyone who is a member
of a family. Daily and secular cares will lay hold on a large
fraction of human life ; to follow in the highest manner our
Lord's earthly profession, we must be, as He was, homeless.
There is an important principle which seems to me to qualify
this. It is that no man should begin to put down the disinter-
ested part of his original nature, unless he has thoroughly put
down the selfish and the unnatural ; it would be an awful
thing, and yet it must have happened often, after conquering
the affections to succumb to the appetites. The affections are
the best aids in what may be called the inevitable sphere of
human action ; while necessary duties are neglected, it is sin
to dispense with any aid in getting through them, and to
undertake harder ones beside. To those who have to lead a
secular life, marriage is, I suppose, in the majority of cases, an
assistance in the performance of duty ; it is necessary to keep
a strong habitual feeling of disinterested affection (in the case
of most men) toward existing persons whom they habitually
see, and it is very difficult to do this in the case of friends,
because they are dispersed so widely and have such different
spheres of duty. You know Arnold's saying, that a family,
or religious intercourse with the poor, was necessary for an
Englishman. I think it might with pains be generalised into
a complete view of the subject. About divine self-denial I
think we quite agree. I only meant that it ought to be kept
consistent with the truth that the manner of virtue depends
on the unitedness of the mind in point of active motive, and
the greatest strain of executive. I like the second verse of
your hymn. The first and third not so well ; they strike me
as written under the orders of your will. Nobody but Newman
can contract with his imagination for a supply of verses. I
send you some of mine which are gloomy and I fear dull."
To William Roscoe Bagehot writes : —
" I left at your rooms a day or two ago a huge pile of
books of yours, which I hope turned up in due course, and
also three dishevelled looking copy books of mine full of an
AN INTERREGNUM 169
essay on Shelley. Concerning this latter if you, or Osier, or
both of you, would send me your opinion I should be glad,
because I have an indefinite respect for it at times which makes
me fear in moments of sanity that it is hopelessly and utterly
bad. If you have read it and think the last, you will please
to write and say so in so many words. You need not write
a detailed criticism if you do riot like, or in any other case
necessarily write that if you concur in the opinion of my
reasonable moments. Have you seen a play called the
Sainfs Tragedy just come out, written by a Mr. Kingsley, a
clergyman somewhere ? Buy it and read it if you have not
seen it, as it will agreeably diversify your Easter holidays. I
admire it excessively, it is more like the old English dramatists
than anything since then ; and takes up deeper problems than
they for the most part meddle with. You are dreadfully
fastidious about modern plays ; but I will answer for your
admiring this a good deal. I am in enormous haste as the
post ought to be gone ; but Somerset postmen are not incar-
nations of punctuality."
Mr. Hutton writes : —
" I was in Liverpool on Sunday and heard Martin eau
preach a very splendid sermon indeed. I was staying with
the Roscoes, and they had a letter from William saying he
had been looking over a critique of yours on Shelley ; what is
this ? and may I see it ? I enclose you the ' Jungfrau ' (a sonnet).
Send me word how you like it, and whether you assent to my
criticisms on your two pieces and adopt them or not. Many
thanks for them. In themselves they are fine, but they look
to me as if they had been written in pain or melancholy, and
while they are certainly not the less fine for that, they are yet
more interesting to me as coming more from your personality
than your other things, which have generally been too im-
personal."
About this time Bagehot writes : —
" MY DEAR HUTTON,
" I came to Town last Monday, and have been in-
tending to write before, but have not fancied that I was able.
170 LIFE OF WALTER B AGE HOT
When I received your last letter, I intended to write to you an
invective against your remarks on Judaism in it ; but owing to
delay my wrath has in great measure evaporated. The view
of the character of God contained in it seems to me in the
main coincident with the Christian, bearing somewhat the
same relation to it that the grand does to the sublime. What
you say of the Patriarchs seem to me to come to this much
only: that notwithstanding particular acts of meanness or
grossness or cowardice, men who are on God's side in the
great conflict between good and evil, and are in earnest on His
side are in His favour, and therefore His friends. If you grant
this, and it is difficult for a Christian to deny it, there is no
difficulty in believing the view which the Old Testament takes
of such men as Abraham or David. I have sometimes thought
that anthropomorphism (if the word is to retain its usual
offensive sense) ought to be defined as the attributing to God
any peculiarity of human nature not essential to our conception
of perfect holiness ; and perhaps it ought to include the taking
this our conception as an accurate result, and not as an approxi-
mation more or less distant from the result. As, however, there
are other names for this last form of irreverence, this much
abased need not perhaps be stretched to include it. There
are obviously two ways of holding the doctrine that man is
God's image, one the Greek of fashioning the Gods on the
exact model of interesting and attractive men ; and the other
that of the Christians, and according to their light of the Jews,
viz. the imputing to man the faculty of obtaining and in part
also the possession of moral attributes resembling those of
God so far as what is finite can resemble what is infinite. And
the first is perhaps the most winning form of anthropomorphism.
I have read Newman's book on the Jews and think it very
dull and poor. What does Martineau think of it ? I do not
like to speak evil of a book of Newman's, but I cannot speak
well of this one. There is no appreciation of the poetry or
the religion of the Jews, nor of the great characters in the
history."
Walter Bagehot and Mr. Hutton were in those days
amusing themselves by writing verses which they sent to one
AN INTERREGNUM 1 7 1
another to criticise. Mr. Huttori writes of verses by Bagehot :
" I admire exceedingly your two shorter pieces, the other not
so much ; it is cold imagination, and not graceful. You seem
fond of idiots, there's a good deal about them. I have seldom
read a finer verse than the first four lines beginning : —
Since dull-eyed Love with idiot haste
O'er human graves has restless paced,
Musings have soothed at evening hour,
As woman's words man's world-worn power.
"There is something of a far deeper sense of weariness and
ov&r-taxed will than I think you ever felt, or at least expressed,
till lately in the two exquisite lines : —
Since labours' weary curse began
To dog the steps of anxious man.
" Your imagination is, I think, something like Gibbon's des-
cription of his own, ' rather strong than beautiful,' and it is in
the sublimer half of poetry that you excel most, not in the
beautiful half. I admire both pieces far more than anything
I have read of yours before."
Other verses which Walter Bagehot wrote about this time
betoken moods of profound melancholy, such as the fol-
lowing : —
As an idiot mother prowling
For a lost and roaming brood ;
As a wild hyaena howling
For her foul and cankered food ;
So ravenous pain strays scowling
Round lean life's banquet crude.
SONNET
on your (Mr. Huttoris) speaking of " causeless melancholy ".
The highest spirits deepest sorrows claim,
The noblest destinies are tinged with fear ;
To sadden careless instinct Jesus came,
From gladdest eyes to draw the scalding tear.
No pain is causeless ; o'er God's mightest sons
Two angels Grief and Guilt divide their sway ;
He who affliction's icy tempest shuns
Must tread a path where fouler breezes stray.
172 LIFE OF WALTER B AGE HOT
The heavy steps of sad repentance lie
Along the burning sands by passion spread,
But they who shrink not from a wintry sky,
High o'er the Alps of sinless sorrow tread.
The pilgrim bent Messiah's land to gain
Must pass a desert, or a mountain chain.
April, 1848.
Bagehot writes to Mr. Hutton : " I send you Roscoe's
criticism on my poems which will amuse you. I like both
your sonnets, but the Pauline one the best ; as the Star
(which is he?) is in your personal equation and not in mine.
Isn't it rather a petty form of fire worship ? Also is not
Cluster around thee every smile and sigh
Spring from affections mocking times control,
rather a large consignment of feeling to send on so distant
a voyage ? Does not the attraction (or the attractiveness at
least) vary directly as the square of the distance? I met
your family (i.e. your sisters and your eldest brother) at the
Torrington Square Roscoes. And I told them in a moment of
temporary insanity that you seemed in good spirits ; your last
letter being awfully dismal. I hope I'm not a moral agent at
times. I often say the exact contrary of what I should know
very well, if I thought the least, in a calm tone of utter con-
viction."
At no time, it would appear, was Walter Bagehot more
painfully confronted with the insolvable mystery of his home
trouble than in the years between his college life and his final
decision to leave London and turn his energies to business.
This decision, it will be remembered, he was advised by
his mother to take in 1845. In his essay on "Hartley
Coleridge," he quotes Keats' words in the Preface to Endymion,
which, judging from his poems and passages in his letters,
partially describes the phase he was at this time passing
through. "The imagination of a boy is healthy, and the
mature imagination of a man is healthy, but there is a space
of life between, in which the soul is in a ferment, the character
undecided, the way of life uncertain, the ambition thick
sighted."
AN INTERREGNUM 1 73
Much might be written on the effects produced by contact
with insanity ; on the depressing reaction on the nervous system
following the excitement, tension, and anxiety caused by it ;
of the distorted and exaggerated view many of the ordinary,
commonplace circumstances of life are apt to take while the
mind is suffering from such contact. Moreover, it creates a
sort of double life. The habit of having always to exercise
caution and discretion, always to have to look out for
danger signals, while hiding what is uppermost in the thoughts,
creates a condition in which the natural impulses get wired
in by a hedge of reserve, and which prevents a free happy
expansion natural in temperaments such as Walter Bagehot's.
The uninitiated understand so little, the sore is so acutely
sensitive, that an instinctive shrinking arises from challenging
the best-intentioned sympathy. It is a painful subject, but in
attempting a biography, sins of omission count as no less
immoral than sins of commission. By omitting existing condi-
tions of mind and circumstance, inadequate impressions must
necessarily result. Walter Bagehot started in life with as
high spirits, as healthy a temperament, and as sound an under-
standing as any human being ever possessed, and it is lament-
able to trace how directly and indirectly his health and
buoyancy were undermined by the pain, wear, and stress of
the family calamity, by " The dark realities which are, as it
were, the skeleton of our life, which seem to haunt us like a
death's head". Although he weathered each storm that arose
with affectionate discretion and courage, the cloud was ever
there, hanging over his life, dimming the play of sunlight on it,
suppressing that causeless, exultant happiness to which his
natural temperament was prone, and which is the kindliest
favour the fates can tender to youth.
Living alone in lodgings Bagehot felt the weight of this
dark reality in its most depressing form. While at Univer-
sity College the companionship of other students suited his
sociable leanings ; and study under professors such as De
Morgan, Long, Maiden, and Hewitt Key, acted as an intel-
lectual stimulant. When at home, though the agitations
might be more acutely disturbing, there were alleviations not
174 LIFE OF WALTER B AGE HOT
found in the lonely lodgings in Great Coram Street. The
devoted affection and wise counsel of his father, the charm of
his mother's personality, Herd's Hill, which he loved, and the
beauty of his native country, all tended to give a less cruel
aspect to the tragedy ; whereas the loneliness of his life in
London accentuated it. The London he was then living in
was an ugly London to him. He was keenly sensitive to the
visible as connected with the invisible, and there was nothing
in the London in which he then dwelt to feed, as at Herd's
Hill, the leisure moments with the soothing delights of colour
and atmosphere : nothing outward to uplift the spirits after
the day's work, no visible stimulus to the poetic and spiritual
aspirations which had been his from childhood. In after days,
referring to this dreary time, he said he ought to have had a
horse to ride, "that would have mended matters". Bagehot
nevertheless would have scorned the idea of allowing himself
to become a victim of anything approaching despair. " If
you would vanquish earth, you must invent Heaven," he
writes in his essay on Macaulay. " His real strength," as he
said of Hartley Coleridge, "was in his own mind," and the
force of his own mind was his defence against spectral scares,
while he was already beginning to feel " the excitement or
origination" as a stimulant against depression. From his
father he inherited a singularly level-headed sense of duty,
and strength of will to follow what conscience dictated.
He was fully alive to the sensitiveness of his brain. " Though
it be false and mischievous to speak of hereditary vice," he
writes in the Hartley Coleridge essay, "it is most true and
wise to observe the mysterious fact of hereditary tempta-
tion. Doubtless it is strange that the nobler emotions and
the inferior impulses, their peculiar direction or their pro-
portionate strength, the power of a fixed idea, that the inner
energy of the very will, which seems to issue from the core of
our complex nature and to typify, if anything does, the pure
essence of the immortal soul, that these and such as these
should be transmitted by material descent, as though they
were an accident of the body, the turn of an eye-brow, or the
feebleness of a joint, if this were not obvious, it would be as
AN INTERREGNUM 1 7 5
amazing, perhaps more amazing than any fact which we know ;
it looks not only like predestinated, but even heritable election.
But, explicable or inexplicable, to be wondered at or not
wondered at, the fact is clear, tendencies and temptations are
transmitted even to the fourth generation, both for good and
for evil, both in those who serve God and in those who served
Him not." Walter Bagehot was well aware that his nerves
were sensitive and excitable, that his imagination often swept
him off the solid groundwork, and that he could not, like his
father, maintain the same patient equanimity of temperament
in meeting the difficulties at home. He felt a sympathy with
Wordsworth who used to say that he was " frequently so rapt
into an unreal transcendental world of idea, that the external
world seemed no longer to exist in relation to him, and he
had to convince himself of its existence by clasping a tree or
something that happened to be near him ". Mr. Hutton says
that Walter Bagehot had " the visionary nature to which the
commonest things often seemed the most marvellous, and the
marvellous things the most intrinsically probable," and he
himself writes in " The First Edinburgh Reviewers " : "A clear,
precise, discriminating intellect shrinks at once from the sym-
bolic, the unfounded, the indefinite. The misfortune is that
mysticism is true. There certainly are kinds of truths, borne
in as it were instinctively on the human intellect, most in-
fluential on the character and the heart, yet hardly capable of
stringent statement difficult to limit by an elaborate definition.
Their course is shadowy ; the mind seems rather to have seen
than to see them, more to feel after than definitely apprehend
them. They commonly involve an infinite element, which of
course cannot be stated precisely, or else a first principle, an
original tendency, of our intellectual constitution, which it is
impossible not to feel, and yet which it is hard to extricate in
terms and words." These vaguer, mystical truths Walter
Bagehot brought into the compass of his sense of reality.
His imagination gave him the power so to pierce the mist that
he could convey definitely in his writings the sense of the in-
definite. His imagination carried him far into dreamlands, into
the attitude of " Shakespeare's greatest dreamer, Hamlet," into,
1 76 LIFE OF WALTER B AGE HOT
the philosophic speculations of Kant. " How," discusses Kant,
"is Nature in general possible?" But Bagehot's imagination
also brought him back on to firm ground. He discerned how
disastrous is the result to those who indulge in feeding only on
the pleasant pastures of dreamland. Of these he writes :
"What is to fix such a mind, what is to strengthen it, to give
it a fulcrum. To exert itself, the will, like the arm, requires
to have an obvious and a definite resistance, to know where it is,
why it is, whence it comes, and whither it goes." Life had to
be lived, and to live it well was Bagehot's aim. Very favourite
words of his were Shelley's : —
Lift not the painted veil
Which those who live call Life.
Bagehot's melancholy sonnets were written for himself and
his friends, whereas the public was given matter of quite a
different character. He entered the arena of authorship by
two articles for the Prospective Review, which was then edited
by his friend William Roscoe. The first alluded to in Mr.
Hutton's letter was on Currency, written in 1847, the second,
also for the Prospective, on John Stuart Mill, in 1848. He
writes to Mr. Roscoe : " I am come to London in September
to read Law and write a review of John Mill's Pol. EC. for the
Prospective. I have got a great reverence for my own virtue
in consequence, and am in immense danger of doing nothing
now I am here ; one lives to reward merit. The fates seem
to think or feel differently, however, as I am in much trouble
about John Mill, who is very tough, and rather dreary. I am
trying to discuss his views about the labouring classes. Most
of his peculiar views come in there, and the subject is of more
interest than any other that I could select. The theory of
population is in an unpleasant state, and it is very difficult to
find sure ground upon it. ... It would be a charity to write
to me, for London is dull, even to me, who am always a solitary
animal."
After the article appeared, Mr. Hutton writes from Berlin :
" I was much interested in your review of Mill. I didn't
think, however, it was as able as your article on the Currency,
and I find Martineau thinks so too. It follows Mill so much.
AN INTERREGNUM 1 7 7
I am sorry you don't blow up Mill more. I should have
thought there was more room for it, as to his theories respect-
ing the future of the working classes, which you do allude to,
but not at any length. The doctrine he urges so much about
population I dislike extremely." Again referring to it, Mr.
Hutton writes in another letter : " Your hatred to your article
is quite possible ; it is extremely clever, and will, I am sure,
be very much admired. I only said you could write a better,
but if I had read it first in the Prospective without knowing
by whom it was, I should have been astonished and delighted
with it."
To his mother Walter wrote cheerfully from London, never
dwelling on his moods of depression. He chose subjects
likely to amuse her, and interest the best part of her mind,
though when he thought he might avert a crisis in her malady,
he wrote without any reserve concerning it.
In December, 1847, he writes: "Mr. Stanley, Arnold's
Biographer, has just brought out a volume of sermons and
essays on the Apostolic age. I admire the sermons exceed-
ingly. Mr. Stanley is a little man with grissly black hair,
and piercing black eyes that look like a Jew's ; very singular
and clever looking. I went to a queer party at Newman's
(Mr. Frank Newman, then Head of University Hall) a night
or two ago. He manages a party worse than anybody I
ever saw. A good many ladies and a good many gentlemen,
but none of the gentlemen knew any of the ladies except Mr.
Newman, and one gentleman who, being married, vigorously
fought shy of his own wife. All the ladies worked dismally
in a meek way ; and the men talked politics and metaphysics
in another room, Newman peering through the folding doors
at the ladies, being afraid, I suppose, they would make a rush
and swamp his proof ' that all philosophy began in nonsense '.
I have been there once or twice before ; but none of the parties
was so queer as this one. The last time he talked to Smith
Osier (there were about twenty people there) and myself,
leaving the rest to shift for themselves."
From Oxford, while staying with his friend Constantine
Prichard, Fellow of Balliol College, Bagehot writes : —
12
178 LIFE OF WALTER B AGE HOT
* MY DEAR MOTHER,
" I am afraid the family will be wroth with me for
not writing ; but the philosophers take up so much of one's
time and tire one so during the rest of it that really not writ-
ing is excusable. Prince Albert has just been exhibiting
himself here in the Ethnological Section of the Association.
Dr. Prichard and Chevalier Bunsen, and Dr. Latham went off
about Ethnology, languages, ancient Egypt, etc., which the
Prince tried hard to look as if he understood, but did not suc-
ceed completely. He was attended by Sir R. Inglis, who
contrives to look knowing very well, and attends the sections
as diligently as any philosopher of them all, though he most
likely does not know much more about the matter than per-
severing ladies who sit all day in the Mathematical Section.
Mr. Laverrier and Mr. Adams (the rival calculator of the
position of the new Planet Neptune) are the great philosophi-
cal attractions. Mr. Adams is the best to look at a good
deal, as Laverrier is a yellow-haired pink little man with in-
visible eyes, and no expression of face at all. Dr. Faraday is
here, and gave a statement that they can now by recent dis-
coveries turn diamonds into coke, but it does not seem that
they can turn them back again ; so that the jewellers will not
suffer. Sir J. Hirschel is the most interesting of the physical
philosophers, and I think the most attractive mentally of them
all. The most interesting Oxford man whom I have met here
is Mr. Stanley, the writer of Arnold's life. He is a son of the
Bishop of Norwich whom I met at his rooms at breakfast the
other morning. Ehrenberg the great animalcule finder is
there ; he looks rather like a squashed animalcule himself.
The Bishop of Oxford preached yesterday at St. Mary's, the
University Church. It happened curiously that yesterday was
the day for an old bequest sermon on pride and the vanity of
human knowledge ; so that the physical philosophers kicked
it in. The sermon was a good one on the whole, though too
rhetorical for the Tractarians here who like plainness of speech.
The Prichards are staying at Wallingford, and come in daily.
The doctor slid off the platform during the rush of Prince
Albert to a neighbouring corner. Bunsen's speech was to a
AN INTERREGNUM 179
considerable extent an eulogism on the Doctor's Book.
Ethnology is only a subsection of the British Association. You
seem to doubt a little whether you shall come on Tuesday, to-
morrow, in your last letter. However, I mean to return to-
morrow, and to go to Hampstead in the evening to receive you.
Possibly something very attractive may turn up here, and I
may stay, but it is not likely at all.
"Believe me,
" Yours obediently, though in great haste,
"WALTER BAGEHOT."
Again from Oxford, while paying another visit to the
Prichards, Bagehot writes : —
" MY DEAREST MOTHER,
" I reached Oxford in perfect safety on Monday
evening. The Prichards were all well and expecting me. They
seem fitted in very nicely here, much better than they ever
were in London. I am going to stay here till to-morrow
Friday, as I am going to dine at Oriel with one of the fellows
there who is a great logician and very ugly to the eyes. The
only great gun whom I have seen here that was new to me
is Mr. Sewell, the moral philosopher and High Church divine.
I cannot say I much admire his books, but he is indisputably a
capital talker, not much like a divine but with some shrewdness
and a good deal of terrestrial knowledge and a large fund of
clever stories. He was the life and soul of a dinner party
given to the Coleridges to which I was admitted."
Walter had studied the philosophy of Kant with great in-
terest. He writes to his friend, Sir Edward Fry, in May,
1846 : " I have been reading some of Kant the founder of the
modern school of Metaphysics in Germany and France. He
appears to me to have been a man of preternatural acuteness,
no little confidence in himself, to have been very fond of the
complexities of an artificial system, and to have been defective
in the power of diffusing simplicity over a subject by the con-
stant application of master-truths. However, he has greatly
advanced study of mental philosophy, and to anyone who
wishes to cultivate the power to acute discrimination his works
i8o LIFE OF WALTER B AGE HOT
may be recommended as constantly requiring the exercise of
that faculty. It is a great pity that he had so little power of
explaining his meaning. His vast and barbarous terminology
is enough to terrify any Englishman but one who, like myself,
is a fanatical devotee in the service of metaphysics. "
Mr. Hutton writes in his memoir : " Walter Bagehot took
the gold medal in Intellectual and Moral Philosophy with his
Master's degree in 1 848, in reading for which he mastered for
the first time those principles of political economy which were
to receive so much illustration from his genius in later years ".
Bagehot's and Mr. Hutton's endeavours at this time to thresh
out various points in theology and morals, were often started
by the views held by Newman and Martineau. Mr. Hutton
still retained the attitude of a pupil inspired by Walter Bagehot's
superior genius. " I think you are right that it is impossible
to conceive moral evil ever totally exterminated from a free
world, there can only be a partial approach to it, leaving a
constant quantity always there ; at least so it seems to me. I
recollect our first talk about an emotional God very well, and
the exact place in the New Road where it took place ; that is
one of the many examples in which I have begun by violently
contesting your opinions and learning to believe them at last.
I believe I owe more to you in matters of philosophy and faith
than to any number of individuals under the sun, Martineau
perhaps excepted, but even here I am very doubtful."
Dr. Prichard died on 23rd December, 1848, at the age of
seventy-two. Of him and his family, excepting always his
Uncle and Aunt Reynolds, Walter Bagehot had seen more
than of anyone outside his college life, both during the Bristol
and London days. Through his son Constantine, Bagehot
was first introduced to Arthur Clough, who resigned his fellow-
ship of Oriel College, Oxford, in November, 1848. Francis
Newman, having vacated the post of Principal of the Univer-
sity Hall, London, Mr. Clough was elected to it. Bagehot
had expended time and money in establishing this Hall for
residence in connection with University College, and it was
through his and Mr. Roscoe's exertions that Mr. Clough was
offered the Headship.
AN INTERREGNUM 181
Walter Bagehot's health had broken down while he took
his M.A. He was in so weak a state that he had to lean on
a friend's arm when he went up to receive the gold medal.
He revived at Herd's Hill, and returned to London in
November, 1848, to read Law in the Chambers of Mr. Hall,
afterwards Vice-Chancellor Sir Charles Hall.
It was during the two following years, when Arthur
Clough held the post of Principal of University Hall, that
Walter Bagehot and he saw most of each other. Mr. Hutton
writes that Arthur Clough was " the man who had, I think, a
greater intellectual fascination for Walter Bagehot than any of
his contemporaries ". Those who believe in inherited racial
refinement and who take an interest in tracing it, would find
if they did so that Arthur Clough and Walter Bagehot had
alike that peculiar kind of refinement which nothing else
appears to be able to confer ; but on further inspection they
might also have traced the influence of a class to which their
nearer ancestors belonged, an influence which was advantage-
ous, expanding, as it did, their view of life in various direc-
tions. Both their families were of ancient lineage, owners for
many generations of large landed estates, the Cloughs in
Wales, and the Bagehots in Gloucestershire, while both their
more immediate ancestors had become merchants and bankers.
Both, to use Walter's own words describing Clough, were men
" of great honesty and moral courage, with an immense deal
of feeling ". Still, Arthur Clough appears hardly to have
been the right man in the right place as Principal of Uni-
versity Hall. Mr. Hutton writes : " Bagehot did what he
could to mediate between that enigma to Presbyterian parents,
a College head who held himself serenely neutral on all moral
and educational subjects interesting to parents and pupils
except the observance of disciplinary rules, and the managing
body who bewildered him and were by him bewildered. I
don't think either Bagehot or Clough's other friends were very
successful in their mediation, but Bagehot 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
1 82 LIFE OF WALTER B AGE HOT
dough'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."
What fascinated Bagehot first in Arthur Clough, was his
singularly fine and fastidious taste in all moral and intel-
lectual questions, combined with an " immense amount of
feeling," and a pure and unselfish nature. Clough scrupulously
refused to admit that anything could be admitted as certain so
long as his mind was conscious of any flaw in the entire proving
of it As he writes : " Action will furnish belief; but will that
belief be the true one ? This is the point you know." It was
a mind for ever weighing the pros and cons of every opinion,
idea and belief, allied to singularly positive and intuitive in-
stincts, while the poet's power in him could cast a charm over
all his wavering uncertainties. Such a nature was an ever-
fertile field of speculative interest to Bagehot. His poetry had
a fascination for him ; but while fully alive to, and sympathising
with, Clough's perception of the mazes which entangle a mind
in search for certainty — a mind at the same time sensible of the
many-sided aspects truths can take — Walter Bagehot could
emerge from the tangle into clear daylight, whereas Arthur
Clough apparently remained in the dim twilight. Both started
from the same disputable premises, but while Arthur Clough's
judgment at the end remained suspended, Walter Bagehot
brought the issue to a definite conclusion. An undeter-
mined result sufficed for the poet, but did not suffice for the
philosopher. Bagehot's mind worked with a force and an im-
petus which carried it through most problems. He had, to
use his own words, " the latent impulse and ' secret vigour,'
the invisible spirit which can only be demonstrated by trial
and victory ". We find these words in the article Bagehot
wrote after Mr. Clough's death in the National Review, 1861,
entitled " Mr. Clough's Poems ". In describing Clough's class
of mind he further writes : " There are, however, some minds
(and of these Mr. Clough's was one) which will not accept
what appears to be an intellectual destiny. They struggle
against the limitations of mortality and will not condescend
to use the natural and needful aids of human thought. They
AN INTERREGNUM 183
will not make their image. They struggle after an ' actual
abstract '. . . . You do not know how to describe these
4 universal negatives ' as they seem to be. They will not
fall into place in the ordinary intellectual world anyhow. If
you offer them any known religion they ' won't have that ' ;
if you offer them no religion they will not have that either ;
if you ask them to accept a new and as yet unrecognised
religion they altogether refuse to do so. They seem not
only to believe in an ' unknown God,' but in a God whom
no man can ever know. . . . Mr. Clough's fate in life had
been to exaggerate this naturally peculiar temper. He was a
pupil of Arnold's ; one of his best, most susceptible and favour-
ite pupils," and Bagehot proceeds to prove that Dr. Arnold's
teaching was bad for him. " He required quite another sort
of teaching ; to be told to take things easily ; not to try to be
wise over much ; to be ' something besides critical ' ; to go
on living quietly and obviously, and see what truth would
come to him. Mr. C lough had to his latest years what may be
noticed in others of Arnold's disciples, a fatigued way of looking
at great subjects. It seemed as if he had been put into them
before his time, had seen through them, had been bored by
them, and had come to want something else." Whatever
Arthur Clough was or was not, however, he fascinated Walter
Bagehot, and the two years in London when Mr. Clough was
Principal of the University Hall, were made more bearable to
Bagehot through constant companionship with him. Their
friendship continued to the end of Mr. Clough's life. He had
never cared for his work at University Hall, and resigned his
post as Head in 1852, and offered himself as a candidate for
the Principalship of a College at Sydney, but did not obtain it.
Having formed a close friendship with Emerson during his
visits to Europe, he left England for Boston in October, 1852.
During his term of office at University Hall, " he gradually,"
writes his sister, Miss Clough, " formed some new and valuable
friendships, among these his acquaintance with Mr. Carlyle was
one of the most important ". Another, certainly, was that with
Walter Bagehot.
After reading Law for six months with Mr. Hall, Bagehot
1 84 LIFE OF WALTER B AGE HOT
changed his work and studied under Mr. Quain, afterwards Mr.
Justice Quain, with whom in after years he continued very
friendly relations. All kinds of study had a certain attraction
for Walter Bagehot. He liked — to use his own words — "to
play with his mind," and nearly every study, however difficult,
took the form of an interesting game to him. At no time in
his life does he seem to have come to a dead wall, or to an
obstacle over which he could not vault, or round which he
could not steer. It was never irksome to him to exercise the
ingenuity and fertility of his brain. But, though liking both
Sir Charles Hall and Justice Quain personally, the study of law
per se had no attraction for him. In a sense it seemed to him
a waste of time — it occupied without satisfying. It necessitated
incessant attention and yet he did not feel it as sustaining or
stimulating food. Though the days seemed crammed with
work, there was a vacancy which left him a prey to depres-
sion. While the tide of life flowed apparently vigorously he
found himself at times turning somewhere out of its rushing
current, into a sort of back water in whose dreamy calm things
were reflected, things belonging to the "truths whose course
is shadowy," which " involve an infinite element," and " cannot
be stated precisely ". While studying law he felt these calmer,
higher — half thoughts — half instincts, were being starved. The
fine fabric of his brain was being usurped without being fully
utilised.
Mr. Roscoe, the friend Bagehot saw most constantly at
this time, likewise felt no enthusiasm for law as a profession,
and early abandoned it. He gave the reasons why he did so
in a letter to Mr. Hutton,1 reasons which he doubtlessly fully
discussed with Bagehot in conversation.
1 " I have been thinking of my relinquishment of the Bar, and with
more satisfaction, and more real conviction of the wisdom of the step, than
I ever had before. I sincerely desire to lead a religious life, I would say
I earnestly desire, but so far I have not advanced. But I have a profound
conviction that to be in all things a child of God is the highest and ultimate
object of life. All modes of life are to be looked at simply with reference
to this object. I am far from thinking that a man ought to neglect the
duties and opportunities of life, or even the higher pleasures which grace
it ; but a man must seek such a mode of life as in his own individual case
AN INTERREGNUM 185
In March, 1851, Bagehot writes from Herd's Hill : —
" MY DEAR ROSCOE,
"Would you be so kind as to look for me at ' Rex V.,
The Churchwardens of Crossley," 5 Adolphus and Ellis, page
10, and send me an account thereof. The point for which I
want it, is of this sort. Under the 59 George the 3rd, chapter
1 34, churchwardens have a power to mortgage church-rates to
obtain any sum they deem necessary for the repairs of the
church, Vestry, Bishop and Incumbent thereto assenting.
Now, some of my family being bankers, have been weak-
minded enough to lend £1,000 or so, on such a security with-
out requiring anybody to be personally liable. Everybody in
the parish has quarrelled with everybody, and the security is
will most surely and safely make these things the stepping-stones to the
highest end. My objections to the Bar are these : my health is so far
from strong, that there is every probability that it would give way entirely
under the unremitting exertions that a life at the Bar, if successful, would
require. My memory is so feeble, and my power of accumulating know-
ledge so limited, and requires such express and repeated exertions to yield
any fruit, that a lawyer's life would require from me a still more complete
devotion and absorption than it does from the ordinary mass of successful
practitioners. I see no adequate object to be gained by so complete a
devotion. I once thought I might exercise a personal influence on those
immediately around me, that I might find in being a ' religious lawyer ' the
highest and noblest usefulness. It was an ambition fondly cherished.
Must I say now it was above my strength, above my nature ? Must this
be one of those great visions of youth which fade in the growing day of
life ? It might have been made a reality, or I might at least have died
while striving to give it reality. It is no longer possible. I want energy
and spring to cope with the labours, difficulties, and trials of a lawyer's life.
I dare not put myself under temptations in which I feel too conscious I
should fail. I could not master the business sufficiently not to be exposed
to the temptation to petty untruthfulness in pretending to know more than
I did ; sometimes I might sacrifice from incapacity interests entrusted to me.
My vanity I dare not trust, nor my indolence ; and even granting the latter
subdued, there is real want of strength and stamina. Were it otherwise,
had I been faithful to my old aspirations, I see far greater difficulties in it
than I once did. ... In fine, I dare not face the temptations. I should
be obliged, if I wished for any success, to devote my mind so completely,
that it would be narrowed to one thing ; and I fear the religious medita-
tion which I so absolutely need, if I am to emerge into light, would never
be attained."
1 86 LIFE OF WALTER B AGE HOT
not forth-coming. By the deed of mortgage the money was
to be paid by six instalments beginning in '46. In fact they
only paid the first instalment and the first year's interest and
then quarrelled and the vestry or majority thereof refused to
make any rate and the churchwardens and minority made one
which they can't get paid and the validity of which is being
contested up at Wells in the Spiritual court. This was in '48
and since then they have made no rates whatever, and the
mortgagees have had nothing. They now imagine that it
would have a good moral effect, if they went for a mandamus
to the churchwardens to make the rate. Montague Smith
whose opinion they took rather throws cold water on them
and seems to say that the aforesaid case decides that each
instalment should be paid annually when due and that the
mortgagee loses his money, if he does come that very year for
a mandamus to get a rate made, and if possible collected. I
confess this strikes me as monstrous. I can understand that
Lord Denman may have held, say as against a parishioner,
that the proper mode of managing the parochial business was
to make and levy annual rates to discharge annual liabilities,
but I can't fancy that a mortgagee is to lose his money unless
he applies to Q.B. the very moment it becomes due. John
Lord Campbell will look at that, I think. In this very case
the mortgagee simply waited because the validity of the rate
actually made being contested, they thought it useless to
compel others to be made in the same form. They may be
wrong in this very likely but I can't think they deserve on
that account to be mulcted of their money. No rates could
now be made except by mandamus as the parish churchwarden
sticks out and refuses, but I think the farmers would pay a
rate that the Q.B. directed to be made. I should therefore
be immensely obliged if you would tell me about this ' anomal-
ous ' case which seems to me very hard, as I rather back up
my family to go for a mandamus on the general principle of
going ahead when you have the moral merits with you and
also on Notteram's rule ' Bagehot always recommends proceed-
ings '. It is a happy case altogether, they got one suit on
for judgment in the Bishop's court when the Defendant malic-
AN INTERREGNUM 187
iously died and of course the suit abates and it will take several
years apparently to work another up to the same critical
point. Brilliant system altogether church-rate law. I re-
commend Main's being sent in for a mandamus and hope to
carry it. I believe (this case excepted) they would win and
there does not seem to be anything even in the objections
taken to the rate which has been made, but it isn't easy to
get the money for all that — so out of the suavity of your dis-
position tell us about Lord Denman's decision. He muddled
a good deal in his time. I shall be up this day week, and
have settled to go into equity. I couldn't live cheerfully
down here, and though I regret immensely that I ever opened
a law book, I must stick to London now come what may,
and I am sure of enough to live on, in any case.
"Ever yours,
"W. BAGEHOT.
" I am responsible for some delay in sending you the
account of Violenzia, for which I apologise. My old landlady
had a really profound idea that it was too big for foreign
postage."
Violenzia was a tragedy Mr. Roscoe had written. He was
abroad at this time and Bagehot and Hutton undertook to
correct proofs and see the publisher for him.
From Great Coram Street, Bagehot writes : —
" MY DEAR ROSCOE,
" I send you the final proofs of Violenzia. I received
yesterday from R. H. H. (Mr. Hutton) the Preface which I have
sent to Parker. I read it with much interest and like the
Sonnet and what you say of the play, exceedingly. I suppose
it is true and it is certainly excellently said ; but I altogether
object to the introduction of Kossuth and the Hungarian
refugees. I can't see that they have anything to do with the
matter in hand. If it appeared on affidavit that Ethel was a
Magyar, and the king an Austrian, no doubt there would be a
connection, and I would strongly advise the introduction of this
link. And seriously I think a dedication — still more a dedica-
tion requiring an argumentative defence — should have some
1 88
LIFE OF WALTER BAGEHOT
reference to the matter in hand, and this plainly has not, and will
strike readers, at least it did me, with alarm and consternation.
Moreover you can't afford space enough to give the real reasons
for your opinion, and I doubt whether it is very accordant with
that superexcellent taste for which you, — , — , to give a more
obiter dictum on a point whereon the public mind is so divided.
This should only be done when the writer has shown, by his
familiarity with kindred topics or otherwise that he knows
more of the matter than his readers. Now it does not appear
from this play that you know anything about Hungary, it
does appear that you know a good deal about women, but
perhaps there is no necessary connection in these cognitions.
I don't think opinions of this sort much affect the public, there
is a national feeling against convictions which a man is very
eager to express, they are to be suspected.
"Yours ever speaking plainly,
"W. BAGEHOT."
CHAPTER VII.
PARIS.
DURING the year 1851, matters had been going from bad
to worse with Bagehot. With the usual knack he had of
knowing what was the best thing to do under difficulties, in
the August of that year he flies off to Paris ostensibly to per-
fect himself in the French language, but more exactly in order
to change the mental atmosphere. He had the good luck to
come in for a Revolution. Mr. Roscoe, by a small kindness,
had helped him to take this step, and Bagehot writes to him
from Paris : " I was very unwell mentally and bodily when I
came here. I had a good deal to put me out. Everything of
all kinds had gone wrong with me for a long time, and there
were some family matters which much annoyed me besides, so
I was in a very weak-minded state and what you did for me
was a real satisfaction just then, and I am very much obliged
to you. I am much obliged also to Sanford for putting in my
letter which is a queer thing I fancy.1 Please to tell him to
send me a copy. There is no difficulty. I have half written
another which I will send you next week, as soon as I have
read over the other. I am rather full on the subject — perhaps
in error — as my maxim just now is that a man's favourite
ideas are always wrong. But there are moments of truth
about my view that I should not have known if I had been
in England, and may be good for other people in consequence.
I confine my immorality to speculation, and to the perusal of
De B6ranger who is really a great poet."
Some years previously Bagehot's mother had visited Paris
with her brother, Mr. Vincent Stuckey. While there she had
1 First letter on the Coup (TAtat which Mr. Sanford, the editor, in-
serted in the Enquirer.
190 LIFE OF WALTER B AGE HOT
annexed a pink silk bonnet which she enjoyed for several
years, and a pretty china clock which still lives at Herd's Hill.
She had gone into society and had made special friends with
a French family, Meynieux by name, who welcomed Walter as
the son of the lady they had " idolised ".
"41, RUE DE VANGIRARD,
"20/^ October^ 1851.
" MY DEAREST MOTHER,
"I have not heard from you for a long time but I
suppose that you will write to me soon. Your friend Madame
Meynieux desired to be remembered to you with such exceeding
vigour that it seems a plain duty to put her affection in the
very front of my letter. I had the honour of dining with her
some days ago, and she made a really splendid panegyric on
her ' bien ancienne amie ' as she calls you (antiquity of course
being your line) for the benefit of a stout and impressive French
lady to whom she was introducing me. She stated that a few
centuries back when she had the pleasure of knowing you she
had been of all your many ' idolateurs ' and ' idolatrices ' by
far the greatest. I was fumbling for a Christian answer to this
heathenish sentiment and feebly striving to be agreeable to the
French lady aforesaid, when I was surprised to hear, in a voice
that seemed familiar to me, ' Hullo, I say, Bagehot '. It
turned out to be a legal friend of mine, Adams by name, who
in his surprise at seeing me very nearly overturned Monsieur
Meynieux (a round man fit to bowl with) who was advancing
with numerous bows to receive him. I admire your old friend
exceedingly.
" There is rather an interesting crisis in politics here just
now. Prince Louis has changed his tack and his ministers
won't change with him. The whole object and idea of his
present policy is to secure the Revision of the article of the
Constitution which renders him ineligible at the next Presi-
dential Election. This is rather a self-seeking end for the
head of a great nation, but he has this excuse that the country
really wish him to remain where he is, and all the better sort
of people are ready to revise the constitution in order to keep
him. Some of this attachment he owes to the good sense and
PARIS 191
the strength of character which in the main he has shown
during his time of office, but much to the general spirit of
timidity and depression which is the general sentiment here in
the middle and especially in the commercial classes. Anybody
who is in will be supported by people who dread any change
and live by the mercantile credit that Revolutions are certain
to destroy. On this account I think the President has a very
good chance of beating, though the legal difficulties imposed
by the constitution are very great. It required three-fourths
of the assembly to consent to the revision and there is an
organised opposition, partly Socialistic and partly factious
which is about, or rather more than a fourth, and which won't
hear of it at any price. The present plan is to break up this
opposition by proposing the repeal of a certain electoral law
which requires three years' continuous residence in a district
before you can gain a vote there. There is a good law
enough in itself, but perhaps scarcely wise here now. The
only sort of institution for which the Red Republicans have
any respect is Universal Suffrage and unless it could be really
and substantially allowed it seems unwise to tamper with it
and weaken the attachment to the one constitution which can
really pretend to any. It is hardly consistent also with the
Constitution of which Universal Suffrage is a main feature.
However, this may be the offer to the Red Republican opposi-
tion that he will consent to the abolition of this law if they will
on their side consent to the revision. Lamartine who is now
from personal grounds in opposition, Emile de Girardin, a sort
of French Cobbett, the head of the newspaper world, and a
member of the Assembly, are all ready to consent to this com-
promise. But it is yet doubtful whether the law of election
can be repealed, or whether if repealed, enough of the opposi-
tion would be willing to vote for the Revision. ' The board
has not determined on the result of what has taken place.'
But there is a general impression that somehow or other the
President will win, whether by removing or quashing the
technical difficulties is to be seen. The present constitution
is not liked, and the Republic is felt to be rather a lame and
impotent conclusion after being introduced with so great a
192 LIFE OF WALTER B AGE HOT
flourish of trumpets four years ago. The ouvriers use the
phrase Vous avez dine sur la Republique — ' You've been and
dined on the Republique ' as equivalent to the Anglican com-
pliment ' What a muff you are '.
" Yours affectionately,
" W. BAGEHOT."
Bagehot visited among others, Madame Mohl, whose salon
was the rendez-vous of notable people from all countries, and
who he was destined to see often in later years. He wrote
accounts to his mother of his social successes and failures, the
most amusing being a description of his attempts to waltz,
an art which he never mastered, as he became giddy before
any serious instruction could be made available.
"PARIS, October, 1851.
"Friday Evening.
" MY DEAREST MOTHER,
"I have added what / call waltzing to my other
accomplishments. It differs from what other people call by
that name, not only in the step which is of my own invention,
but also in its having no relation whatever to the music, and
by preserving its rotatory motion in a great measure by collisions
with the other couples. It's very amusing running small
French girls against some fellow's elbow, it's like killing flies
years ago. There is, however, the inconvenience that one
does not like to ask the same girl twice ; she might say she
had not insured her life, but if you are careful to select a fresh
subject for each experiment, the pastime will succeed. I do
not fancy it pleases the girls ; he dances tout seul (' all by him-
self) I heard one of them say with great indignation to her
female friends, as if a fellow of my age could be expected to
keep time with her or with the music either, and it pleases me,
it being a new, if not humane excitement, and is better than
talking feeble philosophy in out of the way corners.
" People here take great interest in Lord Palmerston's
retirement. The minister for foreign affairs is here, in general,
the first minister ; he was so always in Louis Philippe's time,
though in consequence of the domestic confusion the minister
of the Interior (the Home Secretary in our nomenclature) has
PARIS 193
naturally cut him out, and they know nothing of Lord John
Russell scarcely, and wonder at his having the power to turn
out Lord Palmerston who has been their bete noir for years
and whom they fancied was omnipotent. The reason seems
to be that he and Lord John got in a rage and the Queen cut
up rough (hard phrase that to do into French) for they don't
really seem to differ much about Louis Napoleon, so I
expound this, but the expression of my auditors is still puzzled.
' You don't explain it to me ' as Brother would say. Of course
they are too polite to impute the difficulty to my mode of
expression (they only cut you up afterwards like a rotten
potato) but ascribe it all to the complicated wheel-within-wheel
nature of the English constitution."
Writing to his father and mother, Bagehot describes what
he saw of the revolution of December, 1851 : —
" PARIS, *>tk December, 1851.
" MY DEAREST FATHER,
" I forgot the electric telegraph and thought that
my note would be the first or about the first intelligence that
you would receive of the new Revolution. Wednesday was
extremely quiet, unnaturally so almost, and everybody seemed
to stand in the streets to know as soon as might be what
would turn up ; however, no one seemed to like to stay still
in any place for fear that something of great importance might
have happened or be happening somewhere else. I assisted
in the evening at a great gathering in the Boulevards, and a
man whose name I could not learn read a paper announcing
the decheance of the President, but the appearance of a very
few soldiers sent the swarm in all directions, for they were
mere peaceful citizens or curious foreigners, and had no fighting
aptitude. Altogether the characteristic of that day was exactly
what Lord Byron in some letter calls ' quiet inquietude '.
" Yesterday, Thursday, the Coup cPEtat you will remember
was on Tuesday, was much more disturbed, the Paris Royal
was closed, and a formidable notice was affixed to all the walls
informing all persons that the ' enemies of order ' had begun
their operations. Being curious to see their tactics, I immedi-
ately hied to the Boulevard St. Martin which I fancied would
13
LIFE Of WALTER B AGE HOT
be the centre of operations, for it is in the narrow streets leading
out of that great thoroughfare that the most ' exalted ' of the
ouvriers are said to reside. I had not been misinformed, for as
soon as I got on the ground, the preparations for barricades
were immediately visible. It is a simple process, though there
being no paving stones on the Boulevards was a difficulty, but
the stones of a half-built house supplied the place excellently
well for the one where I was. These with palings, iron rails,
planks, etc., and three overturned omnibuses and two upset cabs
completed the bulwark. It took about half an hour to make
nine, as the Boulevards are about there very wide, but others
especially in the side streets were run up much more rapidly.
The people making them were of two very unlike sorts.
Immensely the greater number were mere boys or lads, gamins
is the technical word, the lower sort of shopboys and sons of
the better artisans, not bad-looking young fellows at all, liking
the fair, and in general quite unarmed. Beside these and
directing them were a few old stagers who have been at it
these twenty years — men whose faces I do not like to think of
— yellow, sour, angry, fanatical, who would rather shoot you
than not. Each barricade that I saw was constructed under
the eye of one or two, not more, of such fellows ; the most of
them do not, I was told, show until the building is over and
the fighting begins. They were implicitly obeyed ; indeed, a
man must have a great deal of pluck not to do as they said,
for they were armed, and a trifle bigoted in their temper.
These (Montagnards is their name technically) I very
studiously avoided, but I asked a question or two of some of
the young fellows, and found that they thought that all the
troups were out of Paris, that the provinces — Lyons especially
— were rising, and that all the military would be wanted to
prevent their march on the capital. It was likely enough that
there was a row at Lyons, but not likely from the distance that
they could yet be at the gates of Paris. Why the troups did
not come I do not know, but for I suppose a couple of hours
the barricade-people had it all their own way, and erected I
think five in that part of the Boulevards, one after another,
with about a hundred yards between them. I scrambled over
PARIS 195
two and got as far as I dared towards the centre. The silence
was curious : on the frontier a raging though industrious multi-
tude, within the kingdom no one, a woman hurrying home, an
old man shrugging his shoulders, all as quiet as the grave. I
did not stay long in the inside, as I feared the troups would
come and I might be shot that Napoleon might rule the French
or some Montagnard might be so kind as to do it just to keep
his hand in. The moment the barricades were done, they
began to break into the shops and houses, not to rob but for
arms. As soon as they were satisfied there was no. more
weapons to be had, they chalked ' death to robbers ' or some-
thing of that sort on the shutters and went away. I should
not think they stole sixpenny worth of any matter except
powder and guns. The Montagnards would have shot any
young fellow that tried it on. I tried hard to hire a window
to see the capture of the fortress as well as its erection but this
was not to be, for everybody said they meant to shut their
windows and indeed it would not have been very safe to look
out on them firing. I therefore retired, though not too quickly.
It is a bad habit to run in a Revolution, somebody may think
you are the ' other side ' and shoot at you, but if you go calmly
and look English, there is no particular danger. As I retired
I met the troups at some distance, slowly and cautiously
hemming in the insurgents. Anybody might go out who
would but no one come in. The whole operation reminded me
very much of the description of the Porteous mob in the
Heart of Midlothian. If you will read over that again you
will have the best idea of the thoroughbred Parisian emeute
that I know. There is the same discipline, order, absence of
plunder, and in the leaders the same deep hatred and fanaticism.
I am pleased to have had an opportunity of seeing it once but
once is enough, as there is, I take it, a touch of sameness in
this kind of sight, and I shall not go again into the citadel of
operation. In no other part is there any danger for a decently
careful person. To-day is much quieter. The troups soon
cleared my barricade, though I heard cannon and musketry,
the latter in plenty, and there was blood and a good deal of it
in the approachable parts of the Boulevards ; the field of the
13 *
1 96 LIFE OF WALTER B AGE HOT
hardest battle was not to be approached for soldiers. I have not
got time for a word more. You will have better accounts in
the English papers than we have here. Only those of the
Government are allowed to appear and these I know from the
description of what I saw are written to tranquillise the pro-
vinces and diminish the disorder much. However, my notion
is that the President will hold his own. Many thanks to my
Mother for her note and also for your letter — I will write in a
day or two.
" Yours ever,
"W. BAGEHOT."
"41, RUE DE VANGIRARD,
" PARIS.
" MY DEAREST MOTHER,
"... When I have not got this Parisian complaint
— for everybody now has at least a bad cold here — I am
extremely well, quite stout, gross and ruddy. I lost three
parties by being ill last week, to one of which, I believe, a big
one, your friend Madame Meynieux was to have chaperoned
me. However, I observe that dances like wheelbarrows are
much the same in all countries, and nowhere propitious to
people too muffish to waltz. One has to fall back on elderly
creatures and express edifying sentiments in bad grammar.
Not having ' been any place ' as Watty used to say, I have
not got anything to tell you. Politics are as dull as ditch-
water here now after the excitement, the only new thing is
decree of banishment apparently for life against some socialists
of note, and of temporary exile against M. Thiers and the
African generals, and Madame de Girardin, the great journal-
ist, and others. The African generals are much to be pitied,
I think, for they are a fine race of men ; the list of exiles is
thought numerous, I think, even by the President's friends — at
least the people on his side whom I have happened to hear of
— of course his enemies say there never was such ' tyranny ' or
oppression since the commencement of mankind. The Con-
stitution hangs fire, that he may have more time to fill up the
Consultative Commission — his privy Council, as he wants to
PARIS 197
get all the creditable names he can. I will write again in a
day or two when I am less stupid and have more to say.
" Yours most affectionately,
"W. BAGEHOT.
"P.S. — I was very sorry to hear of poor Mr. Spark's death
whose mild manners and valuable qualities everybody I think
respected. What a horrid loss of the Amazon, the French
papers live and thrive on it since the coup d'etat, except the
government organs ; they are at low life, and obliged to criti-
cise old prima donnas and ' fill their columns ' with accounts
of the state of the Navy, pleasant reading that, careful depor-
tations on old copy.
" My love universally."
' ' 7th December, 1851,
" Sunday.
" MY DEAREST MOTHER,
" At this moment Paris is as tranquil as a tea-party,
at any rate to the eye. The barricaders have been quashed,
and according to me there will be no more fighting of conse-
quence for some days and it may be for some months. I do
not think it possible for a populace to rise with bayonets so
close upon them ; the Government have as yet been very
determined, cruel and bloody according to their enemies, and
I cannot imagine that if they continue to pursue the same
policy there can be any insurrection of importance ; but no
one can know this. The Montagnards may turn desperate,
but they are much broken, their best leaders being in prison
and in London. I wish for the President decidedly myself as
against M. Thiers and his set in the Parliamentary World ;
even / can't believe in a Government of barristers and news-
paper editors, and also as against the Red party who, though
not insincere, are too abstruse and theoretical for a plain man.
It is easy to say what they would abolish, but horribly hard
to say what they would leave, and what they would find.
I am in short what they call here a rtactionnair, and I
think I am with the majority — a healthy habit for a young
man to contract. M. Bein whom I live with said to me, ' I
do not approve of this violence and coup d'etat, but I am for
198 LIFE OF WALTER B AGE HOT
the President because he's for "the tranquillity"'. People
want to be let alone ; it is clear that the Republic has been
burgled, and if the President were turned out no one knows
who would come in. For the moment, the alternative is
between him and the Socialists. How long he may last is
another question. Your friend Madame Meynieux pitched
into his private character yesterday at a great pace. She was
arguing with a French lady whom I did not know. I have
never heard two people talk so fast and so well at the same
time. M. Meynieux and myself looked on open-mouthed and
in perfect silence. I could not talk that pace in English,
much less in French, where I require five minutes to express
four ideas. I listened patiently for a long time. The French
lady was for the President and your friend violently against.
She is allied with some of the Parliamentary people whom he
has knocked about. She professes to be a Socialist but not a
Republican ; on the contrary she disdains forms of govern-
ment and is exclusively strong on the principle of ' associa-
tion '. I can't tell you, for I do not know, who is to associate
with whom ? She don't approve at all of the common Red
Socialist, indeed the weak point of the system is that no
Socialist will ever associate with any other ; all I know is that,
as they say in the kitchen, somebody is to ' keep company '
with somebody. M. Meynieux didn't seem so strong on that,
he is a man with good notions of food but not much general
ability, though jolly, and awake to the existing world. His
idea was that if he said anything on the Boulevards, he might
be 'had up' for it, which he didn't like. However, in fact,
people say what they please, and your friend did not please to
spare the President. Don't suppose society here is at an end.
People eat their meals — the shops are open. Rachel is to
play to-morrow. But of course there is uneasiness, great
uneasiness, though as my Father will have observed the funds
keep up miraculously. The English papers all stopped to-
day. I do not know if there is row in the provinces which
we are not to hear about. That would floor the Govern-
ment, at least if they had to withdraw troops from Paris."
It was in Paris, in the letters on the Coup cTEtat which he
PARIS 199
sent to his friend Mr. Sanford for insertion in The Enquirer
that Bagebot " found himself" as an author.
After referring to Burke, President Woodrow Wilson writes
of these letters : —
"Bagehot showed the same precocious power, and saw
clearly at twenty-five as at fifty, though he did not see as
much or hold his judgment at so nice a balance. There is
full evidence of this in the seven remarkable letters on the
third Napoleon's Coup (fEtat, which he wrote from Paris
while he was yet a law student. They are evidently the
letters of a young man. Their style goes at a spanking, reck-
less gait that no older mind would have dared attempt or
could have kept its breath at. Their satirical humour has a
quick sting in it ; their judgments are offhand and unconscion-
ably confident ; their crying heresies in matters of politics are
calculated to shock English nerves very painfully. They are
aggressive and a bit arrogant. But their extravagance is super-
ficial. At heart they are sound, and even wise. The man's
vision for affairs has come to him already. He sees that
Frenchmen are not Englishmen, and are not to be judged, or
very much aided either, by English standards in affairs.
You shall not elsewhere learn so well what it was that
happened in France in the early fifties, or why it happened,
and could hardly have been staved off or avoided. 'You
have asked me to tell you what I think of French affairs,' he
writes. ' I shall be pleased to do so ; but I ought perhaps to
begin by cautioning you against believing, or too much heed-
ing, what I say.' It is so he begins, with a shrewd suspicion,
no doubt, that the warning is quite unnecessary. For he was
writing to the editor of The Enquirer, a journal but just estab-
lished for the enlightenment of Unitarian dissenters — a people
Bagehot had reason to know, and could not hope to win either
to the matter or to the manner of his thought. They were
sure to think the one radically misleading and erroneous, and
the other unpardonably flippant. But it was the better sport
on that account to write for their amazement. He undertook
nothing less bold than a justification of what Louis Napoleon
had done in flat derogation and defiance of the constitutional
200 LIFE OF WALTER B AGE HOT
liberties of France. He set himself to show an English
audience, who he knew would decline to believe it, how
desperate a crisis had been averted, how effectual the strong
remedy had been, and how expedient at least a temporary
dictatorship had become. ' Whatever other deficiencies Louis
Napoleon may have,' he said, ' he has one excellent advantage
over other French statesmen : he has never been a professor,
nor a journalist, nor a promising barrister, nor by taste a
litterateur. He has not confused himself with history ; he
does not think in leading articles, in long speeches, or
in agreeable essays. 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 generali-
sation which, John Mill tells us, honourably distinguishes the
French mind has come to this, that every Parisian wants his
head tapped in order to get the formulae and nonsense out of
it. ... So I am for any carnivorous Government.' Con-
scious of his audacity and of what will be said of such senti-
ments among the grave readers of The Enquirer, he hastens in
his second letter to make his real position clear. ' For the
sake of the women who may be led astray,' he laughs, affect-
ing to quote St. Athanasius, ' I will this very moment explain
my sentiments.'
" He is sober enough when it comes to serious explanation of
the difficult matter. Laughing satire and boyish gibe are put
aside, and a thoughtful philosophy of politics — Burke's as well
as his own — comes at once to the surface, in sentences admir-
ably calm and wise. In justifying Napoleon, he says plainly
and at the outset, he is speaking only of France and of the
critical circumstances of the year 1852. 'The first duty of
society,' he declares, ' is the preservation of society. By the
sound work of old-fashioned generations, by the singular pains-
taking of the slumberers in churchyards, by dull care, by
stupid industry, a certain social fabric somehow exists ; people
contrive to go out to their work, and to find work to employ
them actually until the evening ; body and soul are kept to-
gether,— and this is what mankind have to show for their six
PARIS 201
thousand years of toil and trouble.' You cannot better the
living by political change, he maintains, unless you contrive to
hold change to a slow and sober pace, quiet, almost insensible,
like that of the evolutions of husbanding growth. If you can-
not do that, perhaps it is better to hold steadily to the old
present ways of life, under a strong, unshaken, unquestioned
government, capable of guidance and command. 'Burke first
taught the world at large,' he reminds us, ' that politics are
made of time and place ; that institutions are shifting things,
to be tried by and adjusted to the shifting conditions of a
mutable world ; that in fact politics are but a piece of business
to be determined in every case by the exact exigencies of that
case, — in plain English, by sense and circumstances. This was
a great step in political philosophy, though it now seems the
events of 1 848 have taught thinking persons (I fancy) further :
they have enabled us to see that of all these circumstances so
affecting political problems, by far and out of all question the
most important is national character. I need not prove to you
that the French have a national character,' he goes on, ' nor
need I try your patience with a likeness of it : I have only to
examine whether it be a fit basis for natural freedom. I fear
you will laugh when I tell you what I conceive to be about
the most essential mental quality for a free people whose
liberty is to be progressive, permanent, and on a large scale :
it is much stupidity. 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." '
" The explanation is easily made, and with convincing force.
He means that only a race of steady, patient, unimaginative
habits of thought can abide steadfast in the conservative and
businesslike conduct of Government, and he sees the French
to be what De Tocqueville had called them, — a nation apt to
conceive a great design, but unable to persist in its pursuit,
impatient after a single effort, 'swayed by sensations, and not
by principles,' her ' instincts better than her morality '. ' As
people of " large roundabout common sense " will as a rule
somehow get on in life/ says Bagehot, ' no matter what their
202 LIFE OF WALTER BAGEHOT
circumstances or their fortune, so a nation which applies good
judgment, forbearance, a rational and compromising habit, to
the management of free institutions will certainly succeed ;
while the more eminently gifted national character will be but
a source and germ of endless and disastrous failure, if, with
whatever other eminent qualities, it be deficient in these plain,
solid, and essential requisites.' It is no doubt whimsical to
call ' large roundabout common sense,' good judgment, and
rational forbearance ' stupidity ' ; but he means, of course,
that those who possess these solid practical gifts usually lack
that quick, inventive originality and versatility in resource
which we are apt to think characteristic of the creative mind.
' The essence of the French character,' he explains, ' is a
certain mobility ; that is, a certain " excessive sensibility to
present impressions," which is sometimes " levity " for it issues
in a postponement of seemingly fixed principles to a momen-
tary temptation or a transient whim ; sometimes " impatience "
as leading to an exaggerated sense of existing evils ; often " ex-
citement," a total absorption in existing emotion ; oftener " in-
consistency," the sacrifice of old habits to present emergencies,'
— and these are qualities which, however engaging upon
occasion, he is certainly right in regarding as a very serious,
if not fatal, impediment to success in self-government. ' A
real Frenchman,' he exclaims, ' can't be stupid : esprit is his
essence ; wit is to him as water, bonsmots as bonsbons' And
yet 'stupidity,' as he prefers to call it, is, he rightly thinks,
' nature's favourite resource for preserving steadiness of con-
duct and consistency of opinion : it enforces concentration ;
people who learn slowly learn only what they must "
" This, which reads like the moral of an old man, is what
Bagehot saw at twenty-six ; and he was able, though a youth
and in the midst of misleading Paris, to write quick sentences
of political analysis which were fit to serve both as history and
as prophecy. ' If you have to deal with a mobile, a clever, a
versatile, and intellectual, a dogmatic nation,' he says, ' in-
evitably and by necessary consequence you will have conflict-
ing systems ; every man speaking his own words, and giving
his own suffrage to what seems good in his own eyes ; many
PARIS 203
holding to-day what they will regret to-morrow ; a crowd of
crotchety notions and a heavy percentage of philosophical
nonsense ; a great opportunity for subtle stratagem and intrigu-
ing selfishness ; a miserable division among the friends of
tranquillity, and a great power thrown into the hands of those
who, though often with the very best intentions, are practically
and in matter of fact opposed both to society and civilisation.
And moreover, besides minor inconveniences and lesser hard-
ships, you will indisputably have periodically — say three or
four times in fifty years — a great crisis : the public mind much
excited ; the people in the streets swaying to and fro with the
breath of every breeze ; the discontented ouvriers meeting in a
hundred knots, discussing their real sufferings and their imagined
grievances with lean features and angry gesticulations ; the
Parliament all the while in permanence, very ably and eloquently
expounding the whole subject, one man proposing this scheme,
and another that ; the opposition expecting to oust the ministers
and ride in on the popular commotion, the ministers fearing
to take the odium of severe or adequate repressive measures,
lest they should lose their salary, their places, and their majority ;
finally a great crash, a disgusted people overwhelmed by re-
volutionary violence, or seeking a precarious, a pernicious, but
after all a precious protection from the bayonets of military
despotism.' '
Could you wish a better analysis of the affairs of that
clever, volatile people, and can you ascribe it wholly to his
youth that Bagehot should in 1852 have deliberately concluded
that " the first condition of good Government " in France was
"a really strong, a reputedly strong, a continually strong
executive power" ?
Paris and the writing of these Coup d'Etat articles had
effected the cure. Walter Bagehot returned from Paris in
1852, refreshed, braced, and determined. He went to Herd's
Hill, discussed his future with his father, and when back in
London, wrote to him : —
204
LIFE OF WALTER B AGE HOT
" 9 SPRING GARDENS,
"3i.y/ August, 1852.
" My DEAREST FATHER,
" I have been considering carefully the question
which we almost decided upon when I was at home. I mean
my abandoning the law at the present crisis — and in accord-
ance with what we very nearly resolved upon when I was
with you, — I have decided to do so at this juncture — utterly
and for ever."
CHAPTER VIII.
AUTHOR AND BANKER.
BAGEHOT ate his dinners, was called to the Bar, promptly
abandoned law as a profession, and settled at Herd's Hill to
learn business with his father. As he writes to his father, his
mother had " long been inclining to my giving up the law ".
When writing to him, she had urged health as a reason ; but,
reading between the lines, he knew that she longed for his
presence at home. Also he was becoming more and more
conscious of the fertile crop of ideas germinating in his brain,
and of the impulse he felt, ever growing stronger, to express
them in writing. He had acquired a footing on the ladder of
authorship with the articles on Currency and on John Stuart
Mill, published in the Prospective Review ; he had sprung
boldly ahead in the letters on the Coup d'Etat, escaping once
and for all from what was expected of him in Unitarian circles,
and he was more than ever aware on returning to London
from Paris, that the practice of law was incompatible with
literature, though he never for a moment thought of making
literature his avowed profession.
He was still much interested in University College and the
University Hall, and the influence of college life on the future
career of students. This inspired him to write an article on
Oxford which was published in 1852 in the August number of
the Prospective Review.1 He had great doubts as to the merit
of this article.
After the article appeared he wrote : —
" I think that my article on Oxford has got off extremely
1 When editing the republished essays by Bagehot, Mr. Hutton
omitted a considerable portion of the " Oxford " ; but in the forthcoming
complete edition of Bagehot's works, the whole of the essay will be found
as originally printed.
205
zo6 LIFE OF WALTER BAGEHOT
well. I should very much like to write for you an article on
Hartley Coleridge, a review of the edition of his Biographia
Borealis recently brought out. I am rather strong on him
myself, as I was an admirer before his death and renovation.
I am rather afraid his ' poems ' were reviewed in the Pro-
spective not very long ago, and I don't know whether you
would think it desirable to have any second article on him or
them so soon, but if you could strain a point for us, I should
like to write it very much indeed. It would not be a long
article — about thirty pages. I should make it an estimate of
him as a whole — though including of course a criticism on his
poetry — and elucidating him by his father."
Though doubt might exist in Bagehot's own mind and in
Mr. Hutton's as to the merit of the essay on Oxford, there
could be none as to that on Hartley Coleridge. If a selec-
tion were made to prove the truth of Mr. Augustine Birrell's
assertion that Bagehot was a writer who could be known by
his writings, this estimate of Hartley Coleridge would surely
take a foremost place. Mr. Hutton writes in the memoir :
" In the essay on ' Hartley Coleridge ' — perhaps the most per-
fect in style of any of his writings — he describes most power-
fully, and evidently in great measure from his own experience,
the mysterious confusion between appearances and realities
which so bewildered little Hartley ". He wrote this essay
quickly while engrossed in the charm of his subject and insisted
on it being published at once. It appeared in the October
number of the Prospective Review. It proves that the space of
life which Keats believes to exist between the healthy imagi-
nation of the boy and the mature and healthy imagination of
the man had now been traversed, and that Bagehot's matured
individuality as an author had asserted itself. He had not only
found himself but knew that he had found himself. In de-
scribing the kind of poetry which he names as the self-
delineative, he writes : " The first requisite of this poetry is
truth. It is, in Plato's phrase, the soul 'itself by itself as-
piring to view and take account of the particular notes and
marks that distinguish it from all other souls. The sense
of reality is necessary to excellence ; the poet being himself,
AUTHOR AND BANKER 207
speaks like one who has authority ; he knows and must not de-
ceive." Walter Bagehot in those lines has stated his creed —
a creed which dominated all his beliefs, guided his perception,
and controlled his action. The soul " itself by itself " must
allow of no delusions, no prejudices, no fond fancies which thwart
the true direct line of sight. He saw the necessity of this all
the more distinctly in his own case, because he perceived the
force of his imagination. Walter Bagehot is not only great
as an essayist — he may truly be said to stand alone. Though
he deals with grave problems and high conceptions, yet the
way these are treated by him is so natural and easy, that,
however wise, his writing is never ponderous. We are stimu-
lated rather than overweighted by their serious worth. More-
over, he plays with his acquired and wide knowledge with the
same vitality with which he plays with his own original ideas
— with the same humour, the same buoyancy of spirit.
" Hartley Coleridge," he writes, "was not like the Duke of
Wellington. Children are urged by the example of the great
statesman and warrior just departed — not indeed to neglect
' their book ' as he did — but to be industrious and thrifty ;
' always to perform business,' to ' beware of procrastination,'
' never to fail to do their best ' : good ideas, as may be ascer-
tained by referring to the masterly despatches on the Mahratta
transactions. ' Great events,' as the preacher continues,
' which exemplify the efficacy of diligence even in regions
where the very advent of our religion is as yet but partially
made known.' But
What a wilderness were this sad world
If man were always man and never child !
And it were almost a worse wilderness if there were not
some to relieve the dull monotony of activity, who are
children through life, who act on wayward impulse, and whose
will has never come, who toil not and who spin not, who
always have ' fair Eden's simpleness ' : and of such was
Hartley Coleridge. ' Don't you remember,' writes Gray to
Horace Walpole, 'when Lord B. and Sir H. C. and Viscount
D., who are now great statesmen, were little dirty boys playing
at cricket ? For my part I do not feel one bit older or wiser
208 LIFE OF WALTER BAGEHOT
now than I did then.' For as some apply their minds to what
is next them, and labour ever and attain to governing the Tower,
and entering the Trinity House, — to commanding armies, and
applauding pilots, — so there are also some who are ever anxious
to-day about what ought only to be considered to-morrow ;
who never get on ; whom the earth neglects, and whom trades-
men little esteem ; who are where they were ; who cause grief
and are loved ; that are at once a by-word and a blessing ; who
do not live in life, and it seems will not die in death : and of
such was Hartley Coleridge."
Once expressed, such ideas as these are obvious, yet how
out of the way ! What mind disciplined in the creed of getting
on in life would say that there was ever dull monotony in
activity, and yet how obvious it is that nearly every active
business entails dull monotony. Walter Bagehot's energies
were never entirely engrossed by the stream of active currents.
Some, and those among the choicest, were kept for retiring
into the calm, back water in which the finer spirit could bathe
itself, where life was reflected half as a dream — only. Here,
however, he could not abide for long. The home tragedy was
ever there to thrust him out into practical activity, the " dull
drudgery " that, once chosen as his work in life, meant duty and
filled the hours with something to be done. At the Bank or
at The Bridge no speculations on the mysteries and puzzles of
life could invade and take possession, no leaps or flights of
imagination could interfere with business. But in his study
at Herd's Hill, overlooking green lawns and widespread vap-
orous moorlands, away to distant blue ranges of hills, very
different conditions of being were created. The bigger mean-
ing of things would then creep out sideways from the main
theme of his articles, and he felt inspired to play with his sub-
ject,— play various tunes of his very own.
There is a distinct characteristic in Walter Bagehot's writ-
ings which is very obvious in the "Hartley Coleridge". To those
who knew him intimately his writing is what he has called
certain kinds of poetry, self-delineative. No writing could be
less self-conscious, none more self-delineative. With intuitive
spring of mind and imagination he was seized by ideas in-
AUTHOR AND BANKER 209
spired by incidents in his own life and in the lives of those
about them, and these ideas and imaginings found words
in his writings. In this way it is a part of himself he was
depicting, for it was on his individual temperament that the
ideas had been reflected, — ideas which arose from his own
circumstances, his own character, feelings, and imagination, and
it is his own genius which develops them in the form they take
in literature.^ Those circumstances which surrounded Walter
Bagehot all nis life were such as to give him exceptional experi-
ences, but experiences which could not be obviously described or
ostensibly dwelt on. But they coloured the spirit of his thoughts
and feelings. He proudly resented the tyranny of those who
blame or scorn their fellows because they suffer from the effects
of God-given calamities. He had the strongest sympathy
for those who were overweighted by their destiny. The
weaknesses and temptations of such an one as Hartley
Coleridge appealed to his sympathies as far more pathetic than
contemptible. He was ever conscious that God ordained
the conditions of those who must fail according to man's
standard, no less than the conditions of those who are bound
to triumph in the world's fight. He himself possessed the
moral and mental strength to triumph, but that made him
all the more tender towards those who had it not. The
apparent cynicism noticeable in some of his writings is, I
think, when traced to ground, but the offshoot of a scorn
which he felt for the brutal bluntness such as the prosperous
often show towards the failures in life. The pomposities of
the Modern Pharisee he derided, though always with that
genial kind of humour which never could create " bad blood ".
Lenient and kind by nature he resented the idea that any
liability to temptation and failure put a man or woman out of
court altogether. His sense of fairness went down deeply into
the core of a question, and he weighed what could and could
not be helped with a fine perspicuity.
For every evil under the sun
There is a cure, or there is none ;
If there is, then try and find it,
If there's not, then never mind it.
14
210 LIFE OF WALTER B AGE HOT
Such was the spirit in which Walter Bagehot went through
life, bearing not only his own troubles but those of others.
A curious contrast suggests itself when we think of Walter
Bagehot writing the " Hartley Coleridge " in his study at Herd's
Hill, and the same Walter Bagehot on the same days learning
business from his father in the counting-houses of Stuckey's
Bank and of The Bridge.
" We all, whether we write or. speak, must somewhat drape
ourselves when we address our fellows," writes R. L. Stevenson.
Walter Bagehot was no exception to the rule. His parents
read his writings, but the life that he and his father led to-
gether while he was being initiated into business gave little
scope for real intimacy in the things which exercised Walter's
vivid, speculative imagination. By Mr. Bagehot business had
ever been treated as a solemn duty, a duty that had become
almost an idol to him, so constantly did he follow the dictates
of his conscience, a conscience illuminated by vivid spiritual
fervour. But he felt no pleasurable excitement in making
money, no relish given to life through achieving successful
business transactions : only the calm satisfaction of having
secured to his family a sufficient income wherewith to enjoy
the best things in life. Viewing business as a stern duty he
endeavoured to train Walter to look at the transacting of it
with a certain amount of solemnity. But this Walter could
not do. The processes arranged to suit the majority of busi-
ness minds bored him. He arrived at conclusions through
his direct independent judgment, anfl resented unnecessary
trammels with which custom is wont to encircle the modes of
transacting business. Punctilious formalities which were con-
sidered essential seemed a waste of time, and teased him.
With Mr. Bagehot punctuality was a law of the Medes and
Persians. The Langport people set their watches when Mr.
Bagehot walked every morning through the town to the Bank.
Walter let out his want of faith in such solemnities with much
humour and geniality, so that, though his father was some-
what alarmed by the short cuts he wanted to take in acquiring
the rudiments of business, and the light and airy manner in
which he treated the formalities of the counting-house, there
AUTHOR AND BANKER 21 1
was no unpleasant jarring or want of confidence between them.
Once having learnt the preliminaries, Walter's quick insight
and perceptions mastered all that was really essential, and his
father recognised that he could treat important matters as
wisely, as the most rigid doctrinaire, and as confidently and
easily as he could take a fence out hunting. He perceived
further that the self-confidence with which Walter attacked
the serious problems of banking did not arise from vanity,
but from an intuitive power of seizing the main issues of a
question. Consequently Mr. Bagehot gradually learnt to lean
on his judgment and opinions, though never, perhaps, fully
recognising the wide range of interests over which Walter's
genius travelled The fact was certainly puzzling to such a
mind as Mr. Bagehot's that while Walter could cope success-
fully with real and important difficulties, he never could add
up figures with immaculate correctness.
After having pursued his studies at the Bank for some
months, Walter wrote the following to his old school-fellow,
Killigrew Wait : —
" HERD'S HILL,
" Wednesday, ^th January, 1853.
" MY DEAR WAIT,
" Here am I in my father's counting-house trying
(and failing) to do sums, and being rowed ninety-nine times a
day for some horrid sin against the conventions of mercantile
existence. My family perhaps you know are merchants, ship-
owners, and bankers, etc. etc., here and elsewhere. Out of
their multifarious occupations I hope to be able to find, though
I cannot precisely say that I have yet found, some one to
which I am not contemptibly unequal. As to your notion
of doing anything well, it is so many years since I abandoned
the idea, that I can't now quite enter into the feeling. My
difficulty is in doing anything at all. The only thing I ever
really knew was Special Pleading, and the moment I had
learned that, the law reformers botched and abolished it.
It was a very pretty art, and the only trade in which the logi-
cal faculties appear to be of any particular service, and was
14*
212 LIFE OF WALTER B AGE HOT
therefore the champagne of life, but this people which know-
eth not the law, went and abolished it. I suppose you like
business by this time. I think I might if I knew anything
about it, and if my relations would admit that sums are
matters of opinion.
" I can't claim to be very familiar with German matters. I
like to read English books best, because I am partially ac-
quainted with the language in which they are composed. Be-
sides I fancy they are the truest books after all. The German
ideas may be true hereafter, but in the existing world it seems
to me that they are often a good deal misled. If a man
knoweth not what he hath seen (and no German ever does),
how shall he know that which he hath not seen ? Besides
they say there is no such thing as nonsense, in which I think
them quite wrong. I do not know that I can tell you ' what
I am thinking about,' for I am a good deal inclined to believe
that I have ceased to think about anything."
As an antidote to the grind of office work, Walter Bagehot,
following the example of his uncle, Vincent Stuckey, started
keeping a pack of harriers with his cousin, Vincent Wood.
Having no surviving son, Mrs. Vincent Stuckey adopted
her eldest grandson as heir to her husband's property and to
his position in the Bank. On her death Mr. Vincent Wood
changed his name. to Stuckey, continuing to live at Hill House
as he had done in his grandmother's lifetime. He possessed
much of his grandfather's ability for business and genial
sociability of disposition.1
Though a business life in its earliest days may have had
its tiresome side, there was much that soon became congenial
to Bagehot in his life in Somerset. In any case it was better
than law and London. The beauty of the country inspired
ideas, hunting was inspiriting, and the Bank and The Bridge
gradually became interesting. The notable qualities in his
Uncle had left their stamp on the Bank, which he had devel-
1 He and another of Walter Bagehot's cousins, Mr. Vincent Reynolds,
nephew of the " Uncle Reynolds " at Hampstead, married two sisters,
nieces of Sir John Lethbridge, whose family was renowned for its dis-
tinguished beauty.
AUTHOR AND BANKER 213
oped into an important West of England business. Stuckey's
Bank was assuredly no ordinary country bank.
About the time Walter Bagehot settled at Herd's Hill,
he was feeling anxious about Mr. Hutton's health.
On being elected Principal of University Hall when Mr.
Clough resigned the post, Mr. Hutton married Miss Mary
Roscoe. Soon after, the lung trouble, from which he had
suffered for several years, developed into a serious disease.
Bagehot writes to Roscoe : " I saw him (Hutton) on Sunday
and he was as well as one could hope, but I can't but fear
very much about him ". It was decided that he and his wife
should go to the West Indies, a warm climate being recom-
mended. So grave was his condition, that Walter Bagehot,
in parting with him, expressed to others great doubts that he
should ever see him again.
In January, 1853, Bagehot writes from Herd's Hill: —
" MY DEAR HUTTON,
" I have devoted my time for the last four months
nearly exclusively to the art of book-keeping by double entry,
the theory of which is agreeable and pretty but the practice per-
haps as horrible as anything ever was. I maintain too in vain
that sums are matters of opinion, but the people in command
here do not comprehend the nature of contingent matter and try
to prove that figures tend to one result more than another, which
I find myself to be false as they always come different. But
there is no influencing the instinctive dogmatism of the un-
educated mind. In other respects I approve of mercantile
life. There is some excitement in it, if this does not wear
off; always a little to do and no wearing labour, which is
something towards perfection. Chevalier Bunsen has pub-
lished a huge book on ' Hippolytus,' but what other people
say is Origen's. Bunsen's book is four volumes and contains
a mass of learning shovelled together as ill as possible and not
working out anything clearly or well. But there is a German
earnestness and solidity about the book which make it agree-
able to read, and the facts are very good. He proves in a
beautifully Germanic manner that this book was written by
214 LIFE OF WALTER B AGE HOT
Hippolytus because it is a collection of heresies, and Photrus
mentions a book by Hippolytus on heresies, thirty-three in
number, beginning with A and ending with B. Now the book
in question does not end with B or begin A or contain thirty-
three heresies, but Bunsen says it is all quite consistent and
has a special subsidiary hypothesis for each inconsistency
which is very amusing. I believe he is right about the book
though on the whole, and that it was certainly not written by
Origen, and perhaps by Hippolytus, but you would be de-
lighted with the manner in which he goes round and round
the subject, and the unspeakable importance which he attaches
to it. His own existence would not require a keener argu-
ment, or obtain it. It is splendid to see such a bookish turn ;
as if it mattered who wrote such a book, for it is certainly
stupid, that is agreed. Have you seen anything of the blacks ?
It can't be a pretty study, but it may be an instructive one.
People are quite wild here again about Slavery, as strong as
they ever were when there was a bond fide agitation in this
country on the point. I should like to know accurately what
comes from emancipation, taking it as a question of sacrifices.
I can imagine many cases in which Slavery is good, for a
population, but none or not many in which traders can be
trusted to be slaveowners. It may answer in rural villages,
where they only supply their own demand and where the
notion of the slaves being capital is extremely secondary, but
never in a mercantile community where that notion is the
main one and the notion of moral and personal dependence
extremely faint. You will know that we have a change of
ministry in England. Lord Derby is gone out and Lord
Aberdeen with everybody else is come in. I think it is an
excellent ministry though Sir James Graham is in it, whom I
detest. They are the best men we've got, though they are
frightfully old, and have many of the notions of very old
people. I am afraid what they will do about the franchise.
I doubt if they have really studied the subject They are the
old Reform Bill people and have not any new ideas since that
time, otherwise I think they'll do. You see my friend Louis
Napoleon is Emperor. I think there is no doubt his foreign
AUTHOR AND BANKER 215
policy will be mainly aggressive and this country must look
sharp or he'll be upon us. I don't mean now or to-morrow
but soon."
On the Huttons arriving in Barbadoes they found yellow
fever raging and both at once caught the epidemic. When
Mr. Hutton recovered consciousness, after passing days in a
state of delirium, he found that his wife had succumbed to it.
On receiving the news of his sister's death, Mr. Roscoe at
once started for Barbadoes " without regard," Mr. Hutton
writes in his memoir of William Roscoe, " either to the
personal risk which he incurred, or to the melancholy task
which he undertook ".
From Taunton on i6th March, 1853, Walter Bagehot
wrote his farewell to him : —
"MY DEAR ROSCOE,
"Good-bye. Give my kindest and best remem-
brances to Hutton. I hope indeed you will be of service to
him and I hope you may bring him home to us better than
I can now get myself to expect. I will arrange about the
Prospective though what to write about I know no more than
the people in the street. I write with ever so many people
talking figures about me and I hardly know what I write, but
good-bye and God speed you."
The brothers-in-law returned together to England, Mr.
Hutton heartbroken, and with shattered health. Bagehot
went to London to meet him, and at once concerned himself
with finding some congenial occupation wherewith to distract
his mind.
"LANGPORT, i yh August, 1853.
" MY DEAR HUTTON,
" By way of the next step I strongly advise you to
write the article on Atheism which you mentioned and to get
the review made over to you as soon as may be. I should
like to write for you a short article on the new Series of M.
Arnold's poems. They are not very much in themselves,
but they show character and afford, I think, matter for a short
paper and no reading up of any subject will be necessary,
21 6 LIFE OF W 'ALTER B AGE HOT
which is a great blessing and consideration. Or I will write
on the ' Principles of Taxation/ a dreary article if you like it
better, on the Chancellor of the Exchequer's speech and the
Report of the Income Tax Committee. Only make your
selection in due time, so that I may have a long time to waste
and then do it in a very great hurry exactly at the last. You
can hardly imagine the relief it has been to me to have seen
you and to have a new and not unmixedly painful picture of
you in my imagination and to see your mind so clear and
healthy and firm. I did not fancy for a moment that the
suffering which you feel and have felt would weaken your
intellect or obscure your judgment. But I was not sure that
it would not increase the tendency to mere melancholy, which
I (characteristically enough) used to hold to be morbid. I
think it has diminished it. The real and daily pain which
you do not express but cannot conceal, and the constant habit
of putting down serious and solemn thoughts, give a distinct-
ness and coolness to your views which I think they sometimes
1 used to want. There is more of the pure steel in them, as if
they came from a solider and clearer state of mind."
In the July number of the Prospective Review, 1853, ap-
peared " Shakespeare — the Man," very self-delineative, but
differing from the " Hartley Coleridge" because it was a different
side of the self delineated. It flavours more of the Cavalier
side of Bagehot's nature, and treats politics from somewhat
the country gentleman point of view. The mere fact that he
took up this subject proves that living in the country had
cleared away the scares. The essay seems to have been
written to prove that that great Author's writings are, whatever
else they may be besides, self-delineating. "Some extreme
sceptics we know," Bagehot writes in the second paragraph of
"Shakespeare — the Man," "doubt whether it is possible to
deduce anything as to an author's character from his works.
Yet surely people do not keep a tame steam-engine to write
their books ; and if those books were really written by a man,
he must have been a man to write them ; he must have had
the thoughts which they express, have acquired the knowledge
they contain, have possessed the style in which we read them.
AUTHOR AND BANKER 217
The difficulty is a defect of the critics. A person who knows
nothing of an author he has read, will not know much of an
author whom he has seen. . . . Shakespeare's works," he
writes, "could only be produced by a first-rate imagination
working on a first-rate experience. ... To a great experi-
ence one thing is essential, an experiencing nature. . . . The
reason why so few good books are written is that so few people
that can write know anything. After all, the original way of
writing books may turn out to be the best. The first author,
it is plain, could not have taken anything from books, since
there were no books for him to copy from ; he looked at things
for himself."
As before noted, Bagehot proves that Shakespeare's
political views can be clearly made out through his writings,
and no less his wholesome religious instincts. "There is a
religion," Bagehot writes, "of weekdays as well as Sundays,
of ' cakes and ale,' as well as of pews and altar cloth. This
England lay before Shakespeare as it lies before us all, with
its green fields, and its long hedgerows, and its many trees,
and its great towns, and its endless hamlets, and its motley
society, and its long history, and its bold exploits, and its
gathering power, and he saw that they were good. To him,
perhaps, more than to anyone else, has it been given to see that
they were a great unity, a great religious object ; that if you
could only descend to the inner life, to the deep things, to the
secret principles of its noble vigour, to the essence of character,
to what we know of Hamlet and seem to fancy of Ophelia, we
might, so far as we are capable of so doing, understand the
nature which God has made. Let us, then, think of him not
as a teacher of dry dogmas, or a sayer of hard sayings, but as
v A priest to us all,
Of the wonder and bloom of the world.
A teacher of the hearts of men and women ; one from whom
may be learned something of that inmost principle that ever
modulates
With murmurs of the air,
And motions of the forests and the sea
And voice of living beings, and woven hymns,
Of night and day and the deep heart of man.
2i8 LIFE OF WALTER B AGE HOT
" We must pause, lest our readers reject us, as the Bishop
of Durham the poor curate, because he was mystical and con-
fused."
In the October number of the Prospective Review, 1854,
appeared the last essay Bagehot wrote for it, as about that
time the Review ceased to exist. The subject was Bishop
Butler. The character of Bishop Butler attracted Bagehot,
and gave him opportunities to explain his ideas on two kinds
of religion, the natural and the supernatural, the one arising
" from mere contemplation of external beauty," the other " the
source of which is within the mine, the religion of superstition ".
Needless to say, Bishop Butler's religion was that within the
mine. " No one could tell from his writings that the world
was beautiful. If the world were a Durham mine or an exact
square, if no part of it were more expressive than a gravel pit,
or a chalk quarry, the teaching of Butler would be as true as
it is now."
In a newspaper cutting ot 1858, we read the following
paragraph : " Several years ago, ' Advanced Socinians,' the
Rev. Messrs. Taylor and Martineau, founded the Prospective
Review with the conspicuous motto from St. Bernard, Respice,
Aspice, Prospice. From something narrow and sectarian in its
tone, the Prospective did not prosper, and in the hope of a
better future, its conductors re-baptised it the National Review.
During the last twelve months, a series of papers, critical and
characteristic, evidently from the same pen, have attracted
considerable attention to the quiet pages of the National
Review"
These papers were by Bagehot. Mr. Hutton and he had
undertaken to edit this new Review together ; Martineau and
Taylor were to find most of the money, and to write frequently
for it. A Mr. Darbishire was the proprietor, and a certain
Theobold, the printer. Bagehot seems to have taken the
most active part in starting the Review and in inspiring the
tone of the Prospectus^ even if he did not actually pen it him-
self.
The first essay, that on " William Cowper," Bagehot wrote
for the National Review in the July number, 1855, the last on
AUTHOR AND BANKER 219
" Wordsworth, Tennyson and Browning, or Pure, Ornate and
Grotesque Art in English Poetry," in the November number,
1864. For those nine years directing, managing, and writing
for the National Review were among his chief occupations.
It was a source to him of worry and of expense, but also of
great interest and pleasure, partly because the work for it kept
him in constant touch with Mr. Hutton. The National Re-
view -never had a very large circulation. Perhaps its tone
was not sufficiently committed to any one line of thought for
it to secure a fervent adherence from any one section of the
public. This was to be accounted for, perhaps, by the fact
that the opinions of the promoters were never sufficiently
harmonious. Martineau and Tayler were distinct Unitarians,
Mr. Hutton was gradually veering towards the Church of
England, and Bagehot had never held Unitarian doctrines.
They had never appealed to his sympathies, nor did he hold
them to be logical, and it was Bagehot who more than others
gave most of himself to the intellectual side of the manage-
ment. The National Review was fully appreciated by those
who read it, but these were a refined and cultured minority.
In March, 1855, Bagehot writes to Mr. Hutton : —
" I am much obliged to you for engaging to take the
Editorship of the National at my request, though I own I
think you will like it better than you think you shall. Of
course you may count on my doing anything for you in the way
of co-operation — literary or practical locomotion which is not in
my own absolute power, always excepted. Even if it were
offered me I could not have the responsibility of the Review
absolutely on me. It would be sure to come at a time when
there was a press of work in banking or shipping, and either
the number would not appear — if it did appear it would be
certainly misprinted — or I must neglect what I have under-
taken here, which I should of course not choose to do. The
only part I think I could be of any use would be perhaps in
planning the secular articles for each number at first and I
shall be most willing to do all I can in this, as much as if it
were my own work.
" It is clear we shall be able to start. I will send my
220 LIFE OF WALTER B AGE HOT
money to Darbishire directly. How about Lady Byron ?
H. C. Robinson should be let alone, I think. He will give in
in the end — I should like to see the list of contributors. Ask
Martineau to choose his subject and to write to Froude. I
will write to Greg, as soon as Martineau's has been decided.
" What a splendid phrase ' The equilibrium of universal
justice ' ! quite a ' fresh hare ' ; I never heard of it before.
The chief is right about Lord Palmerston. Lord Aberdeen
was the man. A truly considerate mind
" You theologians are too intolerant of one another's
crotchets. I think Martineau will do it very well. Jowett's
book is a very able and good one on the whole. I did not
describe it justly when I wrote to you. I hope M. won't
abuse him too much for staying in the church, though I own
I think his views about as consistent with the worship of the
Grand Llama, but he will be abused enough by his brother
clergy, and there is no use our clamouring too. However, M.
must do what he likes. He will do what he likes : I shall
preserve my tranquillity. You would like Jowett on the
whole. I do not see why Stanley should not stay in the
church. He is not a great logician. J. is morbidly sensitive
to illogicality. I believe the result of J.'s book is that St.
Paul had no precise notions of anything, and in this I agree.
I am afraid M. will rather wish to impute to him definite error.
" Roscoe's article on the ' Humorous ' I should like to have
very much. You won't think it orthodox enough probably.
A man said to me quite bitterly, that the writer of your article
(Protestantism) had no business in the Church of England.
You had left on him the impression of a moderate Maurician,
not going so far quite as that, but I should like Roscoe's
article extremely. The Bible must be treated in a human
manner. It is a terrible superstition."
In January, 1856, Bagehot writes to Mr. Hutton : —
"There is a man Fitz James Stephen who writes in the
' Cambridge Essays ' very well indeed, whom we should try
to get hold of. We might offer him George Sand. His essay
is the relation of novels to life, and is very acute and clever.
You might look at it.
AUTHOR AND BANKER 221
..." Martineau's still strikes me as an awful production.
It appears to mean that you are to go into Poland and raise
a standard of revolt, without in the least knowing whether the
Poles have any capacity or desire for freedom, about which he
admits there are no data, but on the chance of their having
some, which either means that you are to desert them, if you
do not find them up to the mark, or that you are to maintain
them or attempt by endless war to maintain them, although
they are unfit — both which are absurd. Besides you would
have the active opposition of Austria and Prussia, the active
sympathy of the rouge party abroad, which last would mean
the horror and alarm of all conservatives here at home.
" I think you made a great hit about Stephen — you manage
these sort of people very well, you extract so much out of
them. I think certainly I should not reject an article for as-
suming the Deity of Christ, but I could not allow an article to
go in assuming or defending the textual authority of Scripture.
Coleridge's a priori proof of the Trinity (which he never wrote
down) would suit us very well. Practically this divides from
the Trinitarians, because in some sense or other they must
hold the authority of Scripture. It is their postulate. Neither
Jowett nor Maurice seem to hold it ; but if asked Jowett would
say it was an ' antinomy ' and Maurice would become inar-
ticulate.
"When we fail, the cry against us will be that we have
gone off too much into general literature and neglected the
objects the money was subscribed for. I am most anxious
to guard against this by making the last number in every line
special and distinctive. On this account I much wish you
would write something with a semi-theological bearing. There
is the revision of the translation of the Bible. It would be a
good opportunity for praising our translation as a work of art,
and quizzing Sir G. Grey who won't alter the commas for
fear ' of shaking the faith of multitudes ' — the grossest Pro-
testant superstition — but I do not care about the particular
subject, only that you should write on a half-religious subject.
Remember we are not to have the sacred Taylor."
In the autumn of 1856 Bagehot visited his friend Roscoe
222 LIFE OF WALTER B AGE HOT
in Wales, who had settled there after his marriage with Miss
Emily Malin. There for the rest of his life William Roscoe
enjoyed gardening, writing essays and poetry, studying Eliza-
bethan poetry, and occasionally acting as Marshall with Mr.
Justice Compton when on circuit.
Bagehot's first article in the National Review, " William
Cowper," reflected distinctly the influence of his home trouble.
This trouble probably suggested the subject ; in any case it is
written with the subtle insight into the subject of insanity
which only personal experience can give. In the next two
numbers, October, 1855, and January, 1856, appeared "The
First Edinburgh Reviewers " and " Thomas Babington
Macaulay ". He had now fully entered into his life of action
no less than his matured life of thought. After quoting
Macaulay's eulogy on the greater fascination dead authors have
than living, Bagehot writes : " Only a mind impassive to our
daily life, un-alive to bores and evils, to joys and sorrows, in-
capable of the deepest sympathies, a prey to print could
imagine it. The mass of men have stronger ties and warmer
hopes. The exclusive devotion to books tires. We require
to love and hate, to act and live." In " The First Edinburgh
Reviewers " we have an insight into the working of that
lonely speculative imagination which took refuge from the
stirring life of business in the study overlooking the lawns and
wide-stretching moorlands. There are lines in this essay
which perhaps have touched more readers than any others he
has written, and which have served as a text for preachers in
pulpits. They contrast the vocation of a Lord Jeffrey and
that of a Wordsworth, a contrast depicted with Bagehot's own
singular whimsical humour on the one hand, and by his deep
poetic and high penetrating acumen on the other.
" There certainly are kinds of truths, borne in as it were
instinctively on the human intellect, most influential on the
character and the heart, yet hardly capable of stringent state-
ment, difficult to limit by an elaborate definition. Their
course is shadowy ; the mind seems rather to have seen than
to see them, more to feel after than definitely apprehend them.
They commonly involve an infinite element which, of course,
AUTHOR AND BANKER 223
cannot be stated precisely, or else a first principle — an original
tendency of our intellectual constitution, which it is impossible
not to feel, and yet which it is hard to extricate in terms and
words. Of this latter kind is what has been called the religion
of Nature, or more exactly perhaps, the religion of the imagina-
tion. This is an interpretation of the world. Accordingly, to
it the beauty of the universe has a meaning, its grandeur a
soul, its sublimity an expression. As we gaze on the faces of
those who we love ; as we watch the light of life in the dawn-
ing of their eyes, and the play of their features, and the wild-
ness of their animation ; as we trace in changing lineaments a
varying sign ; as a charm and a thrill seem to run along the
tone of a voice, to haunt the mind with a mere word ; as a
tone seems to roam in the ear ; as a trembling fancy hears
words that are unspoken ; so in Nature the mystical sense finds
a motion in the mountain, and a power in the waves, and a
meaning in the long white line of the shore, and a thought in
the blue of heaven, and a gushing soul in the buoyant light, an
unbounded being in the vast void of air, and
Wakeful watching in the pointed stars.
" There is a philosophy in this which might be explained, if
explaining were to our purpose. It might be advanced that
there are original sources of expression in the essential grandeur
and sublimity of Nature, of an analogous though fainter kind
to those familiar, inexplicable signs by which we trace in the
very face and outward lineaments of man, the existence and
working of the mind within. But be this as it may, it is cer-
tain that Mr. Wordsworth preached this kind of religion,
and that Lord Jeffrey did not believe a word of it. His cool,
sharp, collected mind revolted from its mysticism ; his detective
intelligence was absorbed in its apparent fallaciousness ; his
light humour made sport with the sublimities of the preacher.
His love of perspicuity was vexed by its indefiniteness ; the
precise philosopher was amazed at its mystic uninteliigibility.
Finding a little fault was doubtless not unpleasant to him.
The reviewer's pen — <f>6vo<? rjpcoea-criv — has seldom been more
poignantly wielded. 'If/ he was told, 'you would be alarmed
224 LIFE OF WALTER B AGE HOT
into the semblance of modesty, you would charm everybody;
but remember my joke against you ' (Sydney Smith loquitur}
' about the moon. D — n the solar system — bad light— planets
too distant — pestered with comets : feeble contrivance ; could
make a better with great ease.'
" Yet we do not mean that in this great literary feud, either
of the combatants had all the right, or gained all the victory.
The world has given judgment. Both Mr. Wordsworth and
Lord Jeffrey have received their reward. The one had his
own generation : the laughter of men, the applause of drawing-
rooms, the concurrence of the crowd ; the other a succeeding
age, the fond enthusiasm of secret students, the lonely rapture
of lonely minds. And each has received according to his
kind. If all cultivated men speak differently because of the
existence of Wordsworth and Coleridge ; if not a thoughtful
English book has appeared for forty years, without some trace
for good or evil of their influence ; if sermon-writers subsist
upon their thoughts ; if ' sacred poets ' thrive by translating
their weaker portion into the speech of women ; if, when all
this is over, some sufficient part of their writings will ever be
fitting food for wild musing and solitary meditation, surely
this is because they possessed the inner nature, 'an intense
and glowing mind,' 'the vision and the faculty divine'.
But if, perchance, in their weaker moments, the great authors
of the Lyrical Ballads did ever imagine that the world was to
pause because of their verses ; that ' Peter Bell ' would be
popular in the drawing-rooms ; that ' Christabel ' would be
perused in the City ; that people of fashion would make a
handbook of the ' Excursion ' — it was well for them to be
told at once that this was not so. Nature ingeniously pre-
pared a shrill artificial voice, which spoke in season and out
of season, enough and more than enough, what will ever be
the idea of the cities of the plain concerning those who live
alone among the mountains ; of the frivolous concerning the
grave ; of the gregarious concerning the recluse ; of those who
laugh concerning those who laugh not ; of the common con-
cerning the uncommon ; of those who lend on usury concern-
ing those who lend not ; the notion of the world of those whom
AUTHOR AND BANKER 225
it will not reckon among the righteous — it said, ' This will
never do ! ' "
In the same number of the National Review as the Macaulay
appeared the essay on Edward Gibbon, in the July number,
" The Character of Sir Robert Peel," in October, " Percy Bysshe
Shelley," and in this same year, 1856, thirteen articles in the
Saturday Review.
In the December of that year, an event occurred which led
to momentous changes in Bagehot's life. Mr. W. R. Greg, who
was an intimate friend of my father's and a constant inmate of
our home, asked Mr. Hutton if he would like to edit the Econo-
mist. If he desired to do so, Mr. Greg was willing to suggest
the idea to my father, the proprietor. Mr. Hutton hesitated.
He had reasons for wishing, before taking another step affect-
ing his private life, to visit the tomb of his wife in the West
Indies. He was entertaining the idea of marrying again. He
wrote to Bagehot, but making mention only of Mr. Greg's offer
and the desire he had to go abroad before accepting it. Bage-
hot writes in answer : —
"1856.
" MY DEAR HUTTON,
" I have thought over very carefully what you tell me
of Greg's offer, but I cannot think you are acting rightly. You
have now an opportunity which may not occur again of fixing
yourself in an established post, likely to be useful and per-
manent, and give you a fulcrum and position in the world which
is what you have always wanted and is quite necessary to
comfort in England. I do not think you ought to risk it for
the sake of holiday. You may have been right to ask it as a
beginning of the negotiation for it may be a gain to you to get
it, but it seems to me quite out of the question to make it a
sine qua non. Offers of this kind are not to be picked up in
the street every day. As to holidays, it is one of the lessons
of life to learn to be independent of them. They are scarcely
to be obtained by people in regular employment except in very
fortunate circumstances. I have some right to say this myself
for except when I was at Roscoe's last autumn, I have not
been a week without doing some business. I do not say very
'5
226 LIFE OF WALTER B AGE HOT
much, but still some — enough to deaden the mind for more
than four years. I assure you, if you seriously mean to work
hard in England, and you require a good deal of work to keep
your mind healthy, you must not hope for any such long gaps.
At any rate, I feel very strongly that you ought not to make
the having one an essential condition of obtaining so good a
position."
Mr. Greg agreed to leave his offer open till Mr. Hutton
returned from his voyage to the West Indies. On hearing
this Bagehot writes : —
" What is to be your post at first, are you a contributor
or assistant editor or what?
" As to the question of Christ's nature, I think it turns
entirely on the critical question as to the nature of the Gospel
histories. I am more and more disposed to believe that these
are not the narratives of eye-witnesses at all, but embodiments
of traditions dating from the second generation. I believe the
case is one of internal evidence merely. The external being
enough to justify our believing them to be narratives of eye-
witnesses if they read like it, but not in any way such as to
compel us to accept them as such without internal evidence or
in the face of internal difficulties. The internal evidence is
of course to a great extent one of impression, but I should
dwell a great deal on their fragmentary, impersonal character,
going here and there just as traditions do with no reason, but
not adhering the person of the eye-witness, or of specific in-
formants as careful contemporary narratives do. Again the
confusion of the chronology is very great ; tradition always
produces this, but four writers, all with the means of knowing,
and none of them adhering exclusively to mere episodes as
eye-witnesses might, are very unlikely to give four totally in-
harmonious narratives of the whole. Details might be wrong,
but the main times and seasons would be clear. Little un-
designed coincidences too might be looked for. We have as
much right to a Horae Christianae as to a Horae Paulinae.
The extreme oppositions too of the Gospel of John is very
remarkable. That there should be differences of kinds in tra-
ditions is intelligible ; they are the traditions of different com-
AUTHOR AND BANKER 227
munities, one say in Asia Minor among the Hellenists, the
other of Temple-going Jews at Jerusalem, but it is difficult to
imagine three first-hand narratives, each meaning apparently
to give a sufficient view of an entire career, omitting a whole
system of conception and doctrines recorded by a fourth.
Again the character of Christ is given I think in the way tra-
ditions represent character, and not as contemporary narratives
give it. Tradition chooses its points. It gives the character-
istic features of a character only and omits all others. Some-
how it won't believe any others. Defoe's is the style of the
contemporary narrator. He is puzzled with detail and can
hardly lift his facts. Are you not conscious yourself that you
do not know so much of a man just after reading his biography.
It requires time to let the encumbrance of circumstances pass
off. Just in the same way there is no singleness, no unbroken,
defined, unified delineation of character in contemporary nar-
ratives. It is difficult no doubt in an age when the habit of
writing has made us unfamiliar with the power of tradition to
fancy it could ever have given such delineations as those in the
Gospels. Yet if we look at the Old Testament we see instances
that help to make it possible. The delineation of Elijah for
example is as evidently traditional as anything can be, but how
marked, how consistent his character is, how different from
Elisha's or from Samuel's. In the New Testament too the
first chapters of Luke and Matthew, the former especially, are
as remarkable as most parts of those Gospels, yet these are
doubtless traditional. There is an intense, anxious story-
telling impulse in some states of society which produces of
itself wonderful narratives. The authors are as unknown as
the authors of old ballads. Such traditions though inaccurate
in facts are most sensitive to truth of effect, the latter is their
canon of truth in fact. You are to remember that the theory
of the historical origin of the Gospels is very recent. The old
theory was that they were written by the ' Spirit of God '.
I think, or incline to think, they were composed by intense,
half- ins pi red, most affectionate story-telling impulse. Of course
with this sort of view the question of Christ's nature is simple.
Any sort of incarnation requires to be proved by the most
15*
228 LIFE OF WALTER B AGE HOT
close positive historical testimony. Of course you won't think
of this subject on your voyage. Whatever subject a man
starts intending to think of, on that he is quite sure not to
think at all.
" I hope wherever you go you will feel sure of my affec-
tion. Cold I may be, but inconstant I certainly am not.
" Yours most affly.,
" WALTER BAGEHOT."
This connection of Mr. Hutton with the Economist suggested
to Bagehot the idea of himself writing for the Economist. Mr.
Hutton had started on his voyage to the West Indies, and
Bagehot did not personally know Mr. Greg ; but Dr. Martineau
knew both Mr. Greg and Bagehot, so through this channel an
introduction to my father was obtained, the result of which
was that Bagehot was asked to Claverton Manor to talk about
banking with the idea of his writing letters on it in the
Economist.
CHAPTER IX.
ENGAGEMENT AND MARRIAGE.
IT was late in the afternoon of the 24th January, 1857, that
two of my sisters and I were walking in the woods of Claver-
ton Manor. To the left of the house when facing it, is one of
the avenues of beautiful beech trees which the notable Ralph
Allen, Fielding's " Squire Allworthy," planted when he was
the owner of Claverton. This particular avenue was called
"the Beechery," and led by a moss-grown path up to "the
Rocks " on Claverton Downs, where Gainsborough wandered
and sketched. On this afternoon we had struck by a smaller
pathway into the woods on the right leading down the hill to
a stream. I remember the moment as if it were yesterday.
Certain moments of life lodge themselves ineffaceably in the
memory without apparently any adequate cause. We heard
sounds of wheels. We agreed " that Mr. Bag-^tf must be ar-
riving ". We did not know how to pronounce his name, and
felt no interest in his arrival, so continued our walk. He had
been introduced to my father as a "young banker in the West
of England " who wanted to write in the Economist, and he
arrived that 24th of January at Claverton Manor to discuss
banking and political economy with my father, then Financial
Secretary to the Treasury and member for Devonport. Un-
fortunately the day before his arrival my father's mare
"Beauty" had shied, and crushed his ankle against a wall,
so he was confined to his bed. There was a dinner-party of
neighbours and acquaintances from Bath that evening at which
my father could not appear, but he interviewed Walter Bagehot
in his room upstairs after dinner. One of the guests at dinner
was the successor to the celebrated Beau Nash, and was reign-
ing in his stead as master of the ceremonies at the Bath balls.
The fact that he, Walter Bagehot, coming to Claverton to
229
230 LIFE OF WALTER B AGE HOT
discuss the solemnities of banking and political economy with
the Secretary of the Treasury and proprietor of the Economist,
should be confronted by a gentleman whose vocation was of
so frivolous a character, tickled his humour greatly he told
us in after days. As two of my sisters and I were still in the
schoolroom it was not till breakfast the next day that
we first saw him. But then he made his mark. When
breakfast was over, and our German governess had left the
room, he turned big dark eyes quickly round upon us, of the
schoolroom, and exclaimed : " Your governess is like an egg ! "
We at once saw she was like an egg ! From that moment he
rose in our eyes from the status of a political economist to
that of a fellow-creature. He became one of us. Poor gover-
ness ! My memory of her since is chiefly associated with the
starting-point of the good understanding which from the
first existed between Walter Bagehot and his five sisters-in-
law. We were six sisters without a brother. It was something
strangely new, delightful and nutritious that he brought into
our lives. My sister Eliza whom he married was the eldest of
the six, I the youngest. She did not come down to that first
breakfast when Walter established his position with us, hav-
ing a headache ; but she had so far arrested his attention
the evening before at dinner that he missed her. He left
Claverton the next day, and my father with some of the family
went to London a few days later, as Parliament was to open
early in February.
To the young the appearance of a person is of great im-
portance, and, after he had called our Fraiilein " like an egg,"
we closely inspected Walter Bagehot's appearance. We were
puzzled. We could not call him handsome, but decidedly he
was not plain. He was like no one else. His strong indi-
viduality over-rode any classification. He was tall and thin
with rather high, narrow, square shoulders ; his hands were
long and delicate and the movements of his fingers very char-
acteristic. He held his fingers quite straight from the knuckles
and would often stroke his mouth or rub his forehead when
he was thinking or talking.
Dr. Woodrow Wilson gives this description of his appear-
ENGAGEMENT AND MARRIAGE 231
ance : " The very appearance of the man," says President
Woodrow Wilson, " was a sort of outer index to the singular
variety of capacity which has made him so notable a figure in
the literary annals of England. A mass of black, wavy hair ; a
dark eye, with depths full of slumberous, playful fire ; a ruddy
skin that bespoke active blood, quick in its rounds ; the lithe
figure of an excellent horseman ; a nostril full, delicate, quiver-
ing, like that of a blooded racer ; such were the fitting outward
marks of a man in whom life and thought and fancy abounded ;
the aspect of a man of unflagging vivacity, of wholesome,
hearty humour, of a ready intellectual sympathy, of wide and
penetrative observation."
Though President Wilson never saw Walter Bagehot, this
description is particularly happy, except that "ruddy" hardly
described Walter Bagehot's complexion. He had a very fine
skin, very white near where the hair started, and a high colour
— what might be called a hectic colour — concentrated on the
cheek bones, as you often see it in the West country. Such
a colour is associated with soft winds and a moist air, cider-
growing orchards, and very green, wet grass. His eyelids were
thin, and of singularly delicate texture, and the white of the
eyeballs was a blue white. He would pace a room when
talking, and, as the ideas framed themselves in words, he would
throw his head back as some animals do when sniffing the air.
The way he moved, his voice, everything about him, was in-
dividual. To us Walter was ever Waller — and that meant
something quite unlike anybody else.
The upshot of the talk at Claverton was a series of letters
which he started at once in the Economist, signed " A Banker ".
The first commences and concludes with the following passages
in the Economist of 7th February, 1857 : —
"THE GENERAL ASPECT OF THE BANKING QUESTION.
"To THE EDITOR OF THE 'ECONOMIST'.
" SIR,
" In addressing to you a series of letters upon bank-
ing, I do not pretend to have any perfectly new theory to ad-
vance. On a topic of which the literature is already so copious,
232 LIFE OF WALTER BAGEHOT
absolute novelty would be scarcely a recommendation, but on
a complicated question it is desirable that the various lights in
which its details strike individual minds should be continually
expressed. The history of science shows that you cannot
otherwise be secure against 'hasty assumptions, a slavish follow-
ing of able men, and an unthinking adoption of plausible and
popular theories. . . .
" There appears, therefore, to be no reason for departing
from the obvious view, that while the Act of 1819 is prima
facie reasonable in enacting that promises shall be performed,
that of 1847 is prima facie unreasonable in enacting that cer-
tain promises seemingly innocuous shall not be made. Of course
this is not conclusive ; many prima facie conclusions are wholly
erroneous ; but, as I observed before, it is a disadvantage if a
legislative settlement is not in accordance with natural impres-
sions, and the onus probandi is always on those who say that
acts apparently harmless are very hurtful. With a criticism
on the arguments by which this opinion is sought to be made
out, I shall venture soon to trouble you.
" I am, yours obediently,
"A BANKER.
" yd February -, 185 7."
This letter made its mark, eliciting the following letter
from Lord Radnor — whose interest in the journal of free trade
remained unabated since he and my father had invented the
scheme of the Economist.
" COLESHILL HOUSE,
"HlGHWORTH, Zth February, 1857.
" Lord Radnor trusts that ' A Banker ' will not think him
impertinent, if he offers the expression of his great satisfaction at
the perusal of the letter in the Economist of last night.
" It appears to Lord Radnor that to treat the subject of the
Bank Charter Bill in the mere pettyfogging style of 's
speech is simply ridiculous, and that the time is come when the
question of Banking and of the right to issue notes, should be
put on afixedand intelligible basis consistent with the immutable
principles of justice, public convenience, and political economy.
" Other questions of great importance both to the Bank and
ENGAGEMENT AND MARRIAGE 233
the community, ought (as it appears to Lord Radnor) now
to be settled : e.g. its freedom from, or connection with the
Government : its duties, whether due in the first place to the
public, or to the proprietors of stocks ; its functions as Banker
of the State, and as Manager of the Public Debts Monopoly.
" Lord Radnor hopes that if ' A Banker ' agrees with him, he
will not omit to urge these topics in the same forcible manner.
Lord Radnor has many apologies to offer for this intrusion."
Very shortly after my father's arrival in London Walter
dined at our London house, 15 Hertford Street, Mayfair,
where we lived during seventeen years when in London, and
where I was born. This house had a special interest for my
father, because Lord Grey, the statesman who greatly helped
to pass the Reform Bill of 1832, had been born in it.
That week-end visit to Claverton resulted in a momen-
tous change in Walter Bagehot's life, and was to prove a fresh
starting-point for him. The milieu into which he then
entered was a new experience. He was introduced into the
inner circle of political life, and was to make personal friends
of some of the prominent men in this circle. Vividly alive to
all stirring influences in social and public life, he had not yet
tasted a full draught in that big world of London, in which life,
in all directions, is filled up to the brim. His surroundings had
not, except from an intellectual point of view, been such as
to widen his outlook on Society. Bagehot's visit to Claverton
brought him personally into intimate contact with my father,
one of the foremost leaders of the Free-Trade movement, and
a member of the Government. He found a social life full of
swing and vivacity, with notable people coming and going,
a family of six sisters with whom he at once made friends, —
all the more eagerly, perhaps, because he had never had sisters
of his own. Mr. W. R. Greg almost lived with us at that
time, and by his intellectual gifts and singularly pleasant
manners added much to the charm of the life we were then
leading ; also Mr. Hutton, editor of the Economist^ and
Bagehot's greatest friend, was constantly on the scene.
From a mere acquaintance Mr. Hutton soon became one
of our dearest friends. His friendship for my sisters, Mrs.
234 LIFE OF WALTER BAGEHOT
Bagehot and Mrs. Greg and for myself, was felt, up to the
day of his death, to be one of those strong props in life which
never failed us. The fact that Walter Bagehot found, when
he first came to Claverton, an intimate acquaintanceship ex-
isting between my father and this, his closest friend, naturally
quickened his intimacy with us.
Claverton itself was an appropriate alighting spot for one who
has become famous as a writer. It had notable literary associa-
tions. It was classic ground haunted by the memories of many
great people who had come there as guests of Ralph Allen.1
The only remnants of the large " Gothic Mansion renowned
in the Civil Wars " which now exist are the level grass site on
which it stood, and the beautiful terraces and flights of steps
in front. These remain intact, flanked on one side by the old
church and on the other by the gardener's pretty gabled
cottage. The newer house on the hill is large, commodious,
but architecturally uninteresting. When we lived there it con-
tained a fine library, especially rich in illustrated works, from
which I gathered my first knowledge of the treasures to be
found in the great galleries of Europe. There was also a
picture-gallery, used as a billiard-room, where hung Sir Joshua
Reynolds' "Puck," a life-sized three-quarter figure by Paul
Veronese, and some notable Dutch paintings.
1 In Mr. Skrine's Rivers of England he describes Claverton as it was
in Ralph Allen's day : " About midway in this ascent, overlooking
Warleigh and the river, the pleasing village of Claverton seems to hang,
suspended, where its large gothic mansion (renowned in the Civil War)
and its little Church, with the pyramidical tomb of the late much esteemed
Mr. Allen, are striking objects ". Mr. Graves the Rector of Claverton
from 1750 to 1800 in his account of this notable person writes: "After
Mr. Allen had purchased Claverton in the year 1758 from Mr. Skrine "
(his descendant bought it back shortly after my father went to India), " he
was so much pleased with the romantic situation, and with the Manor
House, that he brought most of his company to see it ; and generally
dined there once a week ". This " company " who visited Ralph Allen
included Pope who " was almost a constant inmate of the family during
the Bath Season for many years," Fielding, Kurd, Dr. Warburton Bishop
of Gloucester, and the great Pitt, and many other people of note. Pitt
wrote of Allen : " No incident can make the least change in the honour and
love I bear him, or in the justice my heart does to his humane and
benevolent virtues ".
ENGAGEMENT AND MARRIAGE 235
Of the season of 1857 in London and Walter's visits to
Hertford Street I have no personal recollection, the sister next
to me and I being left with the "Egg" at Claverton. In the
Life, Letters and Journals of George Ticknor, the American,
there is a description of a small dinner-party in Hertford
Street when Walter was one of the guests.
" I dined with Mr. Wilson, a member of Parliament,
Financial Secretary of the Treasury ; owner, and formerly
editor, of the Economist, and the person on whom the Govern-
ment depends in questions of banking and finance. He never
reads a book ; he gets all his knowledge from documents and
conversation, as Greg tells me — that is, at first-hand. But he
talks uncommonly well on all subjects ; strongly, and with a
kind of original force, that you rarely witness. He has a
young wife, and three nice, grown-up daughters, who, with
Greg, a barrister [Walter Bagehot] whose name I did not get
— one other person and myself, filled up a very luxurious table,
as far as eating and drinking are concerned. And who do
you think that other person was ? Nobody less than Madame
Mohl ; who talked as fast and as amusingly as ever, full of
good-natured kindness, with a little sub-acid as usual, to give
it a good flavour. The young ladies, Greg accounts among
the most intelligent of his acquaintance, and they certainly
talk French as few English girls can, for De Tocqueville came
in after dinner, and we all changed language at once, except
the master, who evidently has but one tongue in his head, and
needs but one, considering the strong use he makes of it." It
may have been true that my father at that time had not time
to read a book, but in his boyhood and youth he was a vora-
cious reader.
It was after the family returned to Claverton early in August
that the courting began in real earnest. Walter was con-
stantly coming and going, and every visit brought the climax
nearer. Much vitality prevailed in our family life in those
Claverton and Hertford Street days, vitality of many kinds —
social, literary, political, artistic. There was a great deal of
riding, a great deal of reading, a great deal of music, a great
many visitors. Instigated by Mr. Greg, my elder sisters,
*3$ LIFE OF WALTER B AGE HOT
chiefly my sister Julia, afterwards Mrs. Greg, wrote reviews
of books in the Economist and in the National Review. My
mother was a good musician, and having studied in Germany,
we were perhaps more musician-like in our performances than
many amateurs of that day. We all played the piano, my
sister Matilda (Mrs. Horan) and I played the harp, and we all
sang. My father was very fond of music, and also of pictures :
I was always drawing. From childhood I was always at it
in one form or another. In those days a master came out
from Bath to teach me "the touch for an oak — ditto for a
beech — ditto for a chestnut tree" — and such like theoretic
interpretations of foliage.
The source of all this vitality was my father. In looking
back to that past — and I think without partiality I may say
it, my father possessed more than any one I ever met that
special genius which instinctively discovers how to make
something good for others as well as for itself out of every
moment of life. I can only think of one person who possessed
a like passion for work, the same fervour with which my father
tackled the labour, however arduous, involved in carrying out
everything he undertook to do, and the same delightful social
qualities. That person was a friend of later days, Lord
Leighton. Both had the same staying power, the same in-
domitable energy. Both my father and Leighton revelled in
work. It was said of my father when he was Financial Secre-
tary of the Treasury, that he spoilt all the clerks in the depart-
ment because he did half their work for them.
In his memoir of my father, Walter Bagehot writes : " In
the country, where his habits were necessarily more obvious,
he habitually spent the whole day from eleven till eight, with
some slight interval for a short ride in the middle of the day,
over his Treasury bag ; and as such was his notion of holiday,
it may be easily conceived that in London, when he had still
more to do in a morning, and had to spend almost every
evening in the House of Commons, his work was greater than
an ordinary constitution could have borne. And it was work
of a rather peculiar kind. Some men of routine habits spend
many hours over their work, but do not labour very intensely
ENGAGEMENT AND MARRIAGE 237
at one time ; other men of more excitable natures work im-
pulsively, and clear off everything they do by eager efforts in
a short time. But Mr. Wilson in some sense did both.
Although his hours of labour were so very protracted, yet if
a casual observer happened to enter his library at any moment,
he would find him with his blind down to exclude all objects
of external interest, his brow working eagerly, his eye fixed
intently on the figures before him, and, very likely, his rapid
pen passing fluently over the paper. He had all the labour
of the chronic worker, and all the labour of the impulsive
worker too. And those admitted to his intimacy used to
wonder that he was never tired. He came out of his library
in an evening more ready for vigorous conversation — more
alive to all subjects of daily interest, more quick to gain new
information — more ready to expound complicated topics, than
others who had only passed an easy day of idleness or ordinary
exertion."
My father's natural gifts, together with an earnest, delight-
ful nature, and the influence of his official position, made our
home attractive to various kinds of interesting people.
Walter Bagehot, among the number, found in its atmosphere
stimulating conditions, besides the special charm which, from
his first visit, my sister had inspired. It seems on looking
back a little curious that a person of his notable ability and
twice our age should have been treated by us of the school-
room with so little awe. One explanation for this seeming
irreverence lies in the fact, I believe, that my father's personal
influence so completely placed him in the position of great
Llama with all his surroundings — without his meaning in
the least to occupy such a position — that every one of the
family and those who shared the intimate family life, such
as Walter Bagehot, Mr. Hutton and Mr. Greg, gathered as
mere satellites round a greater centre luminary. There was
also Walter's own strong repugnance to " mounting the
camel " in any sense whatever. Never was there any person
as wise and good as he, who more instinctively objected to
posing as a " superior person ". As a family we interested
him, and our lives were brightened, our interests intensified,
238 LIFE OF WALTER B AGE HOT
and our horizon widened, by his becoming one of us. It may
easily be imagined how great a gain was the invasion of such
a brother, at once a sage, a wit, and a boy, into the home life
of six hitherto brotherless sisters. He came and went, each
time becoming more intimate. Long rides on the downs,
long walks were taken ; but for the walks a donkey had to be
provided for my sister who was the heroine of the situation.
She was not strong enough to walk far. Walter, in order to
secure a tete-a-tete with her, was observed by the vigilant eyes
of her younger sisters to kick this donkey and make it trot on
beyond the walkers. I, as the chief artist in the family, im-
mortalised one of these walks on the Claverton Downs by
drawing a caricature in water-colour which exists unto this
day. When shown to him at the time, it had a depressing
effect upon the aspirant. He feared he had not much chance
if my sister did not mind this, to him, anxious — almost solemn
situation — being caricatured. He was desperately, poetically
in love. My father had always been jealous of any one who
seemed likely to rob him of a daughter, and though he entirely
approved (theoretically) of Walter Bagehot as a son-in-law,
the idea of one of his daughters leaving him made him ill.
On the 5th November the proposal took place, but the answer
was not given till three days later in London, where my
mother and my two sisters, Eliza and Sophie went, en route
for Edinburgh. A certain Dr. Beveridge, one of the first
believers in massage, had been recommended by Lady
Kinnaird as likely to cure my two sisters of ailments with
which they were troubled, so to Dr. Beveridge at Edinburgh
they went for three months.
I remember well the day of the proposal. I do not think
any event, previous or subsequent, produced so much excite-
ment among us. The news was brought up to the schoolroom
by my sister Zoe, and we sat on the piano and talked! —
talked ! — talked ! The " Egg " had returned to Germany and
we were pursuing, or not pursuing, our studies by ourselves, cer-
tain remote professors in Bath being supposed to fill the gap.
On the 7th November, 1858, at 10 o'clock A.M. in the din-
ing-room of 1 5 Hertford Steet, Mayfair, my sister and Walter
ENGAGEMENT AND MARRIAGE 239
Bagehot were engaged. He breakfasted with my father and
sisters, then rushed off to Mr. Hutton with the good news.
Mr. Hutton called the same morning to congratulate.
My sister's diary relates : —
"nth November. — Got a letter from Mr. Bagehot (my
first) from Langport, saying he was to return to London to-
morrow morning to watch the crisis. Sent an answer to the
Queen's Hotel."
" I2tk November. — Papa had a letter from Mr. Bagehot's
father and one from himself, the latter to thank him for the
trust reposed in him. He came by morning express and
called on Papa at the Treasury. He came to see me at 6
o'clock, and we talked together till dinner-time. He brought
me Selections from Wordsworth. Mamma and Sophie went to
the English Opera at the Lyceum. Papa did not come to
dinner till 8.30, having been busy about the crisis. The
Government sent letters to the Bank suspending Sir Robert
Peel's Bank Act of 1844. The Deputy Governor of the Bank
of England' called to discuss matters with Papa at 10 P.M."
" i^th November. — Mr. Bagehot came at 4. I introduced
him to Susan.1 He read me Wordsworth's ' Lord Clifford ' and
we had a very long talk after dinner. Mr. Hutton dined
with us and told Mr. Bagehot in walking home that he is
engaged to Miss Roscoe, a cousin of his first wife."
" ijth November. — Mr. Bagehot came at 9 and breakfasted
with us and went with us to the station at 10.30 — he and I
together. Papa and Mr. Bagehot went to the British Museum
after seeing us off to Scotland, to see the new reading-room
and the new fragments of ancient statues from Halicarnassus."
In this Victorian-era fashion were Walter Bagehot and
Elizabeth Wilson betrothed. A fashion earnest, deliberate,
closely under the chaperonage of parents, none the less exciting
— thrillingly so — to all therein concerned.
The following quotations are from Walter Bagehot's letters
to my sister while she was in Edinburgh. The first written
from Langport on the loth November, began : " I have just
1 Our old nurse who lived in the family for fifty-three years, and died
at Herd's Hill in 1885.
240 LIFE OF WALTER B AGE HOT
rushed down here from Bristol and it appears to me that
I shall rebound again to London to-morrow. I rather fancy
I shall have to stay some days there, as the panic is getting
worse and requires watching. ... I cannot be in a panic at
all myself. I have never felt such happiness as for the last
two days, ever since our first walk in the Cemetery [Walter's
name for Hamilton Gardens]. ... I do not quite believe in
my happiness yet, one requires detail to make one believe in
anything so strange. . . ."
Eight days later he writes from Yeovil : "... What do
you think your father and myself did the moment you were
gone ? We went to see the antiquities of Halicarnassus ! !
They are a set of odd legs and bodies of great statues just ar-
rived, and they alleviated our feelings very much. It happened
in this way. We drove past the British Museum on our way
home, and Mr. Wilson asked if I had seen the new reading-room,
and as I had not, he forthwith took me to see it. We were
ushered into old Panizzi who was doing nothing in a fine arm-
chair, and he proposed we should see the venerable fragments
just arrived from Greece. I am not sure, however, that we
appreciated them. I have an unfortunate prejudice in favour
of statues in one piece — at least in not more than six pieces,
and these are broken up very small indeed — and it is a con-
troversy whose arm belongs to whose body; but I believe
real lovers of art admire these perplexities. On the whole,
however, we spent our hour cheerfully, and, in consequence,
the Chancellor of the Exchequer and a heap of Scotch bankers
were kept half an hour waiting. Seriously I felt pretty well
although you were gone. I am so soothed by the last week . . .
and it is such a rest. I believe too I am a little tired. The
affections are always fatiguing ; then there is the panic which
is wearing, and really a trifle anxious, and your father's con-
versation, and what I guess from it, lets me into the interior of
matters in which I am so much interested that currency be-
comes an excitement, and altogether I am pleasingly tired, and
though I think of you very much, about two minutes in three,
it is nicely and mildly. I must brace myself more to my work
in the morning, however, for it won't do to be always thinking
ENGAGEMENT AND MARRIAGE 241
of our drive to the station and the fireside in Hertford
Street. . . .
" Mr. Moffatt gave us a grand dinner, capital wine and ex-
cellent food. We talked currency till half-past one and then
Mr. Wilson and myself walked to Hertford Street, and stood
on the door-step ever so long talking of Michel Chevallier
and the double standard in France. Mr. Moffatt is a sensible
man, acquainted with money, and was really interested in what
he was saying. There were only five of us, and a small party
is always pleasanter. Mr. Robert Lowe, and the American
Banker were the others ; the latter was instructive. Mr. Lowe
said he disapproved of subscriptions for widows. He thought
they had better means of getting on than any one else, if they
were proper people to keep alive, which I mention to you as a
characteristic expression of the ' masculine element '.
" I came down here (Yeovil) by the evening express to see
one of my partners in the bank who lives here, named Batten,
who would amuse you. . . . He is an intimate friend of mine.
. . . Does the doctor seem a human being? I hate him. He
will try to keep you in Edinburgh under pretence of curing
you."
On the 1 9th November he writes : —
" . . . I do not believe much in your being ill. I think
you are jaded and want to have rubbish talked to you (as you
seem to like it, which is odd), but as you do like it, it is better
than being rubbed. Is the physician a sensible man out of
physic ? One can't judge of drugs, but of common sense one
can, and all professional people should be judged of by that
test. The papers say Mr. Wilson is going to Devonport next
week. He evidently did not intend going when I left town.
He puts the worst on the crisis as an excuse. It is spreading
and widening, but less intense at the focus in London. It is
utterly useless giving your message to my mother, though I
will do so. She believes you must mean to break off the
engagement or you would never have gone to Edinburgh. I
agree with her, but it produces no effect. I thought of you all
day yesterday under the pretence of a day's hunt with very
little sport. During a run your image waned, but returned at
16
242 LIFE OF WALTER BAGEHOT
the decease of the hare. There is no time for quiet reflection
like the intervals of the hunt and I was so happy. ...
" My spirits always make me cheerful in a superficial way,
but they do not satisfy, and somehow life, even before I was
engaged to you, was sweeter and gentler, and the jars and
jangles of action lost their influence, and literature had a new
value since you liked my writing, and everything has had a
gloss upon it, though I have come to Claverton the last few
times with the notion that the gloss would go, that I should
burst out, and you would be tranquil and kind and considerate,
and refuse, and I should never see you again. I had a vision
of the thing which I keep by me. As it has not happened I
am afraid this is egotistical, indeed I know it is, but I am not
sure that egotism is bad in letters, and if I write to you I must
write about what I feel for you. . . .
" To change the subject. What is the particular advantage
of being rubbed at Edinburgh ? Since writing yesterday I
have made careful inquiries and am assured that the English
can rub. Why not be rubbed in Somerset ? Let the doctor
mark the place and have a patch put to show where, and let an
able-bodied person in the West of England rub on the same
place and surely it will be as well ? Does the man's touch do
good to disease like the King's ?
" By incredible researches in an old box I have found the
poem I mentioned to you. I wish I had not, for I thought it
was better. I have not seen it for several years, and it is not
so good as I fancied, perhaps not good at all, but I think you
may care to read it. The young lady's name is Orithyia.
The Greek legend is that she was carried away by the north
wind. I have chosen to believe she was in love with the north
wind, but I am not aware that she ever declared her feelings
explicitly in any document. By the way, you have. I have
just read your letter in that light, and I go about murmuring
' I have made that dignified person commit herself. I have, I
have,' and then I vault over the sofa with exultation. Those
are the feelings of the person you have connected yourself
with. Please do not be offended at my rubbish. Sauciness
is my particular line. I am always rude to everybody I respect.
ENGAGEMENT AND MARRIAGE 243
I could write to you of the deep and serious feelings which I
hope you believe really are in my heart, but my pen jests of
itself and always will. . . .
" I hope the doctor does not think there is anything seri-
ously the matter with your sister. Do not let him do much
to her. I am more afraid of remedies than of diseases. . . .
" Enclosed in this letter is the poem ' Orithyia '."
ORITHYIA.
What am I and where am I ?
Why do I leave the city of my youth,
And the sweet streets where linger all I know,
And the fair home where I have lived and loved ?
To mark how on Hissus gentle face
The eager north wind venteth his quick will,
Or how the long ribbed plane leaves vex the air,
And how subtle and calm the light clouds hang
In amorous poise upon the breath that wafts them ?
I do remember me that in my youth
I strayed, where in Acropolis the hills
Regard Euboea, and the sweet air was hushed,
The distant waves ^olian music made,
The very hills were faint as the next world,
And all things murmured. Yet there was nought.
But all at once the breeze began to murmur
'Orithyia,' and the calm hills remurmured
' Orithyia,' and the fair waves re-echoed
' Orithyia,' and in their hollow throat
The caves half muttered ' Orithyia ' ;
Yet there was nothing save a too deep calm,
An overfulness and a weight in air —
Since then I have not loved what maidens love,
To me the winding dance, the hasteful words,
The gentle music and the gentler home,
The tranquil evening and the pleasant morn,
The flexile fancies and the talk of friends,
The converse low and sweet in evening time,
The taskless work and busy rest were nought,
Nor all the homely harmony of life.
Nor them that fain would love me could I love,
For ever unto me mine own heart seemed
Too awful to be spent on things of earth,
But walked I sole and consecrate, as doth
16*
244 LIFE OF WALTER B AGE HOT
The moon in heaven. Yet were there longings strange.
Such as with lisping tongues of half-formed waves
The tranquil sea doth utter in its musing.
Longings for one immortal whom I knew
And yet knew not. And so in sooth was all.
Now I awake. The dream of this world ends,
A thickening cloud o'er-shadows all the world,
A mind is in the air : — for I am called.
At once a sudden thrill shakes earth and heaven
For He who rules the awful air doth call me.
Boreas, I come, I come, I pant and pause,
I faint, press on, and pause ; for what am I
That He who rules the awful air should love me ?
Yet He hath called me twice and now again,—
My shaking eyes turn dim ; my breath beat thick ;
And all my breast is filled with subtle love, —
Boreas, I come, I come.
Again on the 25th November he attacks the " rubbing ".
" I do not like this about gaslight, and you may depend upon
it the horrid dullness you describe is exactly what you ought
not to have. What is life worth relieved only by a piano ?
If you must not come home by yourself why not come home
with Susan ? I do not believe in patent rubbing. Anybody
can rub. Perhaps Scotch hands are larger, but I doubt that
being an advantage. What does your sister Julia mean by
your being spoilt? It is all rubbish, you want to be made
much off, . . . and you go away to a back street by a boys'
school and hope to be comforted by a piano and the wife of
a Lord Advocate ! ! "
" CLAVERTON,
" •zgth November, 1857.
" . . . I came over here yesterday. Everything in its
usual channel. The only event which has occurred is that
your sister Emilie dined yesterday, and naturally insisted that
Jetty should dine in public also, which Mr. Wilson forbad and
this cast a momentary shade on life, but it is gone now.1 I
think I have distinguished myself about money. I wrote a
letter in the Economist four columns of leader type. Every-
1 "Jetty " was my inseparable, a black-and-tan toy terrier. I knew at
the time that Walter took my part, he always took the part of children.
ENGAGEMENT AND MARRIAGE 245
thing was postponed to it — an article of Mr. Wilson's (! !) — one
of Mutton's ; and something else. Your father seemed to like
it, and Greg said, ' Better than any of your literary things,
Bagehot ? ' which is paying a compliment and spoiling it rather.
"... I am going over to Claverton this afternoon. You
seem to me very poorly. You may depend on it no remedies
will do you the least good unless you are in the midst of cheer-
ful associations and society. Your prospects do not seem
cheerful. I shall speak to your sister Julia. I have some hope
she could arrange your coming home. You can obey Mr.
Beveridge's directions anywhere surely. He won't admit that
of course, and will have endless learned reasons, because he will
be paid if you stay, and have nothing if you go ; but you must
allow for these obliquities in the greatest scientific constitutions."
"... I think I should warn you that in practical things
I have rather an anxious disposition. I am cheerful but not
sanguine. I can make the best of anything, but I have a diffi-
culty in expecting that the future will be very good. The
most successful men of action rather overestimate their chances
of success in action. I cannot do this at all. I have always
to work in the bare cold probability. My energy is fair and
my spirits very good, but this difficulty of intellect I have
always had. If you will soothe me in this it will be almost
too great happiness, though you are a little anxious naturally
too. Still we will have headaches in life together, and that will
be to me immense. Talking of headaches, I cannot be reconciled
to your staying in Edinburgh. I am rather learned in head
complaints from my own experience. My impression is that
they are half in the mind, and that cheerful, easy excitement
is better for them than anything else, and you are quite out
of the way of that. . . . What do you think of my verses ?
You are not obliged to like them. They entirely represent my
past self. I read them as if another person had written them.
Do they seem to you like mine ? "
" HERD'S HILL,
"4^ December, 1857.
"... Everything seems very quiet. I really think in
about a week I could run up to Edinburgh, even if you are
246 LIFE OF WALTER B AGE HOT
cured by Christmas which you must be. I have no faith in Mr.
Beveridge, but some faith in your faith in him. All these head
diseases are somewhat in the mind, at least I found it so, and
if you believe he is doing you good he will do you good ; but
the great thing is that you should be happy. ... I admire
your talking about my choice? Young ladies should not let
their hair fly in the wind ; that was the original beginning.1
Seriously, it is not right to talk so. I feel my whole being
drawn towards you, not by my own will, but some other and
unexpressible way as I believe by a power greater than either
of us. . . ."
Walter — still Mr. Bagehot in the Diary — joined my mother
and sisters in Edinburgh on I3th December, and on the i6th,
my sister's birthday, he presented her with eight volumes
bound in red leather, containing the poetry of Wordsworth,
Shelley and Keats, and on that same day engagement rings
were exchanged. My father arrived in Edinburgh on the day
of these events ; having been kept in London on account of the
crisis. While in Edinburgh, Walter was occupied in writing
his article on this crisis for the National Review.
During this winter Walter Bagehot put together his early
essays and brought them out in a volume, calling them Esti-
mates of some Englishmen and Scotchmen. He wrote to my
sister : —
" I am very glad I decided on reprinting my essays for
your sake, because they will help you to understand my mind
better than anything else. You may consider the book in the
nature of a ' love letter '. It never would have been put to-
gether but from a floating idea that perhaps you might read it
and perhaps you might like me better for it. We shall see.
I am afraid I am callous, possibly proud, and do not care for
mere general reputation. Of course it would be a pleasure if
it should come, but it is a thing which no sane man ought to
make necessary to his happiness, or think of it but as a temporary
luxury, even if it should come to him. First rate fame — the fame
of great productive artists — is a matter of ultimate certainty,
1 During a ride to Orchardleigh my sister's hair came down, and
made Walter aware of the fact that he was in love.
ENGAGEMENT AND MARRIAGE 247
but no other fame is. Posterity cannot take up little people,
there are so many of them. Reputation must be acquired at
the moment and the circumstances of the moment are matters
of accident. In my case I have had a good deal of newspaper
praise for these essays, at least for some of them — when they
first came out, and I must expect very little more. Besides
I know they will be abused and by whom ; and if one puts
aside unfavourable criticisms in newspapers carelessly, one has
scarcely a right to set much store by the favourable ones. I
do care, however, a good deal for some kind of reputation. In
proof of which I send you a letter we received in the course of
the National Review operations from Matthew Arnold. We
wrote to him to ask him to write on Beranger, and I kept his
answer which is wholly unprecedented with me. It gave me a
good deal of pleasure, as he is rather a severe judge of poetical
criticism, and I will give it io you."
Enclosed was the following letter from Matthew Arnold : —
" WHARFESIDE, OTLEY,
"YORKSHIRE, i-jth October, 1856.
"MY DEAR SIR,
" I beg to thank you most warmly for your flattering
proposals : I assure you the subject tempts me so much that the
rate of remuneration would weigh very little with me in deciding
whether to try it or not : but the real truth is I am so much
occupied that I feel I could not do justice either to your
Review or to myself by any article which I could produce for
you under my present circumstances. I am therefore com-
pelled gratefully to decline this offer from you as I have declined
similar offers from others ; but perhaps you will allow me to
say that I have been so much interested by your Review that
it is with unusual reluctance that I forego the opportunity
which you kindly extend to me of contributing to it. It was
only a day or two ago that I read the article on Shelley in
the last number ; that article and one or two others (in which
I imagine that I trace the same hand) seem to me to be of the
very first quality, showing not talent only, but a concern for
the simple truth which is rare in English literature as it is in
English politics and English religion — whatever zeal, vanity
248 LIFE OF WALTER B AGE HOT
and ability may be exhibited by the performers in each of
these three spheres.
" Believe me, my dear Sir, in much haste,
" Your faithful and obliged servant,
" M. ARNOLD.
" R. H. HUTTON, ESQ."
Addressed to
Rosse Priory
(Lord Kinnaird's).
" LANGPORT,
" 8tf January, 1858.
"... I am glad beyond measure to hear you are better.
I think it is my going away, just as Mr. Beveridge's patients
are benefited principally after they leave him. I wish you
would soon adopt that course. Is it not Lady Kinnaird whom
he cured afterwards by magic at a great distance ? You should
inquire into it now you are staying with her. I am quite
ready to believe in him if he will cure you in Somerset I am
glad you like Matthew Arnold's letter. I am reading his new
tragedy which is clever, but too much ' high art,' and not ad-
dressed enough to the common feelings and minds of ordinary
people. I used to tell Clough he believed legibility to be a
defect, and I am sure the high art criticism and practice tend
steadily in that direction. Possibly my essay being a trifle dull
was the reason M. Arnold liked it."
"... All the 'hymeneal arrangements' are quite in
your hands. I insist on your being married yourself, on
this point I shall be firm ; but as to the rest you may be quite
despotic. ... I have no clerical friend whom I at all care to
ask to marry me. I have only one very intimate one at all
now, and he lives in Rutlandshire, which is a good way from
Claverton ; and he is not nearly so episcopal looking as you
describe your uncle to be. I have only one cousin I care to
ask, if I may, to be your bridesmaid. Her name is Mary
Watson Bagehot.1
" I am very glad you can think of me in beautiful scenery.
I do not quite see the connection of ideas, still I am very glad
1 Mrs. Schwann, daughter of Mr. Edward Bagehot.
ENGAGEMENT AND MARRIAGE 249
there is a connection. I have never seen Perthshire, as I
went from Aberdeen to Edinburgh by the packet, being
in a hurry. I like the Scotch scenery very much, it is such
rough simple beauty. Possibly Perthshire may be more
cultivated, but in the part I have seen the elements of beauty
are the simplest imaginable; heather, rude hills and rough
stones ; and yet, with the deep colours which pass over them
the fascination is very great."
" LOMBARD STREET,
" i$th January.
"... I had a pleasant evening at Wimbledon last night.
The only defect was that Mr. Greg has gone into captivity to an
over-fascinating woman, a Mrs. . She has been a pro-
fessional beauty and appeared in a nocturnal sort of silk robe
surmounted by a red head-dress. She had taken to mind on
the waning of her exterior charms, and is a friend of Tenny-
son's and talks of ' sweet ideas ' and ' hard facts '. Greg went
into utter captivity to her and she seems a lion in the Putney
suburb. I came up with Clough in the train and asked him
if he knew her, and he made an excruciating face, and said :
' I believe there is a woman '. Her husband was an influential
member of council at Calcutta, a much better sort of creature
with white'hair. I liked Miss Greg the aged, very much " [the
Aunt Sally who presided over Mr. Greg's home]. " There is a
homely narrowness about her which is pleasant. She has not
over-civilised away her character. . . . Fitz James Stephen
was there. He was pleasant ; he is angular and has a rather
aggressive development of conscience, but he talks sense and is
agreeable. Greg, of course, was most genial himself."
" LANGPORT,
" \lth January, 1858.
"... I admire your defending the ' charming ' Mrs.
- [Mr. Greg's friend]. I am sure you would not like her.
You must not expect me to believe in the universal perfection
of ladies. Some, I will always maintain, to be utter humbugs.
Mrs. is, I assure you. She is not clever. She pays
attention to clever men ; she strokes their minds soothingly
and ingeniously, but that is all. She has been very pretty and
250 LIFE OF IV ALTER B AGE HOT
you know my strong preference for pretty people, and you
ought to know my intense love for one thing, deep mind. . . .*
I like very much that you are to have Greg's daughter for one
of your bridesmaids. You might tell him sometime how
grateful I am to him for bringing me to Claverton. I never
should be able to get it out, if I saw him daily all my life.
" I am very glad the incrustation on the bones of the neck,
which is clever enough to appear in the eyes, has been removed ;
nobody could be happy with such a subtle clever thing about
them. I am also rejoiced that there is to be a rubber in
London, that if you retain your affectionate sentiment for this
alleviation you may obtain it within rational limits. If you
are right and headaches can be cured in this way, friction
will become ubiquitous ; small boy at every corner (like the
shoe cleaners) will call out, 'Rub your neck, sir, rub your
neck ! ' and all the world will be rubbed. By the interest and
talk that are spent on your trousseau you seem to be likely to
have apparel now which will be enough till the end of your
life. I approve of this as I shall save by it. Let me advise
enduring materials (canvas, I am assured, wears well), at any
rate, if that is not lady-like, which I am too ignorant to be
quite sure of, something which will stand the wear and tear of
life. It would be pitiable to be found in old age with only
gossamer (what is gossamer?) gowns. I must go to bed
now, as it is past one in the morning, and I have to hunt.
I have not been out since I returned from Edinburgh and the
duties of our life must be done. You must not think because
I write cheerfully that I do not feel an immense deal your
staying away.
1 This poor lady who Walter criticised so severely, was treated in like
manner by his friend Mr. Hutton, as well as by Arthur Clough. Mr. Hutton
wrote a nonsense verse about her which I illustrated : —
" There was an old lady of Putney,
Who looked as if she would butt me ;
She came with a rush and a passionate gush,
That ecstatic old lady of Putney."
This aversion was a typical example of an inveterate antipathy which
Mr. Hutton, Mr. Clough, Walter Bagehot and other men of their set
entertained towards a certain flashy form of insincerity.
ENGAGEMENT AND MARRIAGE 251
"... I have been reading The Three Clerks (Anthony
Trollope's) in scraps here and there when I could catch hold of
the volume. It is not nearly so clever as Barchester Towers
on the whole, and is very unmethodically written, or rather,
I fear, it is written on the commercial method, whole disser-
tations and irrelevant reflections being inserted to make up
three volumes ; still there are some very clever things. There
is a very nice girl of sixteen, not the least dignified, who falls
in love with a not very steady young gentleman, and then
wastes away, and goes to Torquay because he has debts, etc. I
have always liked to read about women suffering — that is
young women. They stand up in a ball-room and irritate
you with a petty, futile happiness which is most offensive, and
besides they inflict at times such endless pain, that it is right
they should suffer in their turn. Possibly it may not be the
same people who inflict the suffering that endure it, but in a
large universe like this we must not expect a very exact nicety ;
which ' blue and pink girl ' suffers does not much matter, you
will agree with me. I dare say the fates impending justice did
not know them apart. I never could at all.
" The crisis is all over and everybody has too much money.
It is really a very ridiculous world. The last few times I have
been here everybody was on their knees asking for money —
now you have nearly to go on your knees to ask people to take
it. Neither of these two extremes is very pleasant."
"... I am very proud naturally and nothing has ever
really humbled me before. All my million deficiencies and
failings constantly rise up before me. ... I have not, I know,
a good mind, but I have, I think, a firm and true one in its real
depths. The expression which seems to express what I feel in
contrast with last year is the phrase of the Bible, if one might use
it, f a new heart '. I did not think I could have such feelings."
" -2.\st January ^ 1858.
"... I was much pleased with Sir C. Lewis's remark * and
more at your being pleased with it. The Times says, Mr. J.
1 Sir George Cornewall Lewis had written to my father saying that the
article in the National Review (Bagehot's) was the only good one he had
seen on the Crisis.
252 LIFE OF WALTER B AGE HOT
Wilson, M.P., Mrs. Wilson, Misses Wilson (two) were at the
State Ball last night. You have not stolen to town without
telling me, or did you obey Her Majesty's summons by tele-
graph? . . .
"There are reviews of my essays in the Press and the
Spectator, the latter only a short notice, as they say its con-
tents will be fresh in people's minds, which is a compliment as
implying that one is read and remembered. The Press says
I am ' childish and indescribably trivial '. This is fame, you
observe, that enlightened appreciation for which authors long.
I am much afraid Hutton will out-Herod Herod about me
in the Economist. I can't say I think my book will begin a
new era at all, though the covers are very good and the type
is so too."
" I want to take Bella Vista. I am sure it will do for
us. The house stands in, or rather on the edge of, a firwood,
belonging to Sir A. Elton, which looks as if it belonged to
Bella Vista, but does not. The view is really lovely, and so
are the walks in almost every direction, and the beauties are
quite near. Although Clevedon, which is a little watering-
place stuck on to a very little old village is near, you are quite
in the country as much as at Claverton. Inside the rooms
are small and an immense number of them ; in fact it is 'a
minced house, and it would not do for persons who wished to
give enormous entertainments. . . . There is a half tower at
the top of the house from which the view is really wonderful.
" [Part missed out] I never saw any love letters in real
life scarcely, but I am sure it is natural for those who stand
in the relation we do to pour out our hearts to each other quite
simply and as the words come. I believe what seems to others
very silly love letters often do this to the persons concerned,
though there is no meaning in the words in themselves or to
others. To be able to express deep feeling rationally and
yet adequately is a very rare gift, and it is better to utter it
irrationally and at the risk of ridicule than not to utter it at
all. I am sure you won't complain of my letters being neat or
elaborate. I feel you would know they were not thorough letters
of mine if they were so. They would be uncharacteristic."
ENGAGEMENT AND MARRIAGE 253
" I2tk February.
"... I hope you enjoyed Lady Palmerston's. It is all
nonsense or morbidness, as you say, to call the world all hollow.
It is an object of the greatest intellectual interest to those who
have the mind and opportunity to study it. The mistake is
to treat it as giving more than any intellectual interest ever
can. The deepest part of the soul after a little revolts at any-
thing merely intellectual. Such things seem trivial and un-
worthy when forced on us as substitutes for what is deeper.
It is amusing that I should explain to you the charm of the
world. It is horribly against my own interest, but I have a
certain abstract love of truth which is much in the way."
On 1 8th February the travellers returned to Claverton
after stopping in London to buy the then de rigueur dressing-
case, and to order the trousseau. Walter appeared at Claverton
on the i pth. Constant visits followed, and discussions on the
preparations for the wedding were interlarded with readings
of Shelley, of the essay by Walter on Bishop Butler, battledore
and shuttlecock, riding, music, and whist. Cup-and-ball was
Walter's favourite game. How distinctly I see him now
steadying the ball while gazing at it sideways very intently
with his large round black eyes, an eye-glass stuck in one.
He was thirty-two years of age, but he still had a boy's keen
zest in playing certain games, as he had also in riding, in
hunting, and in playing cards. He rather scorned the view
most of us took of cards, the indifference we showed as to
whether we lost or won. One of my sisters he thought it
worth while playing with, as she had the true gambler's spirit.
Her temper was affected when she lost. " It was of no use,"
Walter would say, " to play with people callous as to whether
their cards are good or bad."
From 51 Lombard Street, on 24th February, 1858, Walter
writes : " I am amused at your finding a difficulty in writing to
me at Claverton. Living in the sisterly world brings back all
your old ideas and associations, and you have had no time at
home as yet to get used to it. I quite feel as you do about
general events. Real affection enters into our background of
thought and heart. I confess to not caring as I used to do
254 LIFE OF WALTER B AGE HOT
about the change of administration.1 I used to care more than
suited the principles I used to maintain. I had a theory that one
ought to attend almost exclusively to affairs around one. I
used to say ' I did not care how many wives the King of Siam
had. I could not help him.' Still until quite lately I did care
about public matters an immense deal, and it seems to me
quite strange that I do not do so more. I breakfasted with
Mr. Wilson this morning. He seemed to anticipate glory in
opposition and to have a sensation of freedom in having to
maintain only what it pleased him to maintain, and to have
no official etiquette to restrain him ; but he will feel the non-
arrival of the Treasury bag in a Long Vacation, if Lord Derby
could live so long. I cannot dream that he will, still the
political world is so strange that no case is ever desperate. If
the opposition did any thing factious, he might rise in popularity
and dissolve.
" I astonished a heap of people by saying with positiveness
that the 2 1st of next month was on a Wednesday. I think
about that day rather too much I fear for getting through my
work on other days. I hope I shall have a line from you in the
morning. You take up so entirely my imagination that my mind
seems poor of all dodges and inventions about everything else."
During the weeks before his wedding day Walter was
carrying on unremittingly the business of a banker at Bristol
and Langport, thinking out original ideas in writing his essay
on the " Waverley Novels" for the National Review, partly
doing the work of editing the Review, settling the renting
and furnishing of his future home, and — by his high spirits,
wit, humour, and cordial comradeship, filling the position of
an ideal future brother-in-law. This was a very animated
comradeship with continual sallies of amusing criticism and
undisturbing satire. Nothing he ever said could be resented.
He always steered clear of the sensibilities that could get
hurt. One of my sisters, whose guileless nature led her to be
over-credulous at times, was inclined not only to theorise, but
to take earnest flights in argument, starting from the ground
1 On 25th February, 1858, Lord Derby replaced Lord Palmerston as
Prime Minister.
ENGAGEMENT AND MARRIAGE 255
of her own credulity, whereupon Walter would say, " ought
to be put on the chimney piece ". She was to be treated as an
ornament, not seriously listened to. His own favourite seat
was the china stove in the picture gallery looking down on to
the billiard table where he would perch to read aloud to us
poetry or prose ; the Saturday Review, the National Review,
anything that he wanted to read at the moment. Literature was
a living companion to him, and his interest in it was contagious.
In Walter Bagehot's essay on the "Waverley Novels,"
written during those weeks, the kinship of his sympathies with
those of Sir Walter Scott is evinced ; the same " healthy and
natural sense," the same fellow-feeling with the instinctive
inclinations of men ; understanding well both their wise and their
unwise inclinations. Both were to the core gentle-men, with
humanitarian and merciful consideration for the feeble as for
the strong. Neither could have been beguiled by any passion
of partisanship into believing that any permanent benefit can
be bestowed on any human creature by riding rough-shod
over the feelings, customs, or prejudices of even the most un-
cultured and unreasoning of classes. Of Scott's ideas of
political economy Walter Bagehot writes that they "are
equally characteristic of his strong sense and genial mind.
He was always sneering at Adam Smith and telling many
legends of that philosopher's absence of mind and inaptitude
for the ordinary conduct of life. A contact with the Edin-
burgh logicians had doubtless not augmented his faith in the
formal deductions of abstract economy ; nevertheless, with the
facts before him, he could give a very plain and satisfactory
exposition of the genial consequences of old abuses, the dis-
tinct necessity for stern reform, and the delicate humanity
requisite for introducing that reform temperately and with
feeling ; " then follows the quotation from Guy Mannering
describing the ruthless way in which the Laird of Ellangowan
commenced his magisterial reform and the disastrous effects
which followed this riding rough-shod over the old customs
and feelings of the peasant class.
It was settled that the future home was to be at Clevedon.
As aforesaid, when a student at the Bristol College, Walter
256 LIFE OF WALTER B AGE HOT
went for week-ends to Clevedon on visits to certain cousins
who lived there, and would write enthusiastic letters about the
place to his parents. Sir Arthur Elton, the owner of Cleve-
don Court, a beautiful early fourteenth-century mansion under
the hill, was a keen Liberal, and had sat at my father's feet
when he first entered the House of Commons. Clevedon
Court was haunted by associations with Arthur Hallam, who
was a cousin%of the Eltons, and with Tennyson and Thackeray.
Arthur Hallam lies buried in the old Clevedon Church by
the sea, still an out-of-the-world, solitary spot. A few wind-
blown trees and an open down lead to the walls of cliff above
the Severn. The waves on a stormy day attack their rocky
sides; but the lonely twelfth -century building has resisted,
steadfast and strong, against all hurricanes. In a side chapel
lie the bones of the modern Jonathan who inspired the wail
of passionate love and loss "In Memoriam ".
The Danube to the Severn came
The darkened heart that beat no more ;
They laid him by the pleasant shore,
And in the hearing of the wave.
There twice a day the Severn fills,
The salt sea-water passes by,
And hushes half the babbling Wye,
And makes a silence in the hills.
Sir Arthur Elton had built a house near the top of the
hill above Clevedon to resort to in the autumn when the fall
of the leaf made it damp and misty in the valley below ; but
he only lived in it one winter and subsequently let it. It was
conveniently placed between Claverton and Herd's Hill,
the right sort of size — neither too large nor too small — so it
was chosen for Walter and my sister's first home. With Sir
Arthur Elton's permission, Walter changed the name from
Bella Vista to The Arches, he having taken a fancy to the
archways which supported the terrace running round two sides
of the house.
The great event was fixed to take place on 2ist April.
My sister writes in her diary: "2 1st April. Our wedding
day. Beautiful and hot We started at 11.15. Church quite
ENGAGEMENT AND MARRIAGE 257
full. Used our pew for vestry. Walked on lawn after church.
Hanoverian band playing. We drove to Frome, changed
horses and took up luggage and got to Stourton at 7. Had
rooms at the Inn — had tea dinner. The fete-champetre at
Claverton kept up till 9th October, over 200. Great fun."
It was not considered well for Mrs. Bagehot to attend so
exciting a scene as Walter's wedding, and Mr. Bagehot had
remained with her at Herd's Hill.
At Frome Walter posted a little letter written in pencil.
(Post-mark) 2ist April, Frome.
" FROME (written in the carriage).
"MY DEAREST MOTHER,
" We are married. Everything went off well and
my wife sends her love.
" Yours with greatest affection,
"WALTER BAGEHOT."
Diary. " 22nd April. Walter and I wandered into Sir
H. Hoare's park morning — afternoon read poetry and drove
at 4.30 through the woods to Alfred's Tower. Got out and
looked over the country."
This Alfred's Tower is seen from the train between Frome
and Bruton, reared high on a hill overlooking the woods of
splendid timber in the grounds of Stourton, the property of
the Hoares. The Cornish expresses now rush past it to and
fro many times a day.
Another letter Walter wrote to his mother two days after
the wedding : —
"STOURTON, 23rd April, 1858.
" MY DEAREST MOTHER,
" You will, ere you receive this, have heard some
account of my wedding from somebody. I sent you a note in
pencil from Frome to say that it had been achieved. I am
scarcely an impartial judge, but it seemed to me a very bright
affair, and that not only the persons married, but the others
enjoyed themselves which generally they do not. Nobody
shed a tear — Eliza was a most composed bride — a little anxious
17
258 LIFE OF WALTER BAGEHOT
at the crisis, but very cheerful after it was over. Vincent Wood
made a splendid ' best man/ only that the multitude would
think he was the bridegroom. Mary (Walter's cousin) was
much admired, and all the bridesmaids were very animated
and nice. There was wonderful oratory at the breakfast. A
Mr. Moffat, M.P. for Ashburton, proposed our health in a
copious and eloquent manner, and spoke of the ' hundred of
thousands' who had read my writings, — whom I myself should
wish to see particularly. Sir William Topham proposed the
health of the bridesmaids in a very clever speech in a sort of
Lord Palmerston style. He is a man about the Court, Captain
of the Yeomen of the Guard, and understands the ' touch and
go ' style of oratory rather well. My attention was rather dis-
tracted from what he said by wondering why ' that man '
should be speaking at my wedding. Few people seem so far
off my beat. I believe the dance, etc., after we went away,
was also successful, and the day was so gorgeous that I think it
made people cheerful. Mind will tell in life especially in the
weather. We had a delicious drive to this place, and have
done nothing but potter about it ever since. Eliza is a trifle
tired by the crisis, but very well and seems able to endure
futurity. The post is going, so I must leave off.
" With my best love to my father,
" Ever your affectionate son,
"WALTER BAGEHOT.
" (Turn over. ) I am your affectionate daughter,
"ELIZA BAGEHOT.
"This is the first time I have signed my new name."
A few short notes to his father were written during the
honeymoon. With a great deal of reading of poetry, F.
Denison Maurice sermons, Lyra Apostolica — posting from
place to place in Devonshire, taking occasionally trains, the
honeymoon was passed at Glastonbury, Dawlish, Teignmouth,
Chudleigh, Bibbacombe Bay, Plymouth, Ivy Bridge, Bideford,
Clovelly, Ilfracombe, Lynmouth.
Here the diary says, "Walter wrote his article on the
'Sinking Fund' for the Economist". The same day a letter
ENGAGEMENT AND MARRIAGE 259
brings news from London : " Papa, Mamma, Zoe and Sophie
went to Lady Palmerston's where people were mad with ex-
citement about political matters ". Again, " Posted from
Minehead twenty-seven miles, St. Audrey, Williton, etc., and
took the train at Bridgwater. We reached Clevedon at 5.20
and drove home. Went all over The Arches and garden before
dinner. House quite ready." The next day was Sunday and
they passed the morning in the summer-house, Walter reading
Matthew Arnold's poems aloud, and going to Church in the
evening.
I was sitting in that same summer-house but a few days
ago. It is more than fifty years since I had last seen it. How
the ghosts of the things and people of half a century back
rallied round it ! The beautiful blue Mendip Hills across over
the plain on the horizon, alone take precisely the same forms
as they did on that Sunday morning passed in the summer-
house of Walter Bagehot's and my sister's first home on the 3Oth
May, 1858. Trees have grown tall, creepers planted by my
sister have covered in thick masses much of the stone work of
the house. As I sat among the ghosts a whimsical feeling as
of a dream haunted the whole thing. It was the place — and
yet that past to which it belongs did not feel quite real !
Certain moments, and what occurred at those moments, and
the precise spot at The Arches where they occurred, are lodged
in my memory as is lodged the exact scene in the Claverton
Woods when we heard the wheels of the carriage that brought
Walter Bagehot first among us ; I can still find those spots at
The Arches, I can still see vividly the scenes as they took
place, and yet — how to explain this haunting sense that that
past all belongs to dreamland ! What happens in the brain
that weaves a web across the former self and the self of the
present. Is it that these ghosts we conjure up as haunting
the old places are in reality there; in spirit with us, shedding
over us an influence from their new existence ? To them our
whole world may have become phantom-like, as are those
scenes of the past we are re-enacting in memory.
CHAPTER X.
"THE ARCHES" AND LONDON.
BAGEHOT had chosen his new home — The Arches — mainly
on account of the beauty of the views seen from the house
and grounds. From the terrace and the windows of the house
the dark green of the fir trees makes the foreground of the
scene. Beyond and below the hill, flat meadow lands stretch
away for miles and miles, till in the far distance a hazy blue
range of hills outlines the sky. Pure and soft is the colouring
in this Country of the West. As summer clouds float over the
plain, islets of purple shadow are interwoven into the sunlit
meadows. On stormy days gales from the south-west sweep
up from the Channel across the level, widespread stretch of
land. Hurrying clouds, darkening the land as they fly over
it, create ever- vary ing effects of light and shade, such as
Turner and Constable depict in their records of driven flights
of storm. Specially beautiful is this view on moonlight
nights when the shining needles of the black firs catch a
glistening sparkle, and the broad expanse beyond and the
faint distant hills are bathed in silver sheen, the whole washed
over by a soft pale sapphire blue. Bagehot, on his first visit
to The Arches, foresaw what a source of enjoyment the views
over this wide expanse of earth and sky would prove. The
Wordsworthian feeling for the beauty of nature which he
possessed as a child never died out. He retained it keenly to
the end.
When answering Arthur dough's congratulations on his
marriage, Bagehot writes : " I am exceedingly obliged for your
kind congratulations. We live on the top of a steep hill here,
commanding the entire view of a dead flat. We hope that
you and Mrs. Clough will come up the said hill and look down
on the said flat when you come into the West. You had
better take us on the way to Mr. Froude's."
260,
"THE ARCHES" AND LONDON 261
A week was passed at The Arches, then the first visit
together was paid to the old home, Herd's Hill. "Mr.
Bagehot's carriage met us," says the diary, "and the bells rang
a peal all the evening to welcome us. Strolled on lawn before
dinner. Miss Jones (Walter's old governess) came first, then
Mr. Edward Bagehot, Mary, Barnes Bagehot and Mr. Watson
Bagehot dined at Herd's Hill. Went out on lawn after
dinner. Music and cards." "Next day," says Diary, " Sat
up and Walter stayed at home to receive callers. A great
many people came, a circle of fifteen at one time, and had
cake and wine and drank our health." In those parts this
sitting up of brides was then considered almost as essential as
the service in church. The next event was a family gathering
at The Arches, Mr. and Mrs. Bagehot, my father and the bride
and bridegroom — followed by a move to 12 Upper Belgrave
Street, where we all rejoiced in having Walter and my sister at
home again. Parties, balls, entertainments of all kinds followed.
On 2nd July there is the following entry in the diary : " Mr.
Greg called for Julia and me. We drove to Wimbledon to
dine and sleep. Mr. and Mrs. and Miss Cameron dined there.
Mrs. Cameron insisted on taking us to see her sisters at Little
Holland House. We found a little party, four sisters — Lady
Somers, Mrs. Prinsep and Mrs. Dalrymple being there. Miss
Treherne (the notorious Mrs. Weldon) sang. Mr. Henry
Taylor and Rossetti were there. Mr. Watts' studio was in
the house. Saw his pictures there and in the dining-room."
" Two days after," the diary states that " Papa, Walter, Julia
and I went to Mrs. Prinsep's garden party at Little Holland
House, Miss Treherne sang operatic music with Graziani."
This was the first and last visit to Little Holland House
which my family paid.1
Then comes an evening at Park Lodge with Arthur
1 Nine years later, introduced by my friend Mrs. Nassau Senior, I
visited Watts at what was left of Little Holland House. It was all in
tatters, Watts and his studios alone remaining to tell of the past revelries
by night and by day of the " Kingdom of Pattledom ". You could hardly
drive up to the old battered thatched porch, so busy were the roadmakers
metalling Melbury Road.
262 LIFE OF WALTER BAGEHOT
Clough and Mr. James Spedding, dinner parties at Belgrave
Street for Walter to meet family friends and interesting
acquaintances. Among those mentioned in the diary are
Matthew Arnold, Sir Charles Eastlake, and the Dowager Lady
Glasgow, Sir Arthur Elton, Sir G. Cornewall and Lady
Theresa Lewis, Mr. and Mrs. Robert Lowe, Lord GifTord and
Lord John Hay, Sir Thomas and Lady Fremantle, and many
other literary, artistic, and political people. There were also
the veteran Sunday callers, Mr. Hayward, Sir Roderick
Murchison, Sir William Somerville (Lord Athlumney). In
this fashion was Walter passed into the London world. He
enjoyed it, but he hardly took to that world as a world, though
that world took to him. To several individuals in it he did.
Amongst others he made lasting friendships with Matthew
Arnold and Sir George Cornewall Lewis. Perhaps the effect
produced on him by the society which had no further interest
but that of gregarious sociability, was that of drawing too
strong a contrast between the possibilities at the home at
Herd's Hill and those of ordinary conditions. Of Mr.
Hayward, a professional diner-out, Bagehot said that "he
only became decent when the ladies left the room".
Bagehot, himself a brilliant talker, was, in talking, as in all
else, of choice taste. Mr. Greg, generally present at the
dinner parties in Belgrave Street, was also a notably pleasant
talker ; but as at Claverton, the mainspring of all that was
best in our home life was my father.
A joyous event for me happened on I2th July, 1858.
Walter and Eliza returned to The Arches and took me with
them. I recall those first twelve days spent there as full of
sunshine — sunshine within and sunshine without. Though
I was not out and therefore did not assist at the political
functions, the importance of official life invaded the social
atmosphere at home. Here at The Arches it was different.
It was easy-going, and yet stirringly interesting. Walter
went as a rule to Bristol early in the morning. Deliberate-
minded people descended the hill through the fir wood by
a zigzag carriage drive to the road leading to the railway
station. Bagehot, very un-banker-like, would vault and
" THE ARCHES" AND LONDON 263
scramble down the steep short cuts. He would not return
till 5 o'clock in the evening, but the hours between seemed
all influenced by the same interest which in him was so vivid.
Much reading and pleasure in literature had ever been part of
the home life, but it had never steeped the atmosphere as it
did here. Politics, and the society which official life entails,
had since our childhood always taken a foremost place. The
stimulant Walter found in reading books and in writing
essays was all the stronger because he took it as the bon-bon
after the solid piece de resistance had been devoured. He
maintained that literature should be the play and not the
work of life. " You can't write without having something to
say — you can't have anything worth saying without catching
ideas from contact with your fellow-creatures on lines which
have a stirring interest to you and to them." Such was his
creed. We at The Arches got the flavour of the bon-bon.
This love of books is very contagious. A spell was cast over
those days, I remember, by my reading to my sister "Ashford
Owen's " fascinating story, A Lost Love. This book had
won the hearts of wise men, such as Tennyson, Sir Henry
Taylor, and the Editors of the National Review, where it was
noticed in an article published in the second issue, October,
1855, under the title "A Novel or Two". Strange was the
glamour cast over those days by the enthralment of this
short story. It made the real world seem somewhat unreal —
the unreal real. Daily events were coloured by it. While
Walter was away my sister and I took walks, strolling into
the valley to the sea, or over the downs above the headlands.
And this glamour of A Lost Love wandered with us down to
the beach while we sat by the sea, it followed us over the
downs where we loitered watching the sun setting behind the
Welsh mountains. It was still with us when we sat on the
terrace after dinner in the moonlight. In that sweet light air
of the uplands the romance of that story invaded everything,
weaving itself into the beauty and peaceful feeling of the place.
Calm and deep .peace on this high wold,
And on these dews that drench the furze,
And all the silvery gossamers
That twinkle into green and gold.
264 LIFE OF WALTER B AGE HOT
Calm and still light on you great plain
That sweeps with all its autumn bowers,
And crowded forms and lessening towers,
To mingle with the bounding main.
And yet what was there in the little book to do all that ? The
novel reader of the present day would probably say — Nothing.
Truly only the story of the great miracle told with simple,
realistic straight-forwardness, as a Greek poet might recount
the miracles worked by his gods. The magic wrought in a
dull grey life, of an ordinary English girl, by the invasion into
it of the ruby-winged Eros ; and again, the tragedy wrought
in it when life was suddenly emptied of its joy as the bright
wings carried the little god out of it. The enchantment of the
story must have been in the telling of it — a right telling that
meant that a clear-eyed vision had taught the pen of the writer
true and strange things — things that happen every day — and
taught it how to recount these things so that the reader knew
that they were true and yet strange.1 Well — the ruby wings
had carried the little god into Walter Bagehot's life, and when
these things are about in the air it is apt to vibrate with enchant-
ment. Walter's natural high spirits were always brimming over
with quaint humour which brought amusing, uncommon
elements into conversation. He was very much interested in
his new experiences during the past eighteen months since the
first day when he came to Claverton. Apart from the happiness
they had brought with them, they were new fields wherein to
start the growth of fresh ideas. Every one who belonged to that
new life had an interest for him. Whether it was playing
billiards, reading aloud, or merely talking — he made himself
always excellent company. After finishing an article "Proofs
of Religion," never published, he wrote occasionally for the
1 The critic of the National Review could not make up his mind
whether " Ashford Owen " was a man or a woman, but ended his criticism by
" This is not our last parting, we trust, from ' Ashford Owen,' " but alas ! it
was. Years after those first days of sunshine at The Arches I met the
writer. It was a woman. I asked her why she had never written another
story. "But I did, it was so bad — I never speak of it. It was a crime / "
To have created one single gem in literature of the quality of A Lost Love
would condone for many crimes.
"THE ARCHES" AND LONDON 265
Economist but nothing else till the autumn. During that sum-
mer when at home he rested and enjoyed his happiness.
Soon a change came over the spirit of the dream — a change
from "Ashford Owen" to Jane Austen. Mrs. Bagehot was
clamouring for Walter and my sister to return to Herd's Hill,
and she invited me also. It was on the 23rd of July, 1858,
that we three arrived at the place which has meant home to me
more than any other place in the world for many years past.
It had been the habit of our sisterhood to read Jane
Austen's books periodically aloud to each other, especially
Pride and Prejudice and Sense and Sensibility, and the char-
acters in them had become our intimate acquaintances. The
link which bound a firm tie of friendship between Mr. Hutton
and ourselves from the first visit he paid • us, was created by
his solemnly declaiming the opening sentence of Darcy's
famous proposal in Pride and Prejudice — " Long have I
struggled ! " On arriving at Herd's Hill it was as if one had
stepped back into the world of a hundred years ago, a world
of Jane Austen's novels. A delightful world it was. No
place ever possessed a stronger character of its own. It
seemed set fixed in its own little frame, so fixed that there
was little need of formality. Everyone and everything moved
easily within its acknowledged traditions. Everyone was
allowed freely to possess his or her individuality, because
beyond certain limits it was supposed to be impossible for
anyone to pass.
" Mrs. Bagehot met us at the station," says the diary, " and
drove us home in the new carriage." I fell in love with her
at first sight. The vivacity, charm and spontaneity in every-
thing she did and said, the captivating tone of her voice, soft
yet vibrating, was irresistible. The old world atmosphere of
the place made a quaint setting to her and Walter's racy talk.
When these two were together the fine humour in each was at
its best, for, as Bagehot would say, no one ever understood
his jokes so well as did his mother. We had been told that
Mrs. Bagehot was at times insane, but it was difficult to realise
it when with her. You felt so intimately near her, even when
she herself spoke of her malady, which she did to myself and
266 LIFE OF WALTER B AGE HOT
my sister, that the home tragedy came to us more as a legend
than as an actual fact. To those who have the treatment of
this mysterious calamity, the effect produced on his mother by
Bagehot's behaviour towards her might be an interesting
study. His attitude prevented her feeling any loneliness or
isolation, which is so often felt by those of unsound mind, and
which doubtless increases the malady. In his attitude
towards her he never let go for an instant the feeling of the
natural tie which existed between them — that of the mother
and child ; he never let her wander out alone into the desert
of her aberrations without making every effort to understand
them and to discuss them with her. However difficult it
might be to catch hold of any ray of reason, he would rarely
give up an endeavour to find some common ground to meet
on. This merciful tenderness is evinced in many letters he
wrote to her when they were apart. They had so much in
common that, when well, however great was her affection for
Mr. Bagehot, she felt her son's mind the closer companion to
her own. An exciting element in the atmosphere of this
ostensibly quiet West Country home, was doubtless produced
through the insanity which was so closely allied to genius in
Mrs. Bagehot, and the intimate union between her mind and
Bagehot's in whom the genius was unalloyed, united moreover
to an extraordinarily sound judgment and sane character.
Mr. Bagehot was kind and hospitable, quiet, dignified and re-
served. He talked interestingly on serious topics but was
otherwise generally silent.
On the first morning of our visit, after Mr. Bagehot and
Walter had left the breakfast table, Mrs. Bagehot, as was her
custom, began reading the Psalms while the butler cleared
away the breakfast, explaining to us that by this means she
insured his getting some Bible reading every day. When
Sunday came the usual events that had always taken place at
Herd's Hill were repeated. Mr. Bagehot conducted a Uni-
tarian service in the drawing-room which Walter and my
sister attended. Mrs. Bagehot and I drove to the beautiful
old church on the hill. The quaint little town, the impressive
church, the family gathering on the lawn of Hill House after
"THE ARCHES" AND LONDON 267
the service where Mrs. Stuckey received us as a kind of
Matriarch, were all very new experiences and full of interest.
Mrs. Stuckey continued the traditions of her husband, the
notable Vincent Stuckey, who received in patriarchal style
under the big elm tree and welcomed all comers to Hill House.
In the afternoon all from Herd's Hill except Mr. Bagehot
attended the service at Huish Episcopi Church of the beautiful
tower, rising barely a quarter of a mile beyond the tower of
Langport Church. The service was succeeded by a visit to the
Kennels to view Walter's pack of harriers, a ramble over the
grounds of Hill House, and a great deal of conversation with
various members of the family. As in Miss Austen's stories
the conversation was very animated, but the subject of con-
versation did not always appear quite to justify the amount
of animation. But also, as in the case in Miss Austen's books,
the fact that the individuality of the speaker was invariably
expressed in the language used, gave an interest to any sub-
ject. Bagehot made the talk rise to a higher level of humour
when he was to the fore, but cheeriness and vivacity were ever
present, all the company seeming to be very much interested
in everyone else and their concerns. The members of this
little social circle seemed to have an extraordinary power of
talking for hours together without having any special topic
to discuss. There were days when visitors, relations, or old
friends from the neighbourhood would arrive at Herd's Hill
at noon, and talk till, and through luncheon — talk till five
o'clock tea — talk till dinner and through dinner. There was
a pause after dinner for tea, cards and music ; then the tray
would appear, wine, sandwiches and cake — then family
prayers, then a little more talk, and the departure of the
guests would not take place long before midnight. What the
talk was about it is impossible to recall, but the miracle re-
mains, that, after nearly twelve hours of talking, the company
— guests and hosts — did not become either dull, weary or
sleepy. Mrs. Bagehot was the worker of the miracle — and
she was seventy-two years old on the Friday of that week
when I first stayed at Herd's Hill.
Such were the impressions left after a first visit to Walter
268 LIFE OF WALTER B AGE HOT
Bagehot's home, impressions which were like those always left
by himself — unlike any others. We left after a short visit in
order that Bagehot and my sister should welcome our whole
family who arrived from London. Riding, music, billiard
playing and hilarity went on all through August, after which
the bride and bridegroom were allowed to retire into private
life, having fulfilled all the duties and functions required of
them. On 5th September my sister records in her diary that
they dined alone for the first time since the i8th of June.
The intercourse between Clevedon Court and The Arches
was frequent. Sir Arthur and Lady Elton were not only
themselves cultured and pleasant neighbours, but their guests
were also such as Bagehot enjoyed meeting. Mr. Kinglake,
Mr. Freeman, Mr. Venables and others of like kind visited
Clevedon Court during that autumn. Members of the Bagehot
family and old friends, Mr. Greg and Mr. and Mrs. Hutton
were among the visitors at The Arches in August. The in-
exhaustible delights of Pride and Prejudice were for the
hundredth time again enjoyed during their stay, Mr. Hutton
reading it aloud to us, in, I remember, an emphatic manner
which accentuated every humorous point. The whole party
moved on from The Arches to Claverton, Mr. Hutton and
Bagehot appearing there for the first time with their wives.
Later when the Yeomanry were out at Bath a ball was given
at Claverton and the Bagehots assisted at that and also at
several house parties. It was also while at Claverton in
September that Bagehot began writing his article on Dickens
for the October number of the National Review.
1859 was a year marked by stirring political events. In
the early days of the Session, contrary to the traditions of Tory
policy, the Derby administration brought forward a Reform
Bill which was frustrated by Lord John Russell's famous
" Resolution ". On all hands it was admitted that the Govern-
ment could not proceed with the Bill in the form in which it
had been presented. Lord Derby then decided to go to the
country. The Conservatives were returned with a majority
but with an uncertain future. Lord John Russell hurried for-
ward with a programme of reform which Lord Palmerston
" THE ARCHES" AND LONDON 269
instantly disavowed. Everything seemed to be at sixes and
sevens. Mr. Gladstone made a striking speech which seemed
to imply that he belonged to neither party, Liberals nor Con-
servatives. When, however, on the overthrow of the Govern-
ment in June, Lord Palmerston was given the task of forming
a new ministry, Lord John Russell consented to act under him
as foreign minister and Mr. Gladstone accepted the post of
Chancellor of the Exchequer. Differences and jealousies for
the time subsided in order that a Reform Bill should be passed
by the Liberal Party. At the general election my father was
returned for Devonport at -the head of the poll, and when the
Whig ministry was formed Lord Palmerston offered him the
Presidency of the Board of Works or the Vice-Presidency of
the Board of Trade. He accepted the latter, to which was
then attached the duties of Paymaster of the Forces and an
entrance into the Privy Council.
In the January number of the National Review had appeared
an article by Walter Bagehot on " Parliamentary Reform ".
The subject was in everyone's mind and the manner in which
it was treated in this study was considered exceptionally able.
So much praise was given it that in February Bagehot published
it in pamphlet form, adding a note suggested by the events of
the previous weeks. The first paragraph of this note shows
the line which Bagehot took :
"We shall not," he writes, "be expected to discuss in a
party spirit the subject of Parliamentary Reform. It has never
been objected to the National Review that it is a party organ ;
even periodicals which have long been such, scarcely now dis-
cuss that subject in a party spirit. Both Whigs and Conserva-
tives are pledged to do something, and neither as a party have
agreed what they would do. We would attempt to give an
impartial criticism of the electoral system which now exists,
and some indication of the mode in which we think that its
defects should be amended."
Referring to this impartial criticism, Mr. Robert Lowe1
wrote : —
1 Mr. Robert Lowe was then Vice-President of the Council of Educa-
tion. From 1868 to 1873 Chancellor of the Exchequer. On retiring from
the House of Commons he was created Lord Sherbrooke.
270 LIFE OF WALTER BAGEHOT
\Qth March, 1859.
"Mv DEAR MR. BAGEHOT,
"Pray accept my best thanks for your excellent
article on Reform, which is beyond compare the best I have
seen on the subject, and is indeed written with the insight of a
statesman and the moderation of a philosopher. At the same
time I fear that the passion for equality (the shallowest of all
delusions) is so fixed that any attempt to create inequalities
between classes in different places would fail, and that a low
franchise in some places would only serve as a lever for obtaining
it in all. We could not carry it, and if we could we could not
maintain the exception. I also think that we could not lot
existing boroughs together, because a cry would be raised in
favour of larger towns which remained unenfranchised. The
truth is the impossibility of carrying out your view is on a
sample of that which is coming upon us. Your principles are
true but too refined for popular apprehension, and in this, as
in so many other cases, we are forced to sacrifice what we see
to be right to the incompetency of the tribunal which would
decide upon it.
" This does not diminish your merit and I do not doubt that
your view will bear fruit in some way or other though not in
the direction you propose.
" Remember me very kindly to Mrs. Bagehot, and,
" Believe me,
" Very truly yours,
"ROBERT LOWE."
Mr. G. Arbuthnot ^rote from the Treasury respecting the
pamphlet Parliamentary Reform, " Many thanks for your
pamphlet which is so sensible that it will please no one ".
Thackeray wrote to Chapman & Hall, who published it : " I
hear Mr. Bagehot has written a wonderfully clever pamphlet —
Please send me a copy."
This pamphlet on Parliamentary reform was virtually the
work which landed Walter Bagehot into the inner circle of
political life. My father writes : —
1 Auditor of the Civil List, and considered the most able clerk of the
Treasury of his time.
"THE ARCHES" AND LONDON 271
11 12 UPPER BELGRAVE ST.
"March, 1859.
"Mv DEAR BAGEHOT,
" Everyone speaks in the highest terms of your Reform
Pamphlet. Gladstone is delighted with it, and in mentioning
it last night, not at the moment knowing we were connected,
spoke in great praise of your former book, Estimates. Let
me have a list of those to whom the Pamphlet was sent.
Was one sent to Lord Grey ? We are getting into some con-
fusion in the political world about the Reform Bill. The
great objection among the Radicals is the non-redivision of
the Borough franchise, and among thoughtful politicians the
identity of franchise in town and country, on the grounds I
put very shortly in a paragraph at the end of Hutton's article
this week. But as things stand these two objections come
nearly to the same thing — and Lord John's Resolution em-
braces both classes of objectors. If the matter were to be
voted on now the Government would be beaten.
" The House is just as bad a one as can be, and I see no
good to be done with it. It is rife with jealousy. Glad-
stone has not pronounced that I have heard of, although he
told me last night that he did not like the Bill, and especially
the principle of identity of Franchise. He said it was a very
different Bill from what he expected. ..."
When Bagehot and my sister were staying with us in March
my father invited those who had expressed special admiration
for the pamphlet to meet them at dinner. These included
Lord Grey, Lord Granville, Mr. Gladstone, Mr. Robert Lowe,
Mr. Cardwell, Mr. Edward Bouverie, Sir George Cornewall
Lewis, Sir Richard Bethel, l and Thackeray.
Walter wrote from Herd's Hill to my sister who was with us
in London : " I am very glad the party is said to be still coming
off. It will really be a very fine collection of public animals.
As to reform it will be curious, as Mr. Gladstone is going to
vote for the ministry, and Lord Grey has recommended Lord
Elcho to vote for them ; and all the rest of the Parliamentary
party are decidedly for Lord John's Resolution. I take it is a
1 Afterwards created Lord Westbury as Lord Chancellor.
272 LIFE OF WALTER B AGE HOT
new idea to have a dinner party of both sides on a division night
— particularly a division on a fundamental question ' affecting
the constitution of our country ' as one says in articles, and I
hope the novelty will prosper."
The " novelty " proved a success, and several political
dinners and parties at the Gladstones and others followed,
but early in April the Bagehots were back at The Arches, he,
in his spare moments, reading aloud to my sister the Psalms,
Paradise Lost, Matthew Arnold, Shelley, and in no wise regret-
ting the whirl of London. He accepted the position of a
literary lion in the world of political magnates with a sense
of amusement rather than with any other, I think. He was
much interested in all the events connected with his home
life. He was fond of driving, so my sister and he decided on
having a phaeton and a pair of ponies. " Uncle Reynolds," my
father and Walter were all on the look-out for a suitable pair.
On 22nd July, 1859, Walter writes to my sister : " I have done
nothing in ponies yet and do not even know what my uncle
has done. But I will devote my whole mind to it to-morrow.
I will also be painted." Mrs. Bagehot was desirous of having
portraits painted in miniature of Walter and my sister.
In the April of 1859 Bagehot again began writing for the
Saturday Review, to which he had not contributed any articles
since 1856. He reviewed Lost and Won by Georgiana M.
Craik, The Dean, or the Popular Preacher, Rogers' Recollections,
and The Semi-Detached House, by Miss Eden, edited by Lady
Theresa Lewis. This last was a book entirely to Bagehot's
taste. Its sparkling dialogue and still more its cheerful and
habitual good sense appealed to him greatly. No virtue ap-
pealed to Bagehot more than did good sense. Of Lord Stan-
hope,1 he admiringly wrote that he had " the cautious scepticism
of true common sense," and shrank " from wonderful novelties ".
This was essentially Walter Bagehot's own attitude of mind.
For the July number of the National Review, 1859,
Bagehot wrote the essay on John Milton, which commences
with an amusing disquisition on the different methods of
^ee "William Pitt," National Review, 1861.
" THE ARCHES" AND LONDON 273
treating the art of biography. Notwithstanding Bagehot's
profound appreciation of Milton's genius, his admiration did
not inspire him to treat Milton with solemnity and unalloyed
reverence. Delightful spurts of humour abound throughout
the essay, especially where he refers to political bias shown
in celestial controversies. • " I am grinding on at Milton," he
writes to my sister from Herd's Hill, " and have done ever
so much ; but it is very bad and will be very long. We have
a family party to-day which will spoil the evening, to my in-
tense annoyance, but one ought to be able to endure one's
relations after knowing them so long ; but they are ' co-in-
habiting mischief here, one sees so much of them."
Since the first days of acquaintance with Bagehot my
father had enjoyed his society. Bagehot also had felt that he
derived great advantage from talking out subjects with my
father. Each grew to admire and like the other cordially,
and an affectionate intimacy sprung up between them. Bage-
hot possessed to a rare degree those qualities which inspire
confidence. Letters written in 1859 prove that my father at
that time consulted him with reference to the most private
family concerns. This close connection with my father was
one of the fortunate events in Bagehot's life. His feeling for
his own father in boyhood and youth was little short of adora-
tion, and he retained great filial admiration and affection for
him to the end ; but, as seen in his letter to Mr. Hutton,
written when the latter was in Barbadoes, he had felt impatient
of the teasing restrictions of the minutiae while learning busi-
ness with him. He desired more action, and that action on
more extended lines. My father had also always possessed the
impulse to busy himself not only with the affairs of men, but
with the great, the important affairs of men. While in no wise
devoid of imagination he had nevertheless an uncommon
amount of the intuitive good sense which Bagehot admired
so greatly. He had a singularly sane, well-balanced mind,
and he treated all subjects with fairness, invariably showing
generosity towards the opinions held by others. These qualities,
united with a rare gift of exposition, won for him great esteem
from all classes. But in common with Bagehot he possessed a
18
274 LIFE OF WALTER PAGE HOT
force behind these qualities, "the excitement of origination," l
and a buoyant hopefulness arising from a sense of power.
When very young Bagehot also possessed this buoyancy, but
circumstances later had suppressed it. Contact with my father
seemed in a measure to revive the youthful spring. He wrote
to his friend Killigrew Wait : " In one's infancy one woke up
with a new Weltansicht every morning ; my friends say I am
too sceptical, but I say that I am only lazy in believing, as I
am in everything else. Indeed it seems to me that I do that
better than I do most other things."
My father had never known such periods of apathy nor
could he ever have been called sceptical. He was not in the
habit of ' seriously considering questions which did not appeal
to him as important, but those which he considered important
he would work through in his mind exhaustively until he
found a principle on which to form a definite opinion in re-
spect to them, and this opinion he would hold firmly. Though
personally extremely modest and reserved, he attacked all
public work with an almost exultant confidence and courage,
a confidence and courage arising, I imagine, greatly from his
power of detaching entirely any personal considerations or
inclinations from his duties as an official. As a public1 servant
he rose on to a platform on which he ceased to be anything
but a servant to the public. This attitude Bagehot was the
first to appreciate. In 1859 my father was fifty-four and
Bagehot thirty-three years of age. My father had been in
Parliament twelve years, having entered the House of Commons
as member for Westbury at the General Election in July, 1 847.
Bagehot writes in his memoir of my father : " He showed con-
siderable abilities in electioneering, and a close observer once
said of him, ' Mr. Wilson may or may not be the best Political
Economist in England, but depend upon it he is the only
Political Economist who would ever come in for the borough
of Westbury ' ". There was an autumn session that year. My
father soon gained the ear of the House, his speeches on the
Navigation Laws, Sugar Duties, and kindred subjects being
1 See Essay on Mr. Gladstone.
" THE ARCHES1' AND LONDON 275
much approved by both sides of the House. In a published
letter to his sister, Disraeli writes at that time referring to a
debate on Free Trade, "Wilson very good". About Easter,
1848, Lord John Russell, then Prime Minister, offered my
father office as Secretary to the Indian Board of Control.
On his accepting the post, Cobden wrote to Mr. Greg :
" Wilson has committed political suicide ". Though my father
had been a member of the Council of the Anti-Corn Law
League, and spoke at its meetings at Drury Lane with Cobden,
Bright, O'Connell, Milner Gibson, and other free-traders, that
kind of agitation was not congenial to him. He would say
that he should be sorry to see other political questions worked
in that way. His mind was of the orthodox Whig type. He
called himself a Conservative Liberal. Bagehot's views and
feelings accorded well with those of my father. Common to
both was a dignity which made any extravagance in the ex-
pression of feeling distasteful.
Contact with the active political world through this
congenial intimacy with my father gave a fresh impetus to
Bagehot's life. He had reached a landing place where —
to quote his own words respecting William Pitt — he had " re-
ceived the inestimable permission to be himself". Bagehot
had begun life playing the rdle of a remarkably clever boy,
adored and admired by his parents ; he had surpassed all
his fellow-students at the Bristol College, and found himself
in a class by himself; he had been looked on as a sort
of demi-god by his fellow-students at University College,
London ; he had studied law, and hated it — was called to the
Bar, and left it. He then found himself learning business in
the rural West Country and failing to give satisfaction in its
very rudiments. His real powers crept out at intervals in
articles published in the Prospective Review which his parents
read because they were his; probably no one else in or
near Langport even glanced at them. He hunted over the
country in good comradeship with country gentlemen who
had but the vaguest idea that he had ever written anything —
(he had written " Hartley Coleridge," " Bishop Butler," and
"Shakespeare — the Man"). A few old friends, Mr. Hutton,
18*
276 LIFE OF WALTER B AGE HOT
Mr. Roscoe, Mr. Osier kept up from afar the tradition in his
own mind that he had certain gifts ; and somewhat later,
Matthew Arnold, not knowing who he was, had read him, and
hailed him from afar as a fellow-creature. But he passed his
everyday life ostensibly as one belonging to a very ordinary
species, who enjoyed no intellectual exaltation among his
fellows — no cheers from the public. In his essay on William
Pitt 1 he describes what the views of his past and present
must have been in those years when he was hidden away
learning business at Langport.
" Most boys are conceited ; most boys have a wonderful
belief in their own power. At sixteen, said Mr. Disraeli,
every one believes he is the most peculiar man who ever lived.
And there is certainly no difficulty in imagining Mr. Disraeli
thinking so. The difficulty iSj not to entertain this proud
belief, but to keep it ; not to have these lofty visions, but to
hold them. Manhood comes, and with it come the plain facts
of the world. There is no illusion in them ; they have a
distinct teaching. The world, they say definitely, does not
believe in you. You fancy you have a call to a great career,
but no one else even imagines that you fancy it. You do not
dare to say it out aloud. Before the fear of ridicule and the
touch of reality, the illusions pass away, and with them goes
all intellectual courage. We have no longer the hardihood,
we have scarcely the wish to form our own creed, to think our
own thoughts, to act upon our own belief; we try to be
sensible, and we end in being ordinary ; we fear to be
eccentric, and we end in being commonplace."
The Saturday Review {Saturday Reviler as it was then
called) did its work with Bagehot for a time, and accentuated
the " fear of ridicule ". But happiness came into his life, and
with it some of the old spring and heartiness of high spirits ;
and he looks back on his foe with a just estimate of how little
the world's real progress is affected by this cultured reviling.
" The Saturday Review is remarkable as an attempt on
the part of ' university men ' to speak on political topics and
social difficulties of the time. And what do they teach us ?
1 See National Review, July, 1861.
"THE ARCHES" AND LONDON 277
It is something like this : ' So-and-so has written a tolerable
book, and he would call attention to the industry which pro-
duces tolerable books. So-and-so has devoted himself to a
great subject, and we would observe that the interest now
taken in great subjects is very commendable. Such-and-such
a lady has delicate feelings, which are desirable in a lady,
though we know that they are contrary to the facts of the
world. All common persons are doing as well as they can,
but it does not come to much after all. All statesmen are
doing as ill as they can, and let us be thankful that that does
not come to much either.' We may search and search this
repository of the results of ' university teaching ' for a single
truth which it has established, for a single high cause which
it has advanced, for a single deep thought which is to sink
into the minds of its readers. We have, indeed, a nearly
perfect embodiment of the corrective scepticism of a sleepy
intellect. ' A.B. says he has done something, but he has not
done it; CD. has made a parade of demonstrating this or
that proposition, but he has not proved his case ; there is one
mistake in page 5, and another in page 113 ; a great history
has been written of this or that century, but the best au-
thorities as to that period have not been consulted, which,
however, is not very remarkable, as there is nothing in
them.' " l
As nothing is more depressing than living with a mind not
set on the square — so to speak — one which never seizes things
as they exactly are, or imagines them as they truly could be,
so there is nothing more exhilarating than intimate contact
with a mind that in great and small matters alike always sums
up right. Such was my father's. His sensibilities had never
been nipped by any such sceptical influence as that of the
Saturday Review ; he had never suffered from the fear of
ridicule ; he had never enjoyed the distorting luxury of being
in the position of an only child, and the centre of home
adoration. Nothing great had been expected of him. He
was one of fifteen brothers and sisters, and had had with them
1 Essay on Mr. Gladstone, National Review^ July, 1860.
278 LIFE OF WALTER B AGE HOT
to share a fifteenth part of very sound and wise training and
education, and a discreet affection appropriate to the Quaker
temperament. In working his way through life his spirit had
never been maimed at any time by the iron entering into the
soul. His own qualities had had free play, and through them
chiefly he had secured a distinguished position in the political
world. To sum up — it was a happy turn of fortune for
Bagehot to have made a close friendship with a nature which
restored to him something of the confidence and hopefulness
of youth. About my father the breath of success seemed to
be in the very air, and it was precisely this exhilarating quality
which stimulated Bagehot, and allowed him "the inestimable
permission to be himself".
Further he enjoyed our family life. He would say that
both Claverton and Upper Belgrave Street were good places
because " both mind and body were so well attended to ".
My father's strong family affections appealed to Bagehot.
From our early childhood my father would share with us all
his own interest in public questions. All that was passing in
the world of politics we, as children, knew at first hand from
him. He would take us long walks on Sunday afternoons,
and tell us all that was happening inside and outside the
House of Commons. No less had Bagehot's father from his
childhood discussed every important public question with him.
By reason of all this Bagehot felt he fitted well into his new
family, and assuredly he was greatly welcomed by every
member of it.
During a time I spent at The Arches in May, 1859,
Mr. and Mrs. Arthur Clough paid a visit to the Bagehots.
Mr. Clough was very silent. Crabb Robinson described him
as "that admirable and accomplished man — you know whom
I mean — the one who never says anything ". I do not know
how he did it, but though so silent, Arthur Clough inspired
Bagehot to talk his best. He said few words, but those few
made Bagehot eloquent. Everything about Mr. Clough, I
remember as being rounded, the shape of his head, his eyes,
his intonation — all was rounded, nothing angular.
On returning to London, Bagehot made the acquaintance of
" THE ARCHES" AND LONDON 279
Charles Villiers, Sir James Lacaita, M. de R6musat and many
other well-known men. My mother gave a ball, and Walter
took me to the opera, a great concession on his part, the
stage in any form being distasteful to him. In those days he
looked upon actors and actresses as pitiable people who made
fools of themselves. He had never, like Matthew Arnold,
come under the influence of a really great artist like Rachel.
If he had, he might have thought differently of the whole
tribe. He invited our family to a fish dinner at Greenwich
to meet some of his old friends. I remember the evening as
very delightful. Mr. Justice Quain was especially vivacious
on the occasion. Attached to every event of that year is
a special and melancholy interest. It was the last summer
we passed all together.
At this moment in July, when stirring events were im-
minent in our family life, Walter Bagehot heard of the death
of his friend William Roscoe. For some weeks he had been
ailing. Subsequently, while being nursed at Mr. Osier's
house at Richmond, typhoid fever declared itself, and he suc-
cumbed on July the 3Oth. Mr. Hutton and Walter Bagehot
equally felt his death as a great personal sorrow. Mr.
Hutton wrote in the Memoir which prefaces Mr. Roscoe's
collected works : " I never knew any other man whose death
could have made so deep a rent in the hearts and lives of
other men outside the circle of his own family. . . . There
were several, I believe, who would have been really more
elated by his success than by their own ; who, had he gained
a poet's fame, would have felt their own life brighter, and
who have lost in him one of the main vital springs of their
own happiness." Bagehot wrote in a letter which Mr. Hutton
affixed to the Memoir : " I have said that I do not think he
was very exactly adapted to a barrister's occupation, and he
certainly had no love of an advocate's life. . . . But in one
respect he always seemed to me to resemble the greatest of
English advocates, Erskine. There was, we are told, a sort
of casual perfection about the common manner of the latter ;
Mr. Wyndham said that all his motions were ' like those of
a blood-horse' ; there was an unconscious finish about<them,
280 LIFE OF WALTER B AGE HOT
which fascinated juries and attracted every one about him.
For me, at least, Roscoe had just that fascination." Bagehot
ends the letter with : " All this will seem to you, as it does
to me, very superficial ; and I could have wished to go into the
deeper parts of the character I have been speaking of ... I
hoped to have said something of his rare critical powers ; of
the partially developed gift of poetry which was in him ; of
his delicate but firm, pure but sensitive moral nature ; of his
peculiarly #«complex religion ; but I have not been able to
say what I want. There was a sort of refined simplicity
about him which made all he did, said or believed, character-
istic of him, but which I cannot describe. I feel I could not
say what I wish, and do not like to run any risk of leaving an
impression which would be false. And this feeling of the
peculiar circumstances comes upon me more and more. How
strange it is that you should be writing, and I should be con-
tributing to his life ! All the strange things that have ever
happened to me do not at this moment seem as strange to
me as that. Not so many years ago, he seemed to have much
more life than any of us. ' But what is before us we know
not ; and we know not what shall succeed. ' '
A prophetic note rings in those last words. Mr. Hutton,
whose health caused great anxiety to Bagehot and Roscoe
during many years, survived Walter Bagehot twenty years, and
Roscoe thirty-seven years.
Besides the Reform Bill, two other topics were arousing
great interest in the public mind during the spring and summer
in 1859 — the Mutiny Bill and the war between France and
Italy against Austria. In April Lord Stanley had announced
the necessity of raising £7,000,000 in the London market to
meet the strain on the Indian finances caused by the Mutiny.
Before the Bill had time to pass through the Parliamentary
forms, it was asserted by the best authorities that the projected
loan must be increased to £12,000,000. It was beginning to
be gravely considered whether the resources of India itself
should not be made to meet future liabilities, and the idea that
a political financier should be sent out from England to cope
with the difficulty was taking a definite form. My father's
"THE ARCHES" AND LONDON 281
first post in Lord John Russell's Government having been
Secretary of the Indian Board of Control, he knew much about
India and entered with keen interest into the discussion. On
28th June is found the following entry in the Diary: "Papa
arrived from Devonport at 3.30, the express having stopped
for him at Yatton. We talked of India all the evening." On
the 22nd of July, Bagehot wrote to my sister from London :
" Your father gives a very amusing account of the interior of
the Board of Trade, but he thinks more of India than of any-
thing else." On 2/th July, Sir Charles Wood, then Secretary
of State for India, offered to create for my father the post of
Financial Member of the Supreme Council in India, and on
1st August my father accepted it. On ist August also Sir
Charles Wood produced his Indian Budget, in which there was
no attempt to conceal the difficulties of his case. The Times
thereupon announced my father's appointment.
"THE INDIAN FINANCE MINISTER AND CHANCELLOR
OF THE EXCHEQUER.
"We have authority for stating that the Right Hon. James
Wilson has consented to go to India as a Member of Council
and also as Chancellor of the Indian Exchequer. Mr. Wilson's
position towards the Governor-General and the Cabinet in the
latter capacity will be similar to that which the Chancellor of
the Exchequer bears at home to the Government and the
Cabinet. The task which the new Member of Council has
before him is certainly not a very hopeful one, but Mr. Wilson
will carry with him to India habits of business and a financial
ability hitherto but too rarely exhibited on the banks of the
Hooghly, and if he succeeds in making India solvent, and in
proving that she can pay her way, he will have rendered a
public service which cannot be too highly appreciated. One
element of success he will certainly carry with him in the full
confidence and support of the Home Government ; and having
secured that, we trust that the sacrifice he is about to make
will meet with its reward in the return of financial prosperity
to our Indian dominions."
Bagehot keenly realised the great sacrifices my father was
282 LIFE OF WALTER B AGE HOT
making in taking this step, but I do not believe when he
accepted the office they even crossed my father's mind.
Bagehot saw clearly that with another step forward my father
would occupy a place in the Cabinet. He had great weight
in the House of Commons. His character, his exceptional
power of speaking and of elucidating clearly the points of a
difficult question, and his untiring energy and power of work,
had secured for him a distinctly unique position in the political
world. Bagehot wrote in his Memoir of my father : " He was
able to do an important work better than any one else could do
it, and, in English public life, real work rightly done at the right
season scarcely ever fails to meet with a real reward ". And
again of his power of converting those who held contrary
opinions to his own by the " vigorous simplicity of his argu-
ments," Bagehot writes : " It penetrated where it could not be
expected to penetrate. The Duke of Wellington was, perhaps,
more likely to be prejudiced against a theoretical Political
Economist than any eminent man of his day ; he belonged to
the ' pre-scientific period,' he had much of the impatient
practicality incident to military insight ; he was not likely to
be very partial to the ' doctrines of Mr. Huskisson ' ; neverthe-
less the Duke early pointed out Mr. Wilson's writings to Lord
Brougham as possessing especial practical value ; and when the
Duke at a much later period was disposed to object to the
repeal of the Navigation Laws, Mr. Wilson had a special
interview to convince him of its expediency." l
My father had formed several very intimate personal
1The Duke and my father would at times meet in the Hamilton
Gardens. I recollect very clearly one little incident, happening when my
sisters and I were small children, which was very characteristic of the Duke.
We were living in Hertford Street and passed most of our play-time in the
Hamilton Gardens. One summer evening the Duke and my father were
walking together up and down the gravel paths, the Duke leaning on the
arm of his beautiful daughter-in-law. We were trying with more ambition
than knowledge to fly kites. The Duke saw we were doing it all wrong.
Breaking away from Lady Druro and my father he walked briskly across
the lawn and showed us the proper way in which to fly kites, and watched
the result with a keen interest. Under his guidance this was entirely suc-
cessful, and the kites flew up in the air as high as Apsley House.
" THE ARCHES" AND LONDON 283
friendships with the politicians of the day. There exists a large
packet of letters from Sir George Cornewall Lewis to my
father which proves how intimate they were. My father had
filled the post of Secretary of the Treasury in a manner which
had changed for good the whole working of the office.
Naturally very few who knew my father at the Treasury are
now alive. I asked one of the few, Lord Welby, to write
down any recollections he might have of him, and he has most
kindly sent me the following letter : —
" 1 1 STRATTON STREET,
" llth January ', 1913.
"DEAR MRS. BARRINGTON,
" I entered the Treasury as a junior clerk in the
summer of 1856. Your father was then Financial Secretary
of the Treasury, having been appointed to that post at the end
of 1852, when Lord Aberdeen formed the Coalition Govern-
ment. Mr. Wilson remained Financial Secretary under Lord
Palmerston, and he went out with him in 1858. He had
therefore an unusually long tenure of that post, I think longer
than any one since the Reform Bill. In the fifties the post of
Financial Secretary to the Treasury was, if not the first, at least
as good as any out of the Cabinet. At that time the functions
of Government were very restricted, and the middle-class
regime, then supreme, had no liking for a widening of Govern-
ment interference. The Administrative Departments, then
the Home Office, the Board of Trade, the Poor Laws Board,
were not in prominence. On the other hand, the country was
only beginning its great recovery from the calamities and the
sufferings which the war had inflicted on the people. The
Public was really interested in Finance. Sir Robert Peel had
been the great Economical Minister of the Treasury, and the
Treasury power of controlling expenditure was very great.
The Treasury itself was divided into two branches, (i) Finan-
cial, (2) Control. The Chancellor of the Exchequer was the
Executive head of the Treasury, and the Financial Secretary
of the Treasury was his lieutenant. Chancellors were chiefly
interested in the finance side, and the Financial Secretary of
the Treasury was contented with the control of expenditure.
284 LIFE OF WALTER B AGE HOT
This control was summed up in the formula, 'Treasury con-
sent is necessary to every measure increasing or tending to
increase the public expenditure '. The powers actually ex-
ercised by the Financial Secretary were very large. He was
in the main judge as to questions of control which should be
reserved for the Chancellor. Your father wielded these powers
with great freedom and effect for between five and six years.
A rapid and indefatigable worker, he was the chief organiser
of the public service in that time. These were days before
shorthand or typewriting, ancl I remember with wonder the
extent and amount of the minutes and memoranda which he
wrote with his own hand. I have said that I entered the
Treasury as a junior in 1856. I had, therefore, no personal
knowledge of Mr. Wilson at that time, but for years and years
in organisation of the service, the lines which he had laid down
were so to speak a bulwark of fortification, and what he
called the ' forma paper' of a subject, that is its file, commonly
commenced with a remark in his rapid but somewhat difficult-
to-follow hand. He was a keen practical man of business,
and I remember a reform of the Treasury Department which
he carried out, turning a sleepy office of eighteenth century
type, into what was, for that time, an active office with greater
opportunity for the clerks to learn their work and fit them-
selves for responsibility. Your father served, during their
Ministry, under Mr. Gladstone till 1855, and then under Sir
George Cornewall Lewis. The story was that when he was
pressing the Treasury reform on Sir G. Cornewall Lewis (the
Chancellor of the Exchequer), who was not an active adminis-
trator, the latter said, ' You see, Wilson, you are an animal, I
am only a vegetable '.
" Your father was not only an active and very capable
financial administrator, but he took great interest, as you know,
in Currency questions, taking the side opposed to Peel, Over-
stone and Sir Charles Wood.
" Looking back from the beginning of the twentieth
century, I have always considered your father the most vigorous
and most efficient Financial Secretary of the Treasury we have
had. Perhaps there might be question between him and
" THE ARCHES" AND LONDON 285
Huskisson, though I feel convinced that as administrator he was
the best.
" Yours very truly,
" WELBY."
In his memoir of my father Bagehot writes : " On two
occasions during the tenure of office at the Treasury, Mr.
Wilson was offered a different post. In the autumn of 1856
he was offered the Chairmanship of Inland Revenue, a per-
manent office of considerable value then vacant, which he
declined because he did not consider the income necessary to
him, and because (what some people would think odd) it did
not afford sufficient occupation. It was a ' good pillow,' he
said, ' but he did not wish to lie down '. The second office
offered him was the Vice-Presidency of the Board of Trade in
1855. . . . He had, however, secured so firm a position in
official circles by his real efficiency, that the dispensers of
patronage were, as he believed, likely to give him whatever
he desired as soon as the exigencies of party enabled them
to do so."
Doubtless in going to India my father left much that
was of sterling worth to him ; a life of earnest activity in the
House of Commons, a family life in England which was a
delight to him, relations for whom he always retained a
tenacious affection, old and new friends, and companionship
with Bagehot and with three of his daughters. The severing
from all this my father certainly felt, but there was important
work to be done and he felt capable of doing it. That
clenched the matter ; there was no hesitation.
Before leaving England my father travelled to his birth-
place, visited all his relations and many friends, and places
where he could obtain information on points useful to him in
the work before him. He was entertained at banquets and
receptions given in his honour at Manchester and elsewhere.
He returned to Claverton for a few days' rest before starting.1
1 Some members of the family of Kilvert, well known in Bath, lived
at Claverton in 1859. In 1860 Mrs. Kilvert sent our family the following
entry from her Diary. " ' Mr. A. called on us on his way to Mr. Duck-
286 LIFE OF WALTER B AGE HOT
The Government recognised that my father was making a
sacrifice in going to India. It was intimated to him that on
returning after five years, he would not have to seek for a seat
in the House of Commons, as one would be provided for him
in the Upper Chamber. The Economist my father left in
Bagehot's hands, Mr. Hutton still remaining the editor. My
sister Julia and myself (I being then considered too young to
go to India) he entrusted to the Bagehots' care. Two days
after my father accepted the post created for him in the
Supreme Council, one of my sisters was married at Claverton
to William Stirling Halsey, of the Indian Civil Service, whom
my father later appointed as one of his private secretaries.
worth's seat, Orchardleigh. We had much interesting talk on the past,
present and future state of India. He said he had had a very long night's
conference with our kind friend and neighbour, the Rt. Hon. James Wilson,
when he had a public reception given him at Manchester this month, just
previous to his embarkation for Dublin, whence he was so good as to write
to me a friendly note in acknowledgment for my brief " sketch " of our
mutual friend Mrs. Fry, which had followed him to the Castle of Dublin.
Mr. A. said of Mr. Wilson, " he was one of the great-minded men of the
day ". Mr. Kilvert had ever admired his kind, simple, self-possessed
manners when our neighbour at Claverton Manor. A very few days,
perhaps /tours, before he took his final leave of that beautiful home, he
walked down Claverton Hill and entered the vestibule steps. I heard the
voice of a stranger talking to our servant. Mr. Kilvert, knowing his voice,
instantly came forward and led him into the bow room. He cast his eye
on the walls with evident emotion, and there was the best engravings of
his early and beloved friends, Mrs. Fry, Joseph John Gurney and Sir
Robert H. Inglis. Some deep chord was touched by these remembrances,
rendered unspeakably dear by the wrench he was enduring in quitting his
own native land. He told me the following circumstances : " When I was
at school Mr. J. Gurney gave me and several other boys a theme on three
great attributes of God, viz. : the Omnipotence, the Omniscience, the
Omnipresence, divided into the three subjects, and for the best paper he
offered a prize, which I was happy enough to win ". Mr. Wilson was
touched by my intimate knowledge of Mrs. Fry, and said she had sent to
him on the very first notice she had received of the calamity in her husband's
affairs. He repeated with admiration, " I can never forget her .' " His
conversation was friendly in the extreme to Mr. Kilvert. His approaching
untried task in a far land called out our warmest feelings. His were deep,
manly and solemn when we bade him adieu. His strength seemed
derived from his devotion to the full development of the vast resources of
" THE ARCHES" AND LONDON 287
My father and Walter returned together to London directly
after the wedding. Shortly before the start was made for
India, Walter wrote to my sister, " Your husband is very tired, I
sat up late with your father about his will which was a cheerful
topic, and I have been to the City to-day and since gone
poney hunting with Mr. Reynolds.
On 2Oth October a small steamer took us three miles
down the Southampton Water where the Pera was moored.
It was on the deck of that ship that those who stayed behind
saw my father for the last time.
Even through the stirring events of those last days Bagehot
had contrived to write three articles for that week's Economist.
A great event, the entire uprooting of our family life, had
come and gone. It seemed to have been followed by a lull.
On leaving Southampton, while the Pera was ploughing
the ocean and getting into rough water in the Bay, our quar-
tet, the Bagehots, my sister Julia and I, crossed over to Cowes
and explored with leisure the Isle of Wight. There was
much rain, and much reading aloud in the evenings. As a
finale to our excursion we witnessed a record storm which
made us tremble for those at sea. On wandering down to
the beach one morning from the hotel at Freshwater, we
found the fishermen in all haste pushing and hauling up their
boats inland through the shingle. We asked them what was
the matter. They looked up and pointed to the sun. A
India in her new position, and having long and thoroughly investigated
what could be known of his task, he looked at her every interest. His
persevering integrity and industry had raised him to high distinction.
Without sons but blessed with all the charities of domestic life, surrounded
by the refinements which wealth confers, he has only the great aim of
doing to mankind an enduring service. He seems to have prepared his
mind for conflicts in this untried field of labour. His late calm retreat
must have been a refreshment to his mind, which knew but little rest by
day or night. He crosses the ocean in a martyr's faith. We shall watch
with great anxiety his course : the result of his plans will be the work of
time and the wisdom of his agents. — ADELAIDE SOPHIE KILVERT.'
" There the scene closes. Memory holds fast the now changed field —
Semper fide Us. This very slight trace of a few minutes spent in conversa-
tion with a great and good man I extract from my Diary, in which the
final record must find a place which is here not inserted, and which my sad
thoughts anticipated but too truthfully."
288 LIFE OF WALTER B AGE HOT
great halo surrounded it, and an ominous brightness lighted
the sky. A high sea was running. Every minute the wind
•was increasing in force, and the waves bounded with fury on
to the shore, throwing flakes of froth far inland. Bagehot's
spirits rose. He thoroughly enjoyed a tumult in the elements.
He got us into an open carriage and we set off for the Needles
to see the storm at its best. It was bright overhead, but the
force of the wind was terrific. Immense waves clashed vio-
lently against the Needles, tossing volumes of mist against
the cliffs and up into the air. We could not stand upright.
Walter alone was quite happy, crawling and clambering over
the downs to the cliff's edge. He was greatly amused at my
indignation at being buffeted about by the elements and at
the hem of my silk basque being ripped into shreds. It was
most uncomfortable, still no one could help laughing if Walter
was amused, seeing that his moods were so contagious. He
became particularly happy, when there was any excitement
or risk in a situation. The coachman who drove us thought
there was a danger of his conveyance being turned over by
the wind, and had refused to keep the hood up. After return-
ing to the hotel, while we were lunching, the waiter informed
us with an air of importance that Mr. Tennyson and his two
sons had been down to the beach to watch the storm, add-
ing : " We shall doubtless have it all in the Times to-morrow ".
Such were his views as to the duties of a Poet Laureate !
Incidents such as these are vividly remembered because they
were spiced with a choice flavour such as few have the power
of infusing into daily events, a power richly possessed by
Walter Bagehot. To feel dull or even passive when he was
on the scene was impossible. The puzzling mixture in him
of the boy, overflowing with high spirits, and the very wise
man, itself provoked a speculative kind of amusement.
We returned to The Arches in November, and again read
A Lost Love aloud, and Bagehot began writing his article on
the "History of the Unreformed Parliament and Its Lessons"
for the January number of the National Review. At no time of
his life was the strain of work greater than it was from this
November, 1859, to the spring of 1861. He never appeared
« THE ARCHES" AND LONDON 289
overburdened by it and never failed to be good company, but
he suffered not infrequently from headache, and would lie
down constantly after his work. Considering the amount of
travelling his work entailed, it is remarkable that he yet found
time to get through the close brain work which his writing in-
volved. While living at The Arches, banking, the business
at The Bridge, the management of the Economist and the
editing of the National Review necessitated, as a rule, daily
railway journeys either to London, Bristol or Langport, and
would have filled to the full the life of an ordinary hard
worker. But Bagehot would, over and above all this, write at
least two articles each week in the Economist, and an article
for the National Review every other quarter. In December,
1859, he also undertook to examine the candidates for the
Joseph Hume Scholarship at University College, London.
On 28th December, 1859, at the age of fifty-nine, Lord
Macaulay died. A short but striking paper appeared in the
Economist of the 3ist, written by Bagehot. The appearance
of the History had greatly interested both Mr. Hutton and
Bagehot, and in 1856 Bagehot was inspired to write his
notably stimulating essay on Macaulay in the National
Review. It is as a statesman and as an orator that Bagehot
treated Macaulay in the Economist. He writes : " There are
not many occasions in political life when full-length portrai-
ture, either of principles or facts, is wanted, or is likely to be
successful. Lord Macaulay's successes are all of this class.
He was a politician for great occasions, — when the magnifying
character both of his intellect and his imagination could be
brought into play with effect, when he might safely be per-
mitted to draw the attention of his hearers to a first principle,
bid it expand before their eyes in every direction, and fill all
their minds with homely and vivid illustrations of its worth.
This kind of power is sometimes very useful, especially when
a simple political principle which has grown tiresome and com-
monplace is to be defended. There are scarcely any of Lord
Macaulay's most splendid and effective speeches which do not
owe their effective character to some form of this power.
When religious toleration had become so hackneyed a word
'9
290 LIFE OF WALTER B AGE HOT
that it rather annoyed men of liberal minds even to be obliged
to defend it, Lord Macaulay delighted in expounding its merits
and recalling its full meaning, till it had as new and curious
an interest to the minds of his readers or his audience as the
commonest texture acquires when you see it beneath the glass
of a microscope. He could write in favour of the civil privi-
leges of the Jews with power and force when to every other
mind the question was worked utterly dry. His speech on
the Dissenters' Chapels Bill was one of the most effective of
his orations. In short, his greatest triumphs were gained by
bringing to bear on hackneyed, though only half-known,
principles of popular right, the influence of his vivid and
powerful imagination."
A migration from The Arches to Herd's Hill took place
at Christmas and in February one to Paris. It was while we
were in Paris that Bagehot wrote the tribute to William
Roscoe which Mr. Hutton annexed to the memoir of their
mutual friend. This memoir prefaced the collection, in two
volumes, of Mr. Roscoe's poems and prose writings which
appeared in the spring of 1860, edited by Mr. Hutton.
Madame Mohl and her milieu were, as ever, the greatest
attraction for us in Paris. Ida von Mohl, our life-long friend,
had married, and was no longer acting as her aunt's lieutenant.
Her sister Anna, afterwards the wife of the famous Von
Helmholtz, reigned in her stead. Many of our friends and
acquaintances gathered together on the Friday evenings at
1 20, Rue du Bac. Lady Augusta Bruce, who first met her
husband, Dean Stanley, in the famous Salon ; our old friend
Mr. Frederick Locker of Claverton days, who married Lady
Augusta's sister, Lady Charlotte Bruce ; the De Tourguenieffs,
who had freed the slaves on their estates in Russia, hence
could no longer reside there and had taken refuge in the
Quartier St. Germain ; all these with many others gathered
at that time to the bidding of the fascinating, quaint, kindly
genius of the great-little Madame Mohl on Wednesday and
Friday evenings. It was the erudite host himself who had
most attraction for Bagehot. The dry humour and profound
learning of this Oriental scholar had been discovered by
"THE ARCHES" AND LONDON 291
Bagehot on his first visit to Paris in 1851, in the days of the
Coup cCEtat. On the occasion of this second visit, Bagehot
became intimate with him. Almost daily intercourse took
place between M. and Mme. Mohl and our party during our stay
in Paris. Breakfast and dinner parties were given in the Rue
du Bac for Bagehot to meet M. de Montalembert, M.
d'Haussonville, M. de Lavery, Mignet, Giroult, Lomenie and
other distinguished people. The De Tourguenieffs were
generally among the guests at these entertainments. While
in Paris Bagehot prosecuted his acquaintance with M. de
Remusat. He and my sister dined with our old friends
M. and Mme. Drouyn de 1'Huys. M. Drouyn de 1'Huys had
stayed with my father and mother at Westbury when he was
French Ambassador in England. All this Paris society
Bagehot enjoyed. Intellectual attainments secured at once
in the Paris of that day a welcome into the best social life of
the place. The Parisian was then more logical than the
Londoner. Literary distinction was in theory esteemed and
admired in both capitals, but the proof of this admiration
was more forthcoming, and with a more sympathetic and
intelligent interest in the Paris society of those days than it
was in the London world.
From Paris the Bagehots travelled to Diisseldorf to consult
the famous oculist, the Holfrath Loens. Both were troubled
by head and eye-ache, and to both alike was prescribed that
white lotion so well known in those days as the cure-all. At
Cologne, on the return journey, Bagehot found a letter from
Mr. Hutton, proposing that he should stand as a candidate for
Parliament for the London University. Bagehot thought over
the idea while travelling home, and decided against standing.
However, at Herd's Hill, where he went on arriving in
England, he found his parents anxious that he should do so.
He therefore telegraphed to Mr. Osier to keep the candidature
open till he returned to London. On 3 1st March, at a meeting
of the London University graduates, Bagehot proposed Sir
John Romilly as their candidate. They, however, chose Bage-
hot on that occasion. The matter was, however, finally settled
at a meeting held in the Freemasons ' Tavern, when it was
19*
292 LIFE OF WALTER B AGE HOT
decided by a majority of four in favour of Sir J. Romilly
against Bagehot Walter had written from London to my
sister : " The tide is setting in favour of Romilly as I always
said it would ".
On loth February, 1860, Mr. Gladstone had delivered
his great Budget speech. "A very different one," writes
Bagehot in the Economist of nth February, " from that which
he expected to propose at the present time when he brought
forward his last great Budget in 1853." Bagehot took this
speech as the text for his July article in the National Review?-
His title, however, is "Mr. Gladstone," and his intention was
to solve, as far as possible, the problem "Mr. Gladstone".
" Mr. Gladstone is a problem," he writes. The criticism of
the Budget proper appeared in an article in the Economist by
Bagehot. The article in the National Review begins with :
"We believe that quarterly essayists have a peculiar
mission in relation to the characters of public men. We
believe it is their duty to be personal. . . . We allow
that personality abounds already, that the names of public
men are ever on our lips. Some deliberate truth should be
spoken of our statesmen and if quarterly essayists do not
speak of it, who will ? "
In none of Bagehot's writings is found a finer discrim-
ination, a truer imagination, more illuminating humour or
subtler power of analysis, than in this exploration into the
nature of an interesting, peculiar — to many exasperating —
statesman. The seemingly incompatible, and certainly incon-
sistent creeds which Mr. Gladstone professed during various
phases of his career, Bagehot goes far to explain by digging
deep down to their foundations.
With insight and skill he weighs in one scale the noble
and grand features of Mr. Gladstone's genius, in the other
"his greatest peculiarities" which "have helped him to annoy
the old Whigs, confound the Country gentlemen, and puzzle
the nation generally ". " They have," Bagehot goes on to say,
1 " Speech of the Chancellor of the Exchequer on the Finance of the
Year and the Treaty of Commerce with France, Delivered in the House of
Commons on Friday, loth February, 1860. Corrected by the Author."
"THE ARCHES" AND LONDON 293
" contributed to bring on him the long array of depreciating
adjectives, ' extravagant,' ' inconsistent/ ' incoherent ' and
' incalculable '." Enthusiastic in his admiration, Bagehot is
emphatic in exposing the elements of inconsistency in Mr.
Gladstone's schemes. He writes : —
" It is needless to say Mr. Gladstone is a great orator. . . .
The most sincere admirers and the most eager depreciators of
Mr. Gladstone are agreed on this point, and it is almost the
only point on which they are agreed. . . . Mr. Gladstone
has, beyond every other man in his generation, what we may
call the oratorical impulse. . . . He has the didactic impulse.
He has the ' courage of his ideas ! ' He will convince his
audience. He has a nature, as Coleridge might have said,
towards his audience. He is sure, if they only knew what he
knows, they would feel as he feels, and believe as he believes.
And by this he conquers. This living faith, this enthusiasm,
this confidence, call it as we will, is an extreme power in
human affairs. One croyant, said the Frenchman, is a greater
power than fifty incrfdules. In the composition of an orator,
the hope, the credulous hope, that he will convince his
audience, is the primuin mobile, it is the primitive incentive
which is the spring of his influence and the source of his
power. Mr. Gladstone has this incentive in perhaps an ex-
cessive and dangerous measure. Whatever may be right or
wrong in pure finance, in abstract political economy, it is cer-
tain that no one save Mr. Gladstone would have come down
with the Budget of 1860 to the Commons of 1860. No other
man would have believed that such a proposal would have a
chance. Yet after the warning — the disheartening warning of
a reluctant Cabinet — Mr. Gladstone came down from a de-
pressing sick-bed, and semi-bronchitis hovering about him,
entirely prevailed for the moment, and three parts conquered
after all. We will not say that the world is given to men of
this temperament and this energy ; on the contrary, there is
often a turn in the tide, the ovation of the spring may be the
prelude to unpopularity in the autumn ; but we see that
audiences are given them ; we see that unimpressible men are
deeply moved by them — that the driest topics of legislation
294 LIFE OF WALTER B AGE HOT
and finance are for the instant affected by them — that the
prolonged effects of that momentary influence may be felt for
many years, sometimes for centuries. The orator has a
dominion over the critical instant, and the consequences of
the decisions taken during that instant may last long after the
orator and the audience have both passed away.
" Nor is the didactic impulse the only one which is essen-
tial to a great political orator ; nor is it the only one which
Mr. Gladstone has. We say it with respect ; but he has the
contentious impulse. He illustrates the distinction between
the pacific and the peaceful. On all great questions, on the
controversies of States and Empires, Mr. Gladstone is the most
pacific of mankind. He hates the very rumour of war ; he
trusts in moral influence ; he detests the bare idea of military
preparations. He will not believe that preparations are neces-
sary till the enemy is palpable." (How convincingly the
truth of these words was proved years after Bagehot's death,
when the Gordon tragedy took place.) ..." At the present
moment no Englishman, not Mr. Bright himself, feels so little
the impulse to arm. He will not believe in a war till he sees
men fighting. He is the most pacific of our statesmen in
theory and in policy.
" When you hear Mr. Gladstone, he is about the most com-
bative. He can bear a good deal about the politics of Europe ;
but let a man question the fees on vatting, or the change in
the game certificate, or the stamp on bills of lading — what
melodious thunders of loquacious wrath ! The world, he hints,
is likely to end at such observations, and it is dreadful that they
should be made by the honourable member who made them, —
by the honourable member who four years ago said so-and-so,
and five years before that moved, etc. etc. The number of
well-intentioned and tedious persons whom Mr. Gladstone annu-
ally scolds into a latent dislike of him must be considerable.
. . . No one, indeed, half guides, half follows the moods of his
audience more quickly, more easily, than Mr. Gladstone.
There is a little playfulness in his manner, which contrasts with
the dryness of his favourite topics, and the intense gravity of
his earnest character. He has the same sort of control over
"THE ARCHES" AND LONDON 295
the minds of those he is addressing that a good driver has over
the animal he guides : he feels the minds of his hearers as the
driver the mouths of his horses.
" The species of intellect that is required for this task is
pre-eminently the advocate's intellect. . . . We scarcely think,
with Mr. Gladstone, that this style of oratory is the very high-
est, though it is very natural that he should think so, for it
exactly expresses the oratory in which he is the greatest living
master. Mr. Gladstone's conception of oratory, in theory, and
in practice, is the oratory of Pitt, not the oratory of Chatham
or of Burke ; it is the oratory of adaption. We do not deny
that this is the kind of oratory which is most generally useful,
the only kind which is commonly permissible, the only one
which in general would not be a bore ; but we must remember
that there is an eloquence of great principles which the hearers
scarcely heed, and do not accept — such as, in its highest parts,
is the eloquence of Burke — we must remember that there is an
eloquence of great passions, of high-wrought intense feeling,
which is nearly independent of the peculiarities of its audience,
because it appeals to our elemental human nature — which is
the same, or much the same, in almost every audience, which
is everywhere and always susceptible to the union of vivid
genius and eager passion. Such as this last was, if we may
trust tradition, the eloquence of Chatham, the source of his
rare, , magical, and occasional power. Mr. Gladstone has
neither of these. Few speakers equally great have left so few
passages which can be quoted — so few which embody great
principles in such a manner as to be referred to by coming
generations. He has scarcely given us a sentence that lives
in the memory ; nor is his declamation, facile and effective as
it always is, the very highest declamation : it is a nearly per-
fect expression of intellectual sentiment, but it wants the vol-
canic power of primitive. passion.
" The prominence of advocacy in Mr. Gladstone's mind
is in appearance, though not in reality, diminished by the
purity and intensity of his zeal. There is an elastic heroism
about him. When he begins to speak, we may know that we
are going to hear what we shall not agree with. We may
296 LIFE OF WALTER B AGE HOT
believe that the measures he proposes are mischievous ; we may
smile at the emphasis with which some of their minutiae are
insisted upon ; but we inevitably feel that we have left the
ordinary earth. We know that high sentiments will be appealed
to by one who feels high sentiments ; that strong arguments
will be strongly stated by one who believes that argument
should decide controversy. We know that we are beyond the
realm of the Patronage Secretary, we have felt behind us the
doctrine that corruption is the ruling power in popular as-
semblies, that patronage is the purchase-money of power. We
are not alleging that in the real world in which we live there
is some truth — more or less of truth — in these lower maxims ;
but they do not rule in Mr. Gladstone's world. He has — and
it is one of the springs of great power — a real faith in the
higher parts of human nature ; he believes, with all his heart
and soul and strength, that there is such a thing as truth ; he
has the soul of a martyr with the intellect of an advocate. . . .
" The great faculties we have mentioned give Mr. Gladstone,
it is needless to say, an extraordinary influence in English
politics. England is a country governed mainly by labour
and speech. Mr. Gladstone will work and can speak, and the
result is what we see. With a flowing eloquence and a lofty
heroism ; with an acute intellect and endless knowledge ; with
courage to conceive large schemes, and a voice which will per-
suade men to adopt those schemes — it is not singular that Mr.
Gladstone is of himself a power in parliamentary life. He can
do there what no one else living can do.
" But the effect of these peculiar faculties is by no means
unmixedly favourable. In almost every one of them some
faulty tendency is latent, which may produce bad effects — in
Mr. Gladstone's case has often done so, perhaps does so still.
His greatest characteristic, as we have indicated, is the singular
vivacity of his oratorical impulse. But great as is the immedi-
ate power which a vehement oratorical propensity, when ac-
companied by the requisite faculties, secures to the possessor,
the advantage of possessing it, or rather of being subject to it,
is by no means without an alloy. We have all heard that
Paley said he knew nothing against some one but that he was
"THE ARCHES" AND LONDON 297
a popular preacher. And Paley knew what he was saying.
The oratorical impulse is a disorganising' impulse. The higher
faculties of the mind require a certain calm, and the excitement
of oratory is unfavourable to that calm. . . .
" Nor is cool reflection the only higher state of mind which
the oratorical impulse interferes with ; we believe that it is
singularly unfavourable also to the exercise of the higher kind
of imagination. Several great poets have written good dramatic
harangues ; but no great practical orator has ever written a
great poem. The creative imagination requires a singular
calm : it is ' the unravished bride of quietness,' as the poets
say, ' the foster-child of silence and slow time '. No great
work has ever been produced except after a long interval of
still and musing meditations. The oratorical impulse interferes
with this. It breaks the exclusive brooding of the mind upon
the topic ; it brings in a new set of ideas, the faces of the
audience and the passions of listening men ; it jerks the mind,
if the expression may be allowed, just when the delicate poetry
of the mind is crystallising into symmetry. The process is
stayed, and the result is marred.
" Mr. Gladstone has suffered from both these bad effects
of the oratorical temperament. . . .
" We have now reached the term of the destructive period.
We cannot abolish all our laws ; we have few remaining with
which educated men find fault. The questions which remain
are questions of construction — how the lower classes are to
be admitted to a share of political power without absorbing
the whole power ; how the natural union of Church and State
is to be adapted to an age of divided religious opinion, and
to the necessary conditions of a parliamentary government.
These, and such as these, are the future topics of our home
policy. And on these the voice of the nation will never be
very distinct. Destruction is easy, construction is very difficult.
A statesman who will hereafter learn what our real public
opinion is, will not have to regard loud agitators, but to disre-
gard them ; will not have to yield to a loud voice, but to listen
for a still small voice ; will have to seek for the opinion which is
treasured in secret rather than for that which is noised abroad."
298 LIFE OF WALTER B AGE HOT
When Bagehot thus analysed Mr. Gladstone's gifts and
character the statesman was at the zenith of his fame. In
after years, referring to Mr. Gladstone, Sir Mountstuart Grant
Duff says : " Of him, too, Bagehot writes much and wisely.
It is easy for us who have seen how all ended, to form a
judgment of that notable person ; but Bagehot in 1 860, at a
moment when Mr. Gladstone was at his very best, wrote as
follows : ' If Mr. Gladstone will accept the conditions of his
age ; if he will guide himself by the mature, settled, and
cultured reflection of his time, and not by its loud and noisy
organs ; if he will look for that which is thought rather than
for that which is said, he may leave a great name, be useful
to his country, may steady and balance his own mind. But
if not, not. The coherent efficiency of his career will depend
on the guide which he takes, the index which he obeys, the
Sai/jicav which he consults.' "
Mr. Gladstone had been very much impressed by Bagehot's
writings, and the year before Bagehot wrote this article had
expressed his admiration and had sought Bagehot's acquaint-
ance. All intercourse between himself and Bagehot would
have been obviously of advantage to the latter, seeing that
Mr. Gladstone was Chancellor of the Exchequer and Bagehot
director of the Economist. That he wrote these criticisms at
that particular moment, is a clear proof — were proof wanting —
of his absolute, disinterested independence.
If Bagehot was courageous, Mr. Gladstone was generous
in his view of this outspoken criticism of himself. After re-
ceiving from my sister the volume of reprinted essays which
contained it, published after Bagehot's death, he wrote :
" Some of the articles are not new to me. I remember
feeling, and I still feel, how true the article on myself is in
the parts least favourable to my vanity. . . . Undoubtedly
your husband was a man of most remarkable gifts, and among
them was a singular discernment as to public characters, and
a not less excellent faculty for embodying the results in liter-
ary form."
CHAPTER XI.
INDIA.
INDIA, and all that was happening there in connection with
our family, was to Bagehot, no less than to my sisters and my-
self, the most absorbing subject of interest during the winter,
spring and summer months of 1859 and 1860. The arrival of
the Indian mail was an all-important event Everything that
concerned my father was reflected into Bagehot's life through
the natural sympathy existing between them. As he wrote
in a letter quoted on a future page, " I had a constant habit
of referring to his mind and keeping up a sort of mental
dialogue with him," and in his letters to Bagehot my father
wrote as he would have conversed with him, entirely freely
and without reserve. To no one else did he write in so con-
fidential a strain alike on public and private matters. Bagehot
was an ideal depository for all confidences, as he possessed
discretion, discernment, and a fine tact. Extracts from my
father's letters will show how constantly my father's mind
also was in touch with Bagehot's, after he left for India.
Bagehot's answers to these letters were returned to him from
India ; but no trace of them can now be found. In December,
1860, he wrote to my sister : "The box from India has just
come and I have examined it, but it contains nothing of any
interest. My own letters come back, which gave me a turn"
Not being in the habit of keeping letters, he probably de-
stroyed these at once.
The last act in my father's career is dwelt on somewhat
lengthily in this Life of Walter Bagehot, not only because it
is distinctly connected with Bagehot's position among the
politicians of his day, but because it directly influenced his own
personal attitude towards public affairs. Both my father and
Bagehot had what Bagehot designated as experiencing natures.
299
300 LIFE OF WALTER B AGE HOT
Both natures expanded in proportion as their circumstances
expanded. The colossal character of the work in India that
my father had undertaken, and the buoyant confident spirit in
which he tackled it, appealed to Bagehot's imagination, and
quickened his own feeling of self-confidence. He found him-
self in close intimate contact with work which was on a bigger
scale than any he had previously coped with, work which was,
at that moment, of momentous importance to the empire.
Bagehot was called by some of his contemporaries " a sort
of supplementary Chancellor of the Exchequer". This
honorary position was first earned when he found himself
in the position of interpreting my father's great work in India
to the public in England through the pages of the Economist.
My father lost no opportunity of impressing upon Bagehot
the strong antipathy he felt against any personal element
entering into the criticism of his measures, or into any public
question whatsoever. As Bagehot said in his memoir of my
father : " Few men ever transacted so much important business
with so little of the pettiness of personal feeling ". But even
if my father had not expressed this antipathy, it would have
been impossible for Bagehot to have been guided, even un-
consciously, when writing of him, by personal interest or
affection. His taste in literary matters was morally fastidious,
and a clear-sighted sincerity alone could satisfy it. He had
"a concern for the simple truth," Matthew Arnold's words
written when first he recognised in Bagehot's essays this
purity of aim. Nevertheless, if intimacy with my father had
been a lucky turn in fortune's wheel for Bagehot, it was no
less a happy turn for my father to find so able and apprecia-
tive an exponent of his Indian measures as Bagehot proved
to be. Bagehot estimated the value of my father's policy
together with my father's character and power of carrying
out that policy. What is wise in a strong man may be foolish
in a weaker man. Bagehot recognised the value of my father's
purity and moral strength, the force and simplicity of his nature,
and the great power he possessed of succeeding in carrying out
his aims. Courage is required to write favourably of those who
are known to belong to you. This courage Bagehot possessed ;
INDIA 301
moreover, he could well stand the ordeal of frankly owning
his appreciation for his father-in-law's public work. States-
men attended to what Bagehot said because of the impartial
and obviously sincere manner in which he conducted all con-
troversy. Politicians of all parties recognised that Bagehot
stood outside the pale of political strife, its frictions, jeal-
ousies, compromises and expediencies. Sir Charles Wood,
as Secretary of State for India, attended to what Bagehot
wrote in the Economist about Indian matters ; Gladstone
watched what he wrote, not only of himself but of others ;
Sir Stafford Northcote appealed to Bagehot in a financial
difficulty, and at once adopted his suggestions. Sir M. Grant
Duff said truly : " he [Bagehot] was in his proper place as a
deeply interested spectator and critic of public affairs ".
Public men knew that they were being watched by Bagehot,
and were in their turn deeply interested in his criticisms of
their political actions. Bagehot might drape his published
writings with a reserve and moderation becoming to the dis-
cussion of public matters in an authority such as the Economist
newspaper, but those who were intimate with him at home knew
how deep could be his affections, how enthusiastic his admira-
tions, and how justly he appreciated the great qualities in my
father.
After arriving in India, my father wrote : —
" GOVERNMENT HOUSE,
" CALCUTTA, %th December, 1859.
" DEAR WALTER,
" There was an impression in some quarters that my
appointment would not be very agreeable to Lord Canning,
but his letters which met me on my way out and on my arrival
here show very much the contrary. I cannot express in terms
too strong the willingness of every one here to aid me in every
way. It may be that they cannot do much, but certainly the
will is not wanting.
" I have had a great deputation of the Chamber of Com-
merce and the India Planters' Association this week to present
an address, and another from the Native Association. They
are very confiding and express themselves very willing to be
302 LIFE OF WALTER B AGE HOT
taxed if done fairly. I don't think they will be a difficult
people to manage."
The following letters from Lord Canning were those to
which my father alluded. He confided them to Bagehot's
care.
" CALCUTTA,
" 12nd September, 1859.
" DEAR MR. WILSON,
" By the last mail I have heard that your appoint-
ment is certain, and Sydney tells me that you will leave
England in October.
" I therefore write this to meet you as you set foot on the
first outpost of our Indian Empire (not a cheerful specimen of
it), and to carry to you an early and very sincere welcome. I
am only sorry that it will not be possible for me to greet you
in person when you land in Calcutta, my plans for a visit to
the N.W.P. and Punjab have long been made and meetings
with the native chiefs fixed.
" I start on the 9th or loth of next month ; how long it
may be before I return to Calcutta I cannot yet say. I hope
to pass a part at least of the next hot season in the hills, but
if need be I shall come down to Bengal again at the end of
April or May before going to Simla. But I am very desirous to
see you before you set to work, and as you will get to Calcutta
just at the time of year when the journey can be made with
ease and pleasantly, I would propose to you to join the Camp,
as soon as you conveniently can do so after landing ; seven
or eight days will take you to Agra and two days more to
Delhi ; if I shall have reached that distance before you over-
take me you will see much that is worth seeing of men and
things military and civil whilst in Camp and under circum-
stances of unusual interest, and you will realise at once the
difference between Calcutta and India, which is not easily
taken in at first, great as it is. There are several points upon
which I wish to speak with you, connected with our finances,
and which a few days of talk will dispose of more effectually
than reams of letters ; five weeks' absence from Calcutta will
enable you to spend at least a fortnight in Camp and to see
INDIA 303
much with your own eyes by the way, including most of our
great public works. I cannot at present propose a distinct
plan to you because I do not at all know by which steamer
in October you will leave England, but as soon as I hear this,
I will describe a more definite arrangement than is possible
at this moment. There is another matter, you will probably
find it very difficult to suit yourself at once with a house in
Calcutta. I do not know whether any of your family ac-
company you, but if so the difficulty will be increased. I
will therefore leave orders that apartments in a wing of
Government House shall be ready for yourself and yours on
your arrival. My whole establishment will, almost to a man,
be up country, but you will find no difficulty in making pro-
vision for household wants. Should your daughters be with
you it might perhaps be more agreeable to them in your
absence to fix their residence at Barrackpore, fifteen miles from
Calcutta ; if so one of the houses in the park shall be at their
disposal, but this is a subsidiary arrangement which can easily
be settled when the time comes. I shall no doubt hear some-
thing certain of your movements before I leave Calcutta.
Upon doing so I will send another letter to meet you at
Galle.
" Believe me,
" Yours very faithfully,
" CANNING."
" CAWNPORE,
" tfh November, 1859.
" DEAR MR. WILSON,
" You will have received at Aden a letter which I
wrote before yours of the 2 5th August reached me. I send this
to catch you at Madras, and to assure you that you shall find
everything in Calcutta ready for your reception to such a
degree as I hope to spare you all inconvenience and trouble.
In saying this I refer to bodily comforts mainly ; but pray
dismiss from your mind all suspicion that you will in more
important matters meet with any antagonism, open or silent,
on the part of Officers of Government. I see that Sir C. Wood
304 LIFE OF WALTER B AGE HOT
has this apprehension as well as yourself, but I will almost under-
take to say that none shall show itself, and I will confidently
answer for its being put down if it does. I will send to meet
you at Calcutta, a memorandum strictly private of the dis-
position, usefulness, capacity or incapacity of those with whom
you will be brought into immediate contact ; you will, I
think, find it of service and reassuring. I entirely concur
with you as to the blot in India of the divided responsibility
of the financial and revenue department. I do not think
that you will find any financial officer of the Government of
India to disagree with you on this point, certainly none whose
opinion is worth having, but if there be such, depend upon it,
his opinion will not be in your way.
" I will write to you again to Calcutta respecting the ar-
rangements for your run up country. I got a letter from
Sir C. Wood yesterday, 3rd October, in which he seems to
hope that I would not leave Calcutta before your arrival. I
would willingly have stayed, if that were possible, but it was
not so, after the engagements I had made with the native
chiefs, and moreover my presence in Oude and elsewhere
has been productive already of results which will be of great
and immediate effect upon our financial task. The Commander-
in-Chief is in Camp with me, and will remain until you come
up. I will endeavour so to spin out the next business of my
tour (I leave this place to-morrow) as not to pass beyond Agra
before you arrive. An officer of my staff will present him-
self on board the steamer as soon as she anchors at Garden
Reach and shall conduct you to Government House, where
altho' necessarily denuded greatly of household, by my being
in Camp, I hope that Mrs. Wilson and her daughters will find
themselves fairly comfortable.
" I beg you to offer them my hearty welcome, and also my
regret that I cannot signify it in person.
" Believe me, dear Mr. Wilson,
" Yours sincerely,
" CANNING,"
INDIA 305
" CAMP AROUN,
" iind November, 1 8 59.
" DEAR MR. WILSON,
" I write this to meet you at Calcutta, where you will
arrive about the 28th. I am sanguine that a few days' inter-
view with those, amongst whom your labours will lie, will
dispel any apprehension you have entertained of thwarting or
opposition or even of lukewarm aid.
" In a recent letter, Sir C. Wood expressed a hope that I
should remain in Calcutta to help you against any such dis-
couragements, but I could not, without risk of causing sus-
picions and much mischief, have put off my meetings with
the native chiefs, and the rewarding and recementing of rela-
tions with them, even if I had received his letter in time, and
so far as your own facilities for your work are concerned it is
quite unnecessary. I dare say that capital will be made by
the newspapers and elsewhere of my being absent when you
arrive, but this is of no great moment ; I think, however, it is
a reason (though a minor one) for your coming on a visit to
the Camp, as soon as you can do so conveniently. The fact
of your having been in personal communication with the
Governor-General and returning, as will be obvious, armed
with his fullest support, will be the best possible antidote to any
mischievous representation ; it will also help your way with
all your colleagues and highest subordinates, but the strongest
reasons are in the real business we have in hand, the re-casting
of the financial department, the so-called license tax and the
paper currency, and there are some minor matters.
"As regards the financial department, I am strongly inclined
to carry out the scheme which was proposed by Lord Dal-
housie in 1854 and 1855 but rejected by the Court of Directors,
for joining the home and financial departments, but I think
that some modification of that scheme is necessary. The
license tax is too long a chapter to enter upon here. I recom-
mend you to ask Mr. Harrington to give you verbally a full ac-
count of the course that measure took ; there has been a good
deal of misunderstanding about it ; still it is not yet in a right
shape. I heard a day or two ago that none of the local
20
306 LIFE OF WALTER B AGE HOT
Governments, except Bombay, had sent in their opinions on
it. I am very anxious about the paper currency. I look to
it as one of our surest though an indirect means of relief.
The care must be to make it safe from abuse in times of
temptation to the Government. My present opinion is that
there is no way of doing this so satisfactorily as by giving to
Parliament a control over the issue. Wood tells me you are
favourable to the measure, but he does not say in what shape, nor
do I clearly know his own views upon it. The legal tender of
sovereigns is a small question. I am opposed to it, but if the
paper currency is taken in hand it will cease to be called for.
" As to my movements I shall be at Agra on the 26th.
I shall spin out my stay there but shall not be able to extend
it beyond the 6th or 7th of December. Thence the Camp will
march (12 miles a day) to Delhi, but I shall stop at Muttra,
or near to it, for three days. This will bring me to Delhi
about the 2ist or 22nd December. You will of course be
sworn in at once on your arrival. I can hardly judge how
much time you will require to look about you and to examine
the above-mentioned subjects, but if you could start within a
week of the 2Oth of November, you would easily come up with
the Camp several marches this side of Delhi. Lt.-Col. Gale,
Secty. P.W.D., who probably has made the voyage from
England with you, has to join me forthwith, but I have told
him I can dispense with him till I get to Delhi. His convoy
might be useful to you. Nobody knows the road better,
or what there is worth seeing upon it. Less than a month
would, suffice to spend a week in Camp and to see everything
of note from Calcutta to Delhi.
" Let me add that the sooner any man who has to deal
with the administration of this country learns the immeasur-
able differences there are between Calcutta and India, the
better. I would have given the best year of my life to have
made this tour I am now making before 1857. You already
know that the flag staff house at Barrackpore is at the disposal
of Mrs. Wilson.
" Sincerely yours,
" CANNING."
INDIA 307
"CAMP AROUN,
" 12nd November, 1859.
" DEAR Mr. WILSON,
" This will be delivered to you by Captain Delane,
2nd in command of my body-guard, who has orders to go on
board of your steamer as soon as it arrives, and to conduct
yourself and Mrs. Wilson to Government House. I hope,
more than I expect, that you will find things comfortable in
the wing which has been prepared for you ; the whole house
is more or less in the hands of workmen for its triennial
repair which I was obliged to postpone last year when they
were due, thereby giving the white ants an extra chance. The
person in charge of Government House is named Westfield ;
he has often ushered you into Lady Palmerston's drawing-
room. I think you will find him useful, in bringing servants
and providing for other wants, at all events he is very willing
to be so ; I mean of course servants for personal use, he has
his own staff for the care of the house. I don't think I have
anything more to say in this note than again to bid you and
yours heartily welcome. The letters which accompany this
you had better open in some quieter spot than the deck of a
disgorging steamer.
" Sincerely yours,
" CANNING.
" P.S. — Captain Delane is brother to Delane of the Times."
On his voyage out and while in India my father kept up
a constant correspondence with Sir Charles Wood and other
officials, copies of which he sent to Bagehot. Out of a few
of these very lengthy letters the following extracts outline
the work my father had in hand. Soon after his arrival in
Calcutta he wrote : —
" 8/A December.
" MY DEAR SIR CHARLES WOOD,
"In prosecuting preliminary enquiries before going
to Lord Canning, the great difficulty I have experienced is
the impossibility of obtaining information, not from a want
of will to give it, but from the difficulty of reaching it.
" A Chancellor of the Exchequer in England would find
20*
308 LIFE OF WALTER B AGE HOT
it a difficult task to arrange his annual budget and especially
to impose new taxes if he had to consult every revenue
officer in the country as to what would prove best. He would
have as many and as conflicting opinions as we have here,
and his position would not be mended if, not content with
offering an opinion if asked or not, many of them were to
rush into print and each to show that some tax or other
could not be borne. The truth is there is so much to be said
against any and every tax taken separately that it is not
difficult to raise a prejudice against them all, and thus make
any tax difficult. But what I feel is, that as all are unpopular
the best course is to take that which will best bear discussion,
and firmly stand by it. I do not believe in any serious
opposition if fair ground is taken and a firm front maintained.
" J. W."
On the next day he writes to Sir Charles Trevelyan with
whom he had discussed public matters at Madras on his way
to Calcutta : —
" GOVERNMENT HOUSE,
" gth December.
" DEAR TREVELYAN,
" I have now had ten days clear work here and
begin to have some measure of the extent of work to be done.
Departmentally alone it is enormous ; the whole fabric seems
to have arisen without any attempt at any general system or
plan, and with regard to Finance and Expenditure and checks,
including pay and audit, we seem here to be much in the
same condition as we were in England, under our old Ex-
chequer system, with numerous separate audits, and with
little or no Treasury control, and in those days with a very
imperfect Parliamentary control. But perhaps one of the
most imperfect departments is the Commissariat. I believe
we shall have to go through here much the same process that
we did in England in order to reduce everything into a system.
No one is more familiar with the reforms which have been
made of late years in England than yourself — and especially
as regards the Commissariat branch — I have sent for all the
minutes and regulations in England upon these subjects.
INDIA 309
" Upon the plans of estimates, sanction, and budget I
think from our conversation the other day we are pretty well
agreed.
" May I express a hope that you will instruct your officers
entrusted with the settlement of the imposts that no expres-
sion will be used that can be construed into an exemption from
any general tax to which they in common with others may be
exposed, so that the difficulties (theoretical, I think) which
have been raised in respect of the Bengal Zemindars may not
arise in respect to new settlement.
" We arrived in Calcutta on the 2Oth all the better for
our short but agreeable stay at Madras, and the fresh fruit
you sent on board. I start to-morrow for Meerut and Delhi
to join Lord Canning for a week or ten days. I shall be
absent five weeks. Let me hear from you as often and at as
great length upon these to me all-absorbing topics as you
conveniently can.
" I am very anxious for the result of the Military Finance
Committee.
"J. WILSON."
To Sir Charles Wood my father writes : " A fair Income
Tax has everything now to commend it. (i) The merchants
one and all have declared publicly and to me privately that
they are all in favour of it, if generally extended. (2) The
press has done the same. (3) It would give us far more
money. (4) And above all, it would be the introduction of a
principle of taxation which, being just and general, may lay
the basis for a sounder financial system, and of a revenue to
the State flexible and adapted to emergencies. As to the
practicability of assessing it, I have no fear if we only take
powers sufficiently large and discretionary to assess Schedule
D somewhat in accordance with the habits of the people,
giving a wide margin to the Commissioners of the districts to
determine the precise plan.
" P.S. — Above all things we must take our stand upon
some intelligible principle in taxation and stick firmly to it —
vacillation and hesitation will ruin anything in this country.
310 LIFE OF WALTER B AGE HOT
They like to be ruled if you are only just and, equal in your
dealings. At the present moment they are not in the mood
to resist anything. I am glad to find that your views and my
own are perfectly in unison, so that I may securely proceed
without fearing any cross that might mar our best exertions.
If I find Lord C. as well agreed with me, I shall propose to
act at once on my return to Calcutta, as something must be
done with Harrington's bill which is now lying over referred
to a Committee."
After arriving at the Camp my father writes to Sir Charles
Wood :—
" We have had to-day a visit in Camp from Sir R. Mont-
gomery, but who has left this evening for the Punjab. We
took the opportunity of having a long discussion upon the
subject of the new taxes best adapted for India, and particu-
larly for this part. Lord Canning and I had full four hours
of it. I read to them all I had written to you upon the
subject.
" The conclusions arrived at with ' perfect unanimity '
were that the License duty is to be regarded as a permanent
tax, but the Income Tax to be passed for five years, subject
then to revision and reconsideration."
" CALCUTTA, isf February.
" MY DEAR SIR C. WOOD,
" I shall be glad to find that you adopt the sugges-
tion of sending out Mr. Durand. We shall have so much to
do with the military departments to bring them under control
and order, that I shall be thankful for the assistance of one
so well versed practically in this department — it is the chief
point when I want assistance and support. I must not, how-
ever, say this much without adding that so far as Lord Clyde
and Sir W. Mansfield are concerned, nothing could be better
than their conduct in respect to affording every assistance and
faculty in their power.
" We shall have a great labour in military affairs, in which
department there is reason for enormous deduction. I shall
be thankful if in any arrangement you make you can give me
additional military practical aid to assist in reduction. You
INDIA 311
know my views as to the necessity, if we are to have efficiency,
of having departmental responsibility."
" GOVERNMENT HOUSE,
" 4,tk February, \ 860.
" DEAR SIR W. MANSFIELD,
" I thank you very much for your letter of the 26th
ult, because it lays bare and touches what seems to me to
have been the real source of weakness and extravagance in
India — divided authority in military matters. I become daily
more of opinion that until we have one superior Military head
for the whole Indian Army for all military administration, and
one supreme Civil head, not in theory but in reality, respon-
sible for military expenditure all over India, in short till we
have our Horse Guards and our War Department for all
India, as we have in England for the whole British Empire,
it will be hopeless to make those reductions which are abso-
lutely required, and I will add until all really military forces
are under that single head."
From " The Camp, Delhi," my father wrote, 3Oth Decem-
ber, 1859: —
" MY DEAR WALTER,
"Lord Canning is so well satisfied and pleased with
the Note plan, that I am to introduce a bill into the Legislation
Council on my return to Calcutta. I have also all but settled
my scheme of taxation. I mean to have an Income Tax
proper, giving large discretion to the local officers and com-
missioners as to the mode of levying the tax under Schedule D.
Our chief plan will be to assess the whole town at an aggregate
sum, leaving the people in the town to apportion the assess-
ment among themselves subject to the approval of an appeal
to, by individuals, against what they think unfair, our own
officers or commissioners. Then all classes will be included
holders, Zemindars, public officers, from the Governor-General
down.
" This country is magnificent and full of the most marvel-
lous evidence of ancient grandeur. There is, however, no
sympathy between the Europeans and the Natives and no
312 LIFE OF WALTER B AGE HOT
bending to its increase. There is not the slightest Social com-
munication.
" I cannot tell you how much advantage I have derived
from coming up here. I shall have seen more of India in the
first two months of my residence, both of its people and its
surface, than most men do in a lifetime. Everywhere I see
the European Officers and often many of the leading Bankers
and Merchants (Natives).
"Our plan is to return and meet Lord Canning again in
Camp a week hence, to spend one day and to get down to Cal-
cutta, visiting Agra and many places on our way, about the
2Oth of January. We shall have travelled nearly 3000 miles
up and down. With love to all."
To my sisters and myself the unofficial side of life was re-
counted : —
" THE CAMP, MEERUT,
" zoth December, 1859.
" MY DEAR ELIZA, JULIA AND EMMY,
"... We left on Saturday morning the I oth, crossed
the river in the Governor-General's barge to the south side of
the Hooghly where the Station is, and found the State carriage
(like one of the Queen's on the Great Western) prepared for
us, in which we travelled in as good a style as we could upon
any English line to Runnegunge, the present limit of the line,
1 20 miles. It was a curious feeling when I had brought to
my mind the planning of this line, and particularly the Branch
to Runnegunge, which I remember deciding at Fontainville
about ten years ago.1 Thus far we passed through a flat, rich
country teeming with people and the richest of crops of every
description. A goodly country to bear taxes !
" From Runnegunge we rode into the high hilly country
which extends all the way to the banks of the Ganges, which
river we crossed at Benares ; that part of the journey occupied
sixty hours, resting only about two hours at one of the Bun-
galows each day for the one meal which we took, saving cold
1 When Secretary to the Indian Board of Control my father had done
important work by establishing railway services in many parts of India
which up to that time were difficult of access.
INDIA 313
tea, biscuits, and oranges 'as we journeyed on. The country all
the way is perfectly beautiful. The flat parts all flanked with
fine trees, tamarinds, mango groves, and every variety of large
tree, in a park-like fashion. On each hand, at less or greater
distances, we had magnificent ranges of hills rising in the most
picturesque manner, rugged and pointed in their outlines,
clothed with jungle wood to the top and resembling the steep
hills near Chepstow. One hill, almost the only bare one, was
a facsimile of Arthur's Seat at Edinburgh. We arrived at the
banks of the Ganges (follow me on the map) opposite Benares
just as the sun was rising on Tuesday morning, and as we
crossed the river I certainly never saw a more imposing City
view than the Holy City presented stretching along the banks
of the river, with its mosques and minarettes. We drove
direct to the College of Benares where we were taken in by
Mr. Griffith, the Chief Resident of the College. The Maharaja
of Benares, the wealthiest Native of the country, had heard of
my probable visit, and in order to have the first intimation had
horsemen posted round Mr. Griffith's for the whole day before.
He wished to visit us, but I postponed receiving him till my
return when I should have more leisure. He sent, however,
presents of flowers, fruits, sweetmeats, etc. We rested all the
morning with Mr. Griffith, who knew us at Westbury, his
father being the late Clergyman of Corseling ; we visited the
College where we found Dulup Sing's 1 cousin one of the
scholars, whom the people regard as the real representative of
the family.
" On Thursday morning we started by railway from Alla-
habad to Cawnpore where we remained only two hours to
dine. Our Bungalow was close to the place of the Massacre,
which we went to see with Mr. Drummond, one of the best
Officers of the District. We started 'by dark again and came
on direct for the Camp, which we reached early on Sunday
morning and found a most comfortable tent, with sitting-room
in the centre and a bedroom on each side of it prepared for
1 Dulup Sing had visited my father at Fontainville, Westbury, where
the natives of Wiltshire had viewed him and his black servants as emana-
tions of the evil one on account of their complexions.
314 LIFE OF WALTER B AGE HOT
us next to Lord Canning's. Everything in Camp, including
tents, is in duplicate, so that when you arrive morning after
morning you seem always to go into the same place again.
You find everything in the new spot just as you left it two
hours before in the last place. Everything is made as agree-
able and comfortable as possible for us. We move daily in
one of Lord Canning's carriages appropriated to our use. We
have Lord Clyde pitched close to us. We have General
Mansfield and Lady Mansfield in the Camp and a great many
public officers. Yesterday we had Sir Robert Montgomery
from the Punjab, with whom Lord Canning and I had a long
conference. My business goes on as well as I could wish.
Last night Lady Canning gave a dinner party, Lord Clyde,
General Mansfield and Lady M. and many others were
there. It was a curious sight when we came out of the tent
with Lord Clyde to come away, to find a magnificently capari-
soned elephant waiting for him to take him home. The beast
quietly kneeled down. His Lordship walked up a ladder and
seated himself on his high throne ; the animal quietly rose,
and proceeded with dignified steps on his way, Lord Clyde
being as high as the top of the second storey window of an
English house.
" This morning we made a most imposing entry into this
Station (the cradle of the Mutiny). All the country through
the whole line of march seemed turned out. In the Station
there are some thousands of troops, English and Seikh, all
paraded, and the whole scene was most striking. The Camp
alone consists of 20,000 persons of all classes who move every
day. You can conceive the space of ground which the whole
streets of tents cover. The country is everywhere extremely
quiet, the people feel themselves completely beaten, are
annoyed at their folly and failure, and more than ever look
with astonishment upon British courage, intrepidity, and
power. They seem eager only that the past shall be forgotten.
Their leaders are all dead or taken. The prestige of England
never stood higher. They are ready to submit to anything
and to pay any taxes we impose ; they are only astonished at
our generosity and leniency after the deep offence we have
INDIA 315
received. Lord Canning's progress through the country has
had the best effect. I am glad I have come to the Camp. I
could not have learned so much in any other way. It is likely
I shall go from Delhi to Lahore and Umritza in the Punjab
and get back to Calcutta about the i8th of January. We
shall stay longer at the places on our way back.
" P.S. — The weather is brilliant, sunny, and cold."
On 1 8th February my father brought forward his Budget
in the Legislative Council at Calcutta. Bagehot wrote in the
Economist of 24th March : "Mr. Wilson showed that the real
Indian deficit was £4,060,809, and including home charges,
was £9,016,909. He had, then, more than a £9,000,000
deficit to cover. We extract from the Bombay Gazette the
following : ' On Saturday, 1 8th February, Mr. Wilson rose in
his place in the Legislative Council to make the statement
about which England and India have been vainly speculating
for the last six months. The demand for tickets to be present
on the occasion seems to have been quite unprecedented in
Calcutta, and, indeed, the people of the metropolis are now
beginning to enjoy something of the excitement of Parlia-
mentary life.' "
My father wrote to Bagehot : —
" GOVERNMENT HOUSE,
"CALCUTTA, 22nd February, 1860.
" MY DEAR WALTER,
"They yield. I brought forward my Budget on
Saturday. I cannot say with much doubt of its success, but
it was certainly rather audacious. For six months they had
been discussing whether they should have an Income Tax or
a License Tax, or a Tobacco Duty, and I have given them all
three, and so far from grumbling, all parties are rather vieing
with each other in its support. The Englishman, the rabid
opponent of Government, is now the loudest in approval. The
Friend of India, you will see, is for him, very complimentary,
and all the other papers approve ; no one opposes. Even
the Bengal Zemindars, who have seen their pretensions to ex-
emption swept away for ever, approve. All these bills will
pass without opposition. I also begin to see my way very
3i 6 LIFE OF WALTER B AGE HOT
clear to some very large reductions. The prosperity of the
country is great, and its repose and tranquillity beyond prece-
dent. The heavy hand of power shown during the Mutiny,
and the great moderation pursued since, have effectually
calmed everything. I shall be curious to see how the English
papers will pick me to pieces.
" You must deal with my speech and my policy as you think
best, without thinking of me at all. At this distance I may be
treated as a stranger."
" 2yd February, 1860.
" I wrote to you yesterday with copies of my speech. I
write to-day to explain what I find out is the real source of
the enthusiasm, for no other word would express the fact,
with which my schemes have been received. Yesterday
some of the chief merchants called upon me and said, ' Now,
Sir, we know what to be about. We have never seen such
heart in the trade of Calcutta before. We never had any
knowledge before, and therefore we could not have confidence.
When we contemplated transactions for the future we always
felt in a terror that some sudden unforeseen financial disaster
would upset us by making a light moving market. Now we
see our way clear upon public matters as we do upon our own.
We would gladly have paid double what you take for such a
boon.' This is their language and one can understand it.
" They added too, ' The policy inaugurated holds out to us
indefinite extension of trade, especially as we see the firm
hand with which the Government will be carried on'."
In the Economist of 3 1st March, Bagehot wrote a leader of
five columns on the Indian Budget, explaining in detail the
policy my father was inaugurating. He ended his article by
the following paragraph : " Such is the scheme which Mr.
Wilson has proposed for remedying the financial difficulties
of India ; and, though the Economist cannot but be suspected
of partiality on the subject, we think that we run no risk in
saying that in all its main provisions it will be as acceptable
to the public of England as we know it has been to that of
Calcutta ". In the same number of the Economist he published
an extract, four columns in length, from my father's speech on
INDIA 317
the Budget entitled " Mr. Wilson's Impressions of the Pro-
ductiveness of India," and in the issue of 7th April Bagehot
wrote an article, " Mr. Wilson's Plan for a Paper Currency in
India," and another extract from the Budget Speech, "Mr.
Wilson on the Amount of the Indian Deficit : its real cause
and its true cure ". On 4th April Bagehot wrote a long
article, "The Income Tax in England and in India," and in
the next number an extract from my father's speech on the
Currency, delivered at Calcutta, 3rd March, headed, " Mr.
Wilson's Remarks on a Gold Currency for India ".
"MR. WILSON'S IMPRESSIONS OF THE PRODUCTIVENESS OF
INDIA.
(The Economist, $ist March, 1860.)
" Sir, I am fearful of wearying the Council with all these
details, but I trust you will bear with me. We have a grave
conjunction of affairs to deal with. I think you will already
begin to perceive that the evil is deeper and broader than at
first it appeared. I think you will begin to see that our task
will be heavier, and must extend to great questions of ad-
ministrative reform, as well as to immediate questions of
finance. You will, therefore, I am sure, pardon me if I feel
it to be my duty, to the best of my ability, to unbare before
you the whole extent of the evils as they present themselves
to my mind. Sir, I sincerely trust that in the free observa-
tions which I feel compelled in the performance of my duty
to make I shall be understood not to reflect unfavourably
either upon any individual or upon any class. It is to the
system, and the system alone, that I refer. Nay, I will say
more. It has been a matter of surprise to me that, with so
defective a system, greater evils have not arisen, and that they
have not I attribute only to individual zeal and care."
" MR. WILSON ON THE AMOUNT OF THE INDIAN DEFICIT :
ITS REAL CAUSE AND ITS REAL CURE.
(The Economist, ?th April, 1860.)
" But, Sir, there is one point upon which I must remark.
Until we have one central point of responsible control of Army
318 LIFE OF W 'ALTER B AGE HOT
finances, as of all others, established, it will be in vain to ex-
pect great reduction. Our first course must be to consider
carefully what force is sufficient, and not more than sufficient.
Our next point must be to have carefully revised estimates,
what is here improperly called a Budget System, for military
and all other charges, submitted to the Supreme Government
annually, as they are in England to Parliament, to sanction
only what is necessary, and strictly to keep every province
and every department within their limits. Till you have this
central financial and revenue control, it is in vain to look for
economy ; — when you have it, you may safely give much
greater executive responsibility to local authority. Sir, in
England there is more local government than in any country
in the world ; but there is no country where the central
authority and control of the Government itself is so strong.
And, I will add, that it will be in vain that we make improve-
ments and reforms in our finances if these administrative re-
forms do not take place. You must rely upon a sound system
if you will have permanency, and not upon any individual,
especially in a country where individuals change so rapidly.
Sir, this is nothing new. You have had Finance Commissions
over and over again. What have they done? In looking
over the archives of the i Government of India, I must say, that
the minutes left on record of no Governor-General have struck
me with more force than those of Lord Ellenborough, and
they have induced me to regret that his stay in India had not
been longer. That noble Lord is a distinguished member of
a great party, always opposed to that with which I have had
the honour of acting, and my testimony may therefore be re-
garded as impartial. Sir, that noble Lord saw and understood
the evil of which I speak : he warned the Court of Directors
of it. On the 7th of August, 1 842, he wrote as follows : —
" ' But I cannot hold from the Honourable Court the ex-
pression of my decided and long-formed opinion, that what-
ever diminution may be made by my exertions in the amount
of expenditure will only be of a temporary character, without
an entire change in the financial department, and some very
material modification of the system of carrying on the Govern-
INDIA 319
ment. There is now no one officer charged with the duty of
viewing the expenditure of the State as a whole, and of con-
sidering every proposed or existing item of charge, not by it-
self only, but with reference to the total charge upon the
revenue.
" ' Without this concentration of duty and authority in a
really responsible officer, I have no hope of giving permanence
to the influence of economical principles in the financial ad-
ministration of India, or of even dealing satisfactorily with the
details of expenditure.' "
On 9th May, Walter writes to my sister from London : —
" I have read Sir C. Trevelyan. He says your father will
cause a rebellion and that all his laws are unnecessary. Mr.
Lowe thinks your father's Budget masterly ".
The following letters and extract from the Economist,
written by Bagehot, explain the disastrous course Sir Charles
Trevelyan had thought fit to take respecting the measures of
the Central Government of India : —
" SIR CHARLES TREVELYAN'S MINUTE ON MR. WILSON'S
BUDGET.
(The Economist, 1 2th May, 1860.)
" Sir Charles Trevelyan has entered on the Minutes of the
Madras Presidency an elaborate protest against Mr. Wilson's
scheme of finance. We greatly lament the publication of this
document in India, and are apprehensive of its consequences.
We scarcely know how the natives of India are to be governed,
if one of their rulers tells them they ought not to be taxed,
and the rest of their rulers tell them they shallbe taxed. But
in this country it is very important that we should hear all that
can be said against Mr. Wilson's plans as well as all that can
be said for them, and Sir Charles Trevelyan's recall does not
render it the less necessary that we should examine fully the
nature of his objections. Indian finance is a very difficult sub-
ject, and though the minute of Sir Charles Trevelyan is rather
too like a political pamphlet, we may overlook the defects of its
form. We believe the publication of it will tend to strengthen
the confidence which is at present felt in the soundness of Mr.
320 LIFE OF WALTER B AGE HOT
Wilson's plans. On a subject so vast and so little investi-
gated as Indian finance, we could not be sure that there were
not some considerations which we had wholly overlooked. We
have now heard everything which can be said against Mr.
Wilson's scheme by a very competent and seemingly not reluc-
tant critic ; if he has discovered no conclusive objection to
them, it is very unlikely that any such objection can be found.
" It will be remembered that Mr. Wilson found the deficit
in India larger than he expected. It was £9,000,000 last
year, and will probably be £6,500,000 this year. To meet
this formidable deficit he imposed three taxes — an income tax,
a licence tax, and a tobacco tax. Sir Charles's criticism on
these taxes is distinct enough. He says, first, that they are
unjust as respects a great part of India ; secondly, that they
are unnecessary ; lastly, that they will cause a rebellion. We
will take these objections one after another. . . .
" Sir C. Trevelyan thinks there is danger in the course Mr.
Wilson has taken. But is there not greater danger in his own
course ? He has told the natives of Madras that new taxes
which are unjust and unnecessary are about to be levied upon
them. He has used his authority as local Governor to spread
this doctrine. He has hinted that he expects the natives will
rebel. Who will be to blame if they do rebel ? Surely the
ruler who was instructed with an authority over 30,000,000
of people, and who incited them to resistance."
My father writes on 4th July, 1860 : —
"DEAR WALTER,
" With regard to the great Madras revolt, I have
probably been the calmest spectator either here or at home.
From the first I anticipated trouble from him and warned my
colleagues of the danger, and our confidential despatch of the
9th of April was written by me in consequence of my appre-
hensions. But it was all in vain. I expected trouble from him,
but never that he would proceed to such extremities.
"As soon as we received his minute our line was taken at
once, I saw it would never do to make any reply to him. . . .
So we replied to his minute that we must decline any contro-
INDIA 321
versy, but that our observations would be made to the
Secretary of State. And when I found that he published it
even before it was in our hands, I came at once to the con-
clusion that a firm and decisive front was our policy, and if
accompanied by great temperance and moderation, I felt quite
confident all would come right. Our despatches to the
Secretary of State, up to one which goes by this mail, will, I
believe, do more to reveal the real character of Indian Finance
than all that has been written the last four years. I hope they
will all be presented to Parliament. . . .
" But much as I was prepared for trouble from him, and
easily as I took it when it came, I own it was very annoying.
Up to the moment there was not a dissenting voice. The
measures were received with acclamation. But upon the whole
I doubt if the ordeal of discussion to which they have now been
exposed will not be without its advantage. I cannot say
that I feel less practically secure than I did before. What we
have to do is to show no hesitation. Firmness and justice are
the only policy for India. No vacillation or you are gone ;
they like to be governed, and respect an iron hand, if it be but
equal and just. I have, I think, more confidence than ever
that the taxes will be established and collected, and without
disturbance ; but the task is still an enormous one.
" However, you have no idea of the increased capacity of
the mind for undertaking a special service of this kind when
removed to a new scene of action and when one throws off
all the cares and engagements, less or more trivial, by which
one is surrounded in ordinary life, and throws one's whole soul
into such special service, and particularly when one feels as-
sured of having the power to carry it out. I cannot tell you
with what ease one determines the largest and gravest question
here compared with in England, and I am certain that the
more one can exercise real power, there is by far the greater
tendency to moderation, care and prudence.
" My colleagues are in every respect what I could wish.
Lord Canning has a very competent mind, is open to conviction
whatever his views may have been at first. Sir James Outram
is a man pf the highest honour, with the least self-seeking I
21
322 LIFE OF WALTER B AGE HOT
have ever seen in any man ; and Sir B. Frere is one of the most
competent, clear-headed, original-thinking, and amiable men
I ever knew. We have not had an approach to a disagreeable
word since my arrival. If we have differed, friendly discussion
has brought it right.
"About the Economist and your threatened opposition.
I am very glad to see that in every way it holds its own so
well. Its writing is certainly as a whole very good and its
views sound. One number only I complained of because it
consisted in a great measure of an extract from my speech
and another from my minute. The more I see of life, and
public life, the less I like to see my name prominent in docu-
ments. Throughout the late contest I never put anything in
the shape of a minute, but always in the form of a despatch
from the whole Government. It removes that unhappy
personal character to all public proceedings which Trevelyan
could not resist. So pray say nothing, and admit nothing
that looks like a personal puff or undue pushing forward of
me. The way you have treated the Trevelyan matter was
fair, reasonable and dignified."
To my eldest sister my father wrote from Barrackpore : —
, 1860.
" It was quite cheerful to have but half a sheet from you
by the last Mail. It was very thoughtful to notice my birth-
day which is more than I did here. I shall be very sorry to
deprive you of Julia and Emmy, but still I am selfish enough
to hope that circumstances will combine to enable them to
come.
" I suppose you have finished your London visit long ere
this and are again settled at Clevedon. I hope you enjoyed
it. As you say I don't think the Trevelyan affair has done
me any harm, but the contrary in England ; but there is no-
doubt it has given us a great shock among the natives here.
Up to the time of those minutes appearing, all Europeans showed
a combined and united front, and that had a great effect upon
the natives. Had that not been disturbed they would never
have ventured even to think of opposition. As it is>
INDIA 323
moral power and restraint has been removed and what was
like a charm has been broken. Certainly all that could have
been done to counteract the effect has been done. On the
instant here, we declared our undiminished determination to
proceed with our plans, and the prompt recall of Trevelyan
gave all the support to that determination we could have
desired. For a bad job the best has been made of it, but the
task is heavy and I fear a long one. Write to me frequently, it
is a great pleasure to receive your letters. I cannot write often.
" Remember me to the good people at Langport and to
Sir Arthur and other old friends.
" With love to you all, believe me,
" Always your affectionate Papa,
"JAMES WILSON."
Walter wrote to my sister from London on 2nd August :
"They say Sir Charles Trevelyan is on board the Calcutta
mail ; that he would take command, and lost it ".
In his memoir of my father Bagehot writes : —
" The reception of Mr. Wilson's Budget was universally
favourable until the publication of the minute of Sir C.
Trevelyan, which, as was inevitable, produced a serious re-
action. Heavy taxation can never be very pleasant, and in
the Presidency of Madras Sir Charles gave the sanction of
the Government — of the highest authority the people saw — to
the hope that they would not be taxed. The prompt recall
of Sir Charles, however, did much to convince the natives of
the firm determination of the English Government, and Mr.
Wilson hoped that the ordeal of criticism through which his
measures had to pass would ultimately be favourable to them.
It certainly secured them from the accusation of being pre-
pared in haste, but it purchased this benefit at the loss to the
public of much precious time, and to Mr. Wilson of precious
health. Of the substance of this minute it is sufficient to say
that its fundamental theory, that additional taxation of any
sort was unnecessary in India, has scarcely been believed by
any one except its author."
From Barrack pore my father writes : —
21*
324 LIFE OF WALTER BAGEHOT
" \gthjuly, 1860.
" MY DEAR WALTER,
" I have now got a Military Finance Commission in
full swing ; a Civil Finance Commission also going. I am
re-organising the Finance Pay and Accountant General's
Departments in order to get all the advantage of the English
System of Estimates, Pay Office and Audit ; and this with as
little disturbance of existing plans as possible, — the latter is a
point I have specially aimed at. On the whole and almost
without an exception I have willing allies in all the existing
offices. No attempt that I see is anywhere made to thwart
or impede.
" You can well understand then, how full my hands are,
if to all these you add the new currency arrangements, and
you will not then wonder that my health has rendered it
necessary to come down here for a day or two to get some
fresh air."
The following is the last letter my father wrote to Bagehot.
By the same mail — some unconscious prophetic instinct seems
to have been at work — he wrote to each of my sisters and
myself separately, and in a specially affectionate tone. In all
he expressed the desire he felt that my sister Julia and I
should be with him.
" MY DEAR WALTER,
" We have been in great anxiety for the last fortnight
for pending famine in the N.W.P., but at the last moment
rain has come and has just saved us. We had already begun
our preliminary preparations to meet it. As it is the
crops may not be good and trade may still be affected by
high prices.
" I have had rather a bad attack with the hot damp rain
and tremendous work ; but I am getting on well, and with my
measures, and am the better for having been a week at
Barrackpore. Capital accounts from the Nilgiris." (My
mother had been sent there for reasons of health.) " I hope
Julia and Emmy will come. I know nothing yet. My Income
Tax is now law and will begin collection on salaries and
dividends next week. I managed to get it through the
INDIA 325
L.C. without a single division and without giving up one
point of importance.
"My Licence Bill will be finished in a few days and the
Currency Bill has gone as far as I want it till October. I
have every reason to be well satisfied and am very happy now
that the famine is no longer imminent.
" With love to you all,
" Yours always,
" JAMES WILSON."
On nth August a calamity in every sense awful had be-
fallen us : yet for four weeks, all unconscious of our loss, we
had been passing happy days at The Arches, following our
usual pursuits and receiving and answering Indian letters.
In the Diary on I2th September is noted the following:
" Walter stayed at home to write for the Economist. At one
o'clock we saw Papa's death in the Times. Julia found it
and called me and we both ran to Walter's study."
From my room I had heard a cry and confused sounds of
voices and I too ran to Walter's study. The moments there,
and those before and after, can never be forgotten. Then
came a blank. The clock — all marking of time — stopped.
When the hands began to move again they seemed to be
moving on another dial.
The following message had been received at the Indian
Office on the I ith, and was forwarded to us, but did not reach
The Arches till I3th September: —
" ALEXANDRIA, <\th September. — A message received from
Suez sent by order of the Governor-General of India informs
me that the Right Hon. James Wilson died on Saturday
evening at 7 o'clock. He was interred on Sunday evening.
Fifteen minute guns were fired from Fort William. — R.
COLQUEHOUN."
Walter Bagehot at once wrote to his father.
" Hour after hour," Mr. Bagehot wrote in answer, " makes
me feel more and more sad and my heart aches for you all
more than I can describe. The loss of such a parent, and
such a man is not easily borne, nor can its extent be at once
326 LIFE OF WALTER B AGE HOT
comprehended. I think of you as a fellow-sufferer quite with
his own children. Your affection for him I know, and his for
you was always shown in a way not to be mistaken, and the
relation of father and son seemed as complete as it could be.
Your loss I cannot attempt to estimate. I will come to you
whenever you wish. I feel almost that we have no right to
intrude on sorrow so deep and trying."
No words could prove better the modesty and unselfish-
ness of Mr. Bagehot's character. He was willing generously
to share with another the tie which existed between him-
self and the son who had ever been his " greatest treasure ".
Mr. and Mrs. Bagehot came to The Arches on i/th September.
They were the first friends we saw.
Letters of sympathy poured in — mostly addressed to
Bagehot — from relations, friends, and my father's political
colleagues, one and all expressing the belief that my father's
death was a national calamity. On the day we heard of it
Mr. Hutton wrote to Bagehot : —
" Is this terrible thing true ! I cannot bear to think it.
I see no telegraphic despatch from India and have very faint
hopes it may be false. I feel, and always felt, the warmest
regard for Mr. Wilson and am quite stunned." Again he
writes : " It struck me with horror to hear that Miss Wilson
learned it in that way. It was bad enough for a man friend.
God knows how I feel for them all and for you. . . . The
whole thing is terrible beyond expression, the more so that I
cannot reconcile the idea of death with Mr. Wilson in any way."
Later he writes to Bagehot : " All I implore of you is to
let some worthy notice be taken of his life and character in
the Economist, and soon, before the warmth of public sentiment
is quite cooled concerning his sad end. If you delay long
this will be so in the outer world. And 1 feel very strongly
that something is due to him in his own paper, as I am sure
you will do.
"That paragraph in the Times haunts me still. I don't
know that I can explain why the whole thing weighs on me
so much like griefs which have cut far deeper. I think you
are mistaken in fancying you estimated him intellectually
INDIA 327
more highly than I did. My very incapacity to deal with his
subjects in the same fashion at all, joined to great enough
appreciation of the subjects to make me see how powerfully they
were dealt with, made his intellect to me most fascinating.
I have often on Friday nights walked down to the very end of
Pall Mall with him at near three in the morning, merely to
get half an hour's more conversation."
On 1 7th September Mr. Hutton writes : —
" MY DEAR BAGEHOT,
" It occurred to me on Friday that you might be
able to write a Memoir of Mr. Wilson as a special supplement.
It would be very good. I did not think it inconsistent with
having a briefer notice during the first excitement of public
feeling. Greg's gave no idea of the massive simplicity and
geniality of his social character and tastes, which in a great
financier was exceedingly remarkable. Thorough enjoyment
of all the more genial sides of life distinguished him, I should
think, from Peel and Lewis and Lord Overstone and all those
whose interests came nearest to his."
Mr. Greg wrote to Bagehot on I3th September: "I have
scarcely been able to realise the thing. Wilson was the last
man in the world with whom one could connect the idea of
death. Of all possible calamities it was about the only one I had
never dreamed of. I believe in my heart the country could
not have sustained a greater loss — and as for his family — ! "
Truly the loss was irreparable to us, and during the many
years that have passed since that terribly memorable I2th
September, 1860, more and more has it been felt to be so.
Nevertheless how unutterably sadder and more difficult our
lives must have been had not Walter Bagehot been one of us.
So completely one with us did we feel him to be, so naturally
and unobtrusively did he at once take my father's place in
managing all our family affairs and in settling all matters
great and small in which our interests were concerned that
perhaps, at the time, we hardly realised how much of the great
blank he filled, how much more altered our family life would
have been without his help.
328 LIFE OF WALTER B AGE HOT
" Let us pull together in all things," he wrote about that
time to one of the family.
The following extracts from letters written to William
Halsey in a measure reveal the effect produced on Bagehot by
the news of my father's death.
" CLEVEDON,
" 2$th September, 1860.
" MY DEAR WILLIAM,
" As you anticipated, long before your last letter we
had the awful intelligence of Mr. Wilson's death. It was in
the strictest sense awful news — at least to me. In India
where you are daily and hourly familiar with such sudden
calamities I have no doubt that you are able to realise the
uncertainty of human life, but I never realised it at all.
Especially in Mr. Wilson's case. I never really contemplated
the contingency of his death. He had so much life, vigour,
energy, that it was and even still is — peculiarly difficult to me
to connect him with that idea. I have never felt the shock
of any event so much. I hope we are well here, — that is as
well as we could reasonably expect. Julia saw her father's
death in the paper notwithstanding the telegram which you
hoped would have prevented it. It was a terrible scene for
the time."
A fortnight later Bagehot wrote : —
"I suffered deeply from Mr. Wilson's death — more than I
could have supposed possible. I had such extreme pleasure
in talking to him on his favourite subjects before he went to
India, and since he went away, from writing on the same
subjects in the Economist where he used to write, that I had
a constant habit of referring to his mind and keeping up a
sort of mental dialogue with him ; and for several days I was
almost bewildered at feeling he was gone. Even now,
though I have known of his death almost a fortnight, I am to
some extent1
1 The Times correspondent at Calcutta wrote on 8th August, speaking
of the circumstances that preceded my father's death. "About six days
ago, the Calcutta public was startled by the news that the Chancellor of
the Exchequer, after struggling against and vanquishing several minor
illnesses, was at last confined to his bed by a very severe attack of dysentery.
It is difficult to exaggerate the effect which this intelligence produced on
INDIA 329
The Economist, bordered with black, appeared on 1 5th
September. Bagehot had decided to write a Memoir as a
supplement to a future number, therefore wrote no article
himself in that number, but quoted the Leader from the
Times.
" THE DEATH OF THE RIGHT HONOURABLE JAMES WILSON.
" The conductors of this journal do not feel that they can
at present do more than record this mournful event in the
words of others. It has come too suddenly upon them. If
they should themselves say anything on the subject, it must
be hereafter and deliberately."
(From the "Times" of i^th September}.
" Scarcely has the grave closed over Sir Henry Ward and
all the hopes and aspirations connected with his appointment
to the Government of Madras, when we are called upon to
record the loss of a man who filled the most prominent situa-
tion in India, and to whom we, at least — and, we believe, the
great majority of the community in England and in our
Eastern Empire, — looked as the regenerator of the finances of
India. Mr. Wilson has sunk under the combined effects of a
climate to which his constitution was unsuited, and the cares
and anxieties of a position of almost unexampled difficulty,
labour, and responsibility. He had just life enough given
the public mind. Every one seemed suddenly to appreciate the fact that
all chance of financial regeneration was bound up in the life of Mr. Wilson ;
that the removal of his guiding hand from the rein would be the signal for
retrogression into that slough of despond from which we are but now
beginning to emerge. It flashed suddenly across the minds of men that
Mr. Wilson was not only the directing agent of the new taxes, but the
centre and vivifying spirit of all the Committees which are now sitting to
bring about administrative reforms. He had made himself a necessity
for India ; it seemed impossible that, when yet only one of his measures —
the Income Tax — had been matured and brought into action, he should
be compelled to leave the scene of his labours. These thoughts, com-
bined with the knowledge that his illness had been brought about by
intense and unremitting labour in a most trying climate, caused a sensation
which, as I said before, it would be difficult to exaggerate. Inquiries
were constant, and came from all classes of the Community ; even the
natives shared in the general feeling of regret."
330 LIFE OF WALTER B AGE HOT
him to carry through the Indian Legislature his great scheme
for remodelling the taxation of the country. The complement
to that scheme, the reorganisation of the revenue department,
the establishment of an efficient central check on expenditure,
— we fear he had not time to realise. With him is gone down
to the grave a vast amount of knowledge and experience of
the principles and details of all subjects connected with finance,
together with an acquaintance with the affairs of India sufficient
to make that knowledge thoroughly applicable and available.
"Mr. Wilson suffered severely from the effects of the
Indian climate, and was advised to seek for health in a Hill
Station, but he felt the arduous nature of the duty he had
undertaken too strongly to allow any personal consideration
whatever to interfere with it To that sense of duty he has
sacrificed his valuable life.
"We can find men to fill the Government of Madras in whose
ability to discharge its duties with prudence and vigour we
can feel every confidence, but we look in vain for the man
whom we should place in the situation which by the consent
of all Mr. Wilson was thoroughly competent to fill. . . . No
worthier panegyric can be passed on the public servant we
have lost than this, — that he has gone, and left no successor."
Sir Charles Wood kindly forwarded to us a private letter
Lord Canning had written him, describing the last interview
he had with my father.
" The sad news of poor Wilson's death will have reached
you by telegraph. It was rather sudden at the end, for he
rallied a little after I closed my last letter (gth August), and
some about him still had hope, but on the following day he
sank rapidly and all was over. I saw him on the 9th. It
appeared to me then that death was in his face ; but he was
not very weak. He talked chiefly about some private arrange-
ments, and then a little about public matters — the Currency
Bill, the Military Finance Committee, etc. I was by his bed-
side for a quarter of an hour, at the end of which he got
exhausted. He said he knew how it must end, and I could
say no more in dispute of this, than that his Doctor had told
INDIA 331
-
me in the morning that a return of strength might show itself
in the course of the next two days, and that if so, his life
might still be safe. He was stronger the next day, but it was
only for a few hours. A bad night followed and on the nth
he died.
" I was much struck by the tone in which he spoke of
public matters — not a word of self — or of his own name or
share in the work in hand, and yet with great hopefulness of
the success of most of the machinery which he has set at work.
It was very touching."
The official announcement of my father's death was also
forwarded to us.
" To THE RIGHT HONOURABLE SIR CHARLES WOOD, BART.,
G.C.B., SECRETARY OF STATE FOR INDIA.
" SIR, the painful task is imposed upon us of announcing
to Her Majesty's Government the death of our colleague, the
Right Honourable James Wilson.
" 2. This lamentable event took place on the evening of
Saturday, the 1 1 th, after an illness of a few days.
"3. We enclose a copy of the notification by which we
yesterday communicated the mournful intelligence to the
public. The funeral took place at the time mentioned in the
notification ; and the great respect in which our lamented
colleague was held was evinced by a very large attendance of
the general community, in addition to the public officers, civil
and military.
"4. We are unable adequately to express our sense of the
great loss which the public interests have sustained in Mr.
Wilson's death. We do not doubt, however, that this will be
as fully appreciated by Her Majesty's Government as it is by
ourselves, and as we have every reason to believe it will be by
the community generally throughout India.
" 5. But we should not satisfy our feelings in communicat-
ing this sad occurrence to Her Majesty's Government, if we
did not state our belief that the fatal disease which has re-
moved Mr. Wilson from amongst us was in a degree the
consequence of his laborious application to the duties of his
332 LIFE OF WALTER B AGE HOT
high position, and of his conscientious determination not to
cease from the prosecution of the important measures of which
he had charge until their success was ensured. Actuated by
a self-denying devotion to the objects for which he came out
to this country, Mr. Wilson continued to labour indefatigably
long after the general state of his health had become such as
to cause anxiety to the physician who attended him, and it was
within a few days only after the Income Tax had become law,
and when, at the earnest request of his medical adviser, he
was preparing to remove from Calcutta for the remainder of
the rainy season, that he was seized with the illness that has
carried him off.
" 6. It is our sincere conviction that this eminent public
servant sacrificed his life in the discharge of his duty.
" We have, etc.
" CANNING.
" H. B. E. FRERE.
" C. BEADON.
" FORT WILLIAM,
August, 1860."
Bagehot wrote in the Memoir : " The mourning in Calcutta
was more universal than had ever been remembered. He had
not been long in India, but while he had been there he filled
a conspicuous and great part : he had done so much that there
were necessarily doubts in the minds of some as to the ex-
pediency of part of it. No such doubts, however, were thought
of now. ' That he should have come out to die here ! ' —
' That he should have left a great English career for this ! '
were the phrases in every one's mouth. The funeral was the
largest ever known in Calcutta. It was attended by almost
the whole population, from the Governor-General downwards,
and not a single voice, on any ground whatever, dissented from
the general grief."
In the pages of the Economist of 2Oth October Bagehot
inserted the tribute Sir Bartle Frere paid my father in a speech
delivered to the Legislative Council at Calcutta : —
" It had pleased Providence to take him from among us,
INDIA 333
and he [Sir Bartle Frere] believed there was not throughout
India a single right-minded Englishman who did not feel his
death as a personal as well as a national loss. He was sure
that, when the intelligence of this melancholy event reached
England, Mr. Wilson's loss would be mourned in the same
manner as was that of Neil, of Havelock, of Nicholson, and
of Peel. What Mr. Wilson's loss would be to the Government,
those only who had laboured with him could understand. . . .
" It was not only that we had experience of his large
statesman-like views and great abilities in the transaction of
every branch of public business, but we felt the same confi-
dence in his opinions on every subject connected with finance
which was accorded to him by men of every party at home.
He was a master in his craft, and no other man could possibly
succeed in gaining that amount of public confidence for his
judgment on all financial matters which Mr. Wilson so justly
possessed."
In Sir Richard Temple's record of his Indian experiences l
is found a full account of my father's work in India. He was
on my father's personal staff in addition to being the ordinary
financial secretariat of the Government.
" In February, 1 860, Mr. Wilson produced his financial
Budget before the Legislative Council at Calcutta, carefully
explaining that his proposals had the concurrence of his col-
leagues and the approval of Lord Canning. His speech on
that occasion was the most able and eloquent statement that
had ever up to that time been made orally in India. Remark-
able minutes and reports had been frequent in India, but not
speeches ; and since that day the proceedings of the Indian
Legislature have often been animated by oratory. But the
novelty of Wilson's oratorical effort, enlivening so grave a sub-
ject as finance, charmed as well as astonished both those who
heard the statement and those who read the verbatim report
of it. The warmth, confidence, and enthusiasm of his words,
also the solidity of his arguments founded on a financial ex-
1 Men and Events of My Time in India, by Sir Richard Temple,
Bart., G. C.S.I., C.I.E., D.C.L., late Finance Minister of India ; Lieutenant^
Governor of Bengal, and Governor of Bombay.
334 LIFE OF WALTER B AGE HOT
perience far larger than that possessed by any one in India
seemed to take, as it were, the public mind by storm. All
men believed that the State, having passed successfully through
its political and military trials, was drifting into another
danger, which, if less pressing, was more abiding, namely,
that of certain disorder and possible disaster financially. As
matters grew worse a state of urgency appeared to be approach-
ing ; the time was full, and, in public estimation, here was
Wilson, the man to cope with it ...
" Men felt that some remedy must be applied, and were
prepared to support the man who proposed a definite policy.
The European members of the community both official and
non-official were, indeed, jealous of being ' taxed without re-
presentation,' that is, taxed under a Government which had
no representative institutions. Still they loyally accepted a
necessity which had been proved to their satisfaction, and
patriotically acquiesced in the sacrifices demanded from them.
The Anglo-Indian newspaper Press strongly and cordially sup-
ported the Budget The natives generally were silent ; and
the organs of native opinion seemed to yield to the current of
approbation which had set in.
" Thus it happened that Wilson was at the outset greeted
with a chorus of public approval. Though he relied much on
the spirit and patriotism of his countrymen in India, he was
agreeably surprised at the more than favourable reception ac-
corded to his Budget statement. And as congratulations con-
tinued to pour in from many quarters, he used to declare
himself to be 'the most fortunate of tax-gatherers'. To
complete his contentment, he received friendly support from
the then Secretary of State, Sir Charles Wood (afterwards
Lord Halifax).
" Soon, however, clouds began to rise on this clear horizon,
as was indeed to be expected by all who knew the changeable-
ness of the ' popularis aura '. It transpired that one important
functionary, Sir Charles Trevelyan, Governor of Madras, dis-
approved the Budget, describing its main provisions as ' three
tremendous taxes'. He was then in full swing of his ad-
ministration, and was deemed to be one of the most competent
INDIA 335
and energetic Governors that had ever ruled over the Madras
Presidency. His unfavourable view in respect to the Budget,
besides exercising great influence with his colleagues at Madras
and his principal officers, affected public opinion throughout
Southern India. He then allowed the local newspapers to
publish the protest which he had deemed it his duty to record
against the proposed taxation. This publication caused ex-
citement at Calcutta and other centres of opinion in India,
and was thought to constitute an official collision between the
Government of Madras and the Supreme Government. Lord
Canning, who was then absent in Northern India, returned to
Calcutta, in order that he might better arrange measures for
vindicating his authority. Sir Charles Trevelyan shortly left
Madras, having been recalled by the Government in England.
>»
Later my father " produced," writes Sir R. Temple, " be-
fore the Legislative Council his measure for a Government
paper currency, to which great importance was attached.
His speech on that occasion was so lucid as to invest with
much interest a subject not ordinarily attractive. Being the
first statement of that kind made in India, it was received with
admiring attention. ..."
Bagehot had written in the Economist > 25th February, 1 860 :
"There is no country in which the admitted advantages of a
paper currency would be of so great importance as in India.
In that country itself enormous quantities of silver are con-
tinually being transferred from one place to another, both for
the purposes of trade and for the purposes of revenue. This
not only entails upon India a vast expense, and absorbs much
capital which it would be more wise to employ productively,
but it requires that the Government shall keep continually at
hand considerable bodies of troops for the purpose of protect-
ing the remittance of its money from one part of the country
to another.
" It is now generally, though not universally, agreed that, in
conformity with the recommendation of Mr. Wilson, the paper
currency which is to be issued in India should be a Govern-
ment currency both in reality and name.. We showed a short
336 LIFE OF WALTER B AGE HOT
time since that on every account it was most advisable that
this course should be adopted."
"... Mr. Wilson," Sir Richard Temple continues, " prob-
ably learnt more of the country in a very short time than any
person who ever landed on its shores ; and his general in-
formation extended daily. His hopes of success in his
financial policy were as high as his sense of the gravity and
difficulty of his task. As weeks and months wore on, bringing
with them their load of toil, trouble and anxiety, his character
showed itself in a stronger light. Despite the depression
from great heat, to which he had not been accustomed, his
spirits were buoyant, and disposition elastic, while his bearing
was genial and animated. His temper, though not destitute
of warmth and impetuosity in pursuit of great objects, was
yet ready and equable under disappointments. Though de-
sirous of entering into the views of his opponents, he was yet
very self-reliant, never doubting that if his plans were defeated
for a time he would surely rectify them, and that they would
come right in the end if only his eye should be upon them
and his hand remain at the helm. He kept before his im-
agination a goal from which his thoughts were never diverted ;
if he could not win it at once he would be content with some
progress, and pause with the full intention of starting again
some day from the point where he had then stopped. His
mind was fertile in expedients and whenever obstacles
threatened him with failure he would forthwith contrive
remedies in the conviction that his policy was good for the
public interests and must ultimately prevail.
" At first his illness excited no alarm in his family or among
the public, and the general impression regarding his vigour
and vitality remained undisturbed. He continued to read
official papers, giving general attention to public affairs with-
out performing much actual business. But he was soon obliged
to accede to the request of his physician, Dr. Alexander
Macrae, of Calcutta, that he should call in a second medical
adviser, and cease reading or thinking ; then warnings of
danger began to be whispered abroad. As the dysentery
developed more and more of its formidable symptoms day
INDIA 337
after day, he asked for a categorical statement of his condi-
tion from Dr. Macrae, in whose judgment and devotion he
placed much confidence. The physician's reply, without
absolutely shutting out hope, led him to prepare for a speedy
end. He immediately sent to Lord Canning, to come for a
last interview. During that conversation he commended the
services of several who had worked .with him, and mentioned
some arrangements he had intended to propose, evincing
thoughtfulness for others to the last. His countenance had be-
come emaciated in the extreme ; he looked as if he had been
starved to death by the illness, as Lord Canning thus described
his aspect to me afterwards. He then wrote a letter to his
wife in the Nilgiri Hills, also dictated various messages on
public and private affairs with steady coolness and entire self-
possession. A few hours later, he sank under dysentery in
its most fatal form on the evening of Saturday, 1 1 th August.
The following evening he was buried in the principal cemetery
of Calcutta, and as his, coffin was lowered, there stood around
his grave one of the most important and varied assemblages
that had ever been seen in that place — an assemblage com-
prising representatives of every class of the European com-
munity, whether official or non-official. The strings of
carriages, carrying sorrowful spectators, covered more than
two miles of the road leading to the burial-ground. That
Sabbath was a day of mourning, and in every church of the
city allusion was made from the pulpit to the solemn lesson
conveyed to the community by the sudden demise of one
among the foremost citizens of the Empire.
" On a retrospect of that stirring and eventful time, the mind
at first hardly realises that these broadly laid plans embracing,
with a comprehensive policy, vast affairs and varied subjects,
were all crowded by Wilson into the brief space of eight
months. A review of these proceedings will help us to imagine
what great things a man, who did so much in a few months,
would have accomplished had he been spared for a few years.
Between December and July he introduced for the first time
in India a financial Budget framed upon the English model
— inspired the public mind with fresh confidence — brought
22
338 LIFE OF WALTER B AGE HOT
together the threads of finance which had been broken and
scattered by a military and political convulsion — proposed to
the legislature three new taxes and carried one of them, the
income-tax, through several stages in the Legislative Council
— devised a scheme for the Government paper currency —
stimulated the operations of the Military Finance Commission
over the entire range of army expenditure for both the
European and Native forces — procured the appointment of a
commission to review the numerous branches of civil expendi-
ture— caused arrangements to be begun for re-organising the
whole police of the Empire — reviewed the existing system of
audit and account — besides discharging the multifarious duties
devolving on a finance minister and a member of the general
Government. All this was compassed by him immediately
on landing in an utterly strange country amidst an alien
people, and further was carried on with unabated vigour de-
spite the depression caused by a tropical climate."
Bagehot published in the Economist, i8th August, 1860,
an important minute, written by Sir Bartle Frere, refuting state-
ments which had been made to the effect that my father's scheme
of taxation was that of one who was trying to force purely
English measures on to a people to whom they were unsuited.
" INDIAN FINANCE.
"Minute by the Hon. Sir H. B. E. Frere, dated 24th
April, 1860, showing that the taxes now proposed to be
levied in India are in accordance with the practice of the
natives themselves': —
" There is one point in the objections which have been
raised to Mr. Wilson's financial measures which it seems to
me has been hardly sufficiently noticed, and which, indeed, I
should scarcely have thought/ required elaborate refutation,
had it not been taken up by the press in some parts of India,
and by the British Indian (Zemindars') Association in the
petition which was presented to the Legislative Council on
Saturday last, and urged in terms so plausible as to mislead
all but those who are intimately acquainted with native modes
of taxation.
INDIA 339
" I allude to the assertion that Mr. Wilson's scheme is
entirely ' on the English model ' ; that ' the taxes he proposes
are utterly unsuited to India ' ; that ' his plan embraces the
introduction into India of direct taxation ' (as if it were a per-
fect novelty) ' calculated to arouse all the natives' latent feelings
of opposition'. That it is, in fact, such a plan as a man
acquainted only with England and English modes of taxation
would devise, and which anyone acquainted with India and Indian
modes of taxation would reject as impossible or dangerous.
"But how stands the fact? It would be far nearer the
truth to say the taxes proposed by Mr. Wilson are in principle,
and in most of their details, similar to taxes which are almost
universal throughout all native States in India, which date
from the earliest periods of Indian history, which have never
been given up to any considerable extent by any Indian
Government till we conquered the country, and that the
scheme Mr. Wilson has devised for restoring the equilibrium
of our finances is precisely such as would commend itself to the
judgment of any experienced native financier. No notice is
taken of the fact that, during the present discussion, no scheme
of fresh taxation has hitherto been propounded by anyone,
native or European, which would bear a moment's examination,
which has not included some form of direct taxation, all more
or less partial, inadequate to our wants, or otherwise more ob-
jectionable than that selected by Mr. Wilson — but all direct
taxes, and generally in some form, more or less cumbersome,
taxes on incomes — such taxes, in fact, being, from the earliest
times, component parts of all native schemes of finance.
"It seems to be forgotten that up to 1834-6, taxes on
incomes, trades, and professions were levied almost universally
throughout British India under various names, and that they
were then abolished in parts of Bengal and throughout the
North-Western Provinces and Bombay, not because they were
in theory bad taxes, but because they were so unfairly assessed
and unequally levied, that it was difficult to reform them in
their then existing shape. Many able men then advocated
their retention, after a thorough reform ; but they were not
then needed.
340 LIFE OF WALTER B AGE HOT
"Altogether, I doubt whether there is any part of India
where an income tax, and taxes on arts, trades, and professions,
are as much a novelty as the income tax was in England when
revised by Sir Robert Peel ; certainly there is none where such
taxes are as new to the people as the income tax was in Eng-
land, when first proposed by Mr. Pitt as a regular part of his
financial system.
" (Signed) H. B. E. FRERE.
"24^ April, 1860."
On 2Oth October, the anniversary of my father's leaving
England for India, Walter met my mother and my sister
Matilda (Mrs. Horan) at Southampton on their return from
India and brought them to The Arches.
He was then writing the memoir of my father which ap-
peared as a supplement to the Economist on I /th November,
1860. He sent the proofs to Mr. Arbuthnot of the Treasury
who wrote in reply : —
" TREASURY,
" \st December, 1860.
" MY DEAR SIR,
" I have read very carefully the passages in your
memoir of Mr. Wilson which relate to his work in the Treasury,
and I see nothing whatever that ; requires correction. I think
however that they are susceptible of some addition. You
might with justice to his memory refer to the very cordial
manner in which he discussed subjects with those who acted
under him, listened to their objections or suggestions, and
often governed himself by them.
" While he worked as no other Secretary of the Treasury
ever worked, so far from depressing others, he encouraged
their exertions, co-operated with them, and was always ready
to bear hearty testimony to the merits of deserving Officers.
For myself, it would be very gratifying to me if you made
some allusion to the generous spirit in which he forgot tem-
porary animosities which are too apt to arise amongst earnest
men who differ in opinion, and which spirit prevented him from
allowing them to operate to the prejudice of the public service.
" He was eminently tolerant. In my own case, after
INDIA 341
differences which were enough to ruffle the temper of any
man, he soon allowed all personal feeling to subside, and it
has been a great consolation to me to reflect that, previous to
his departure for India, I had the opportunity of confidential
and unreserved communication with him on matters of great
public interest, and that we parted with as much cordiality as
if there had been no unpleasant passages between us. I had
several letters from him from India written in the same spirit,
and in the last which I received from him, he enquired about
several Officers of this Department, with whom he had been
thrown principally in contact, expressing great interest in
matters affecting their prospects of advancement.
" Yours very truly,
"G. ARBUTHNOT.
" W. BAGEHOT, ESQ."
Lord Grey wrote a long letter to Bagehot which began : —
" HOWICK, ALNWICK,
" 2.4th November, \ 860.
" DEAR SIR,
" I cannot forbear writing to say with how much in-
terest I read your memoir of Mr. Wilson in the supplement
to last week's Economist.
" Having had the pleasure of knowing him very well, and
the advantage of much valuable assistance and advice from
him when I was in office, I can bear testimony to the strict
accuracy of all you say with regard to his great ability in
public affairs and especially with reference to all questions of
commerce and finance. His death is indeed a great calamity
to the nation, and still more so to India, and though I trust
the great measures he had begun there had made so much
progress that the sound principles on which they rest may
ensure their success, it is impossible not to feel that the pro-
bability of this is greatly diminished by their execution being
no longer guided by his energy and judgment. . . ."
In the grave pages of the Economist Bagehot dwelt almost
exclusively in this memoir on the serious side of his subject.
He fully appreciated nevertheless the value of my father's
342 LIFE OF WALTER B AGE HOT
personality, the charm of which lay much in the keen sym-
pathy he felt for various interests outside his own line of work.
As Mr. Hutton notes he had "thorough enjoyment of all the
more genial sides of life ". He greatly enjoyed the beauty of
nature, and cared much for art and music.
A very happy description of the combination in my father
of gravity and vivacity is given in Sir Richard Temple's
Men and Events of my Time in India. Working with and
under my father, he was daily brought into contact with him.
Among his many attainments Sir Richard Temple was a good
artist, and he recognised in my father's temperament those
sensibilities which were in sympathy with the artistic side of
his own. He writes : " He (my father) had a keen perception
of every object that met his view, a habit of casting observant
looks in all directions, and an extraordinarily retentive memory
of what he saw, heard, or read. His manner and conversation,
though grave while he was intent on work, were bright and
vivacious in society. He delighted in India as a country, and
regarded her resources with hopeful interest, her people with
sympathy, her scenery with admiration, her antiquities with
curiosity. Nothing, he said, could be imagined more intensely
interesting than India ; with the ancient cities, the relics of
decayed dynasties, the thronging population, the bustle of
trade at every corner, the expansive plains bounded by alpine
ranges affording a climate for new varieties of production, the
large rivers, the magnificent canals irrigating the country, the
careful agriculture with cultivation up to the roadside, the
thrifty and economical habits of the people bent on active and
profitable pursuits. These descriptive expressions are his own,
being taken straight from his sayings and writings. It was
instructive as well as amusing to accompany him in his walks
during the early morning hours amidst the suburbs of Calcutta.
He would observe every Native garden that we passed, talking
about the natural habitat, culture and uses of the trees or
plants. He would often stop at the wayside booth or shops,
discussing the manufacture, prices and style of the wares. He
would note the carts, drawn by bullocks and laden with pro-
duce, on their way to the capital, also the men and women
INDIA 343
carrying head-loads of articles to market Then he would
ever and anon exclaim that the country seemed bursting, as
it were, with vitality and industry. The fairs which were
held almost daily in various places, and more especially the
central market of Calcutta, offered to him an extensive scope
for economic reflection. He would watch the piece-goods and
fancy- wares from Europe, the Oriental stuffs made in far-off
cities, the flowers and vegetables brought by railway from
gardens distant hundreds of miles, the game snared or shot in
forests and marshes. He regarded all these goods, indeed,
with the eye of an economist, in reference to their uses, but
having a lively imagination he recognised • their beauty also.
If a thing seemed beautiful he felt all the more zealous in
promoting its usefulness ; if a thing was useful he appreciated
it the better from its being beautiful also. Having been from
the first imbued with the principles of unrestricted freedom in
trade, he loved to speculate upon the moral advantages arising
from the interchange of produce, which were in their way as
great as the material advantages. Trade, he would say, is a
great agency for securing peace and charity among men in all
parts of the earth, enlarging the minds of diverse nations,
raising their thoughts beyond petty jealousy, softening their
mutual animosities, and uniting them by the bonds of good-
will and of common interest. . . . Wilson's intellect was
essentially methodical in its habits, ever searching for first
principles and fundamental axioms, and then applying them
to practice and to actual circumstances. . . . He was eminently
practical. His principles lay deep in his mind, but in respect
to practice he was ever studying the variety of circumstances,
keeping his imagination open for the reception of the new
ideas to be derived from the facts as recently learnt, and from
the phenomena as freshly perceived. He was most anxious
to understand India not as she had been supposed to be, or
as she ought to have become, but as she actually was. While
keeping in recollection the broad traits of human nature, as
common to mankind in all times and places, he was especially
desirous to realise to himself the idiosyncrasies, aptitudes and
tendencies — even the prejudices — of the Natives. Although
344 LIFE OF WALTER PAGE HOT
the people had to be led gently towards the paths of economic
science, yet he wished to show the tenderest consideration
towards the thoughts and sentiments springing from their
historical antecedents. He hoped also to evince that modera-
tion and self-restraint which befitted the peculiar position of
the British as foreign masters of an eastern empire.
" Such in brief was Wilson, the first scientific economist
who had ever visited India. ..."
And, it may be added, such was the nature which had a
more direct influence on Bagehot than had any other after
his mind became matured. Intimate contact with my father
established a harmony between Bagehot's active and his in-
tellectual impulses. This led to trains of thought which later
found expression in his three complete works — The English
Constitution, Lombard Street, Physics and Politics, and the
Economic Studies left unfinished when he died.
Shortly after my father's death the English Government
approached Bagehot on the question as to whether he would
accept the post my father had filled in India. He at once
declined, stating that family reasons made it impossible for
him to leave England. Under no circumstances would
Bagehot have left his father to bear the home trouble without
his help. As is well known, Mr. Samuel Laing was then
appointed as my father's successor but resigned the post in
1862. Sir C. Wood then appointed Sir Charles Trevelyan.
In the Economist of 8th November, 1862, Bagehot wrote a long
article, of which the following are the first passages : —
" SIR C. TREVELYAN AS FINANCE MINISTER FOR INDIA.
"The appointment of Sir C. Trevelyan as Finance
Minister of India must awaken recollections in the face of
which the conductors of this journal cannot profess to be im-
partial. They have weighed well whether on such a subject
it would be advisable for them to say anything, but they
think that it would be best for them to say a few words.
" There is but little need to refer to the publication by Sir
Charles Trevelyan of the now celebrated Madras despatches,
and his consequent recall by the Secretary of State for India.
INDIA 345
He was then recalled, not for erroneous doctrines in finance,
not for a single doctrine which he avowed, or a single doctrine
which he combated, but for palpable and plain insubordina-
tion. There is, and must be, a supreme Government in India ;
Mr. Wilson was for the time the authorised and recognised
organ of that Government. Sir Charles Trevelyan resisted
that Government, and revolted against the policy of Mr.
Wilson, and he has paid the inevitable penalty.
"The publication of the Madras despatches was a monstrous
act of misjudgment and insubordination, but it was only an
aggravated outbreak of an inherent disposition. Sir Charles
Trevelyan has many eminent qualities — great acuteness,
great industry, an ardent though ill-regulated public zeal —
but he never was a safe man ; he never had a sound and
simple judgment ; from vanity or from some better motive,
he has never been very willing to confine himself to his proper
sphere, especially when it was a subordinate one. These are
the very opposite qualities to those which India requires in
the situation to which he has been appointed. ..."
Referring to this article Bagehot received the following
letter from Sir Charles Wood : —
" SECRETARY OF STATE FOR INDIA IN COUNCIL.
" INDIA OFFICE,
" 28^ November, 1862.
" DEAR SIR,
" I have been intending to write to you for a long
time, ever since indeed I determined to send Sir C. Trevelyan
to India.
" You naturally might view the appointment with a critical
eye, and I have not a word to say against the criticism in the
Economist on the subject. I believe, however, that you will find
that he will be a much more faithful successor in Mr. Wilson's
steps than Mr. Laing. He will maintain the Income Tax
according to Wilson's avowed intention for the five years and
fully carry out his plans for the management of the currency,
as far as is possible after the derangement made in them of
late. He is fully aware of the error which he committed and
346 LIFE OF WALTER B AGE HOT
will, I believe, make an admirable public servant at Calcutta.
He is thoroughly imbued with what were Wilson's notions,
that a financier to make great plans and long speeches is not
what is now needed, but a practical man of business to re-
duce and keep down expenditure.
" I think you will be pleased to hear this. He erred and
has paid dearly for his error, though not more dearly than
was fitting, and I hope we shall get good service out of him
yet.
" Yours truly,
"C. WOOD.
" W. BAGEHOT, ESQ."
In answer to this letter Bagehot wrote : —
" I am very much obliged to you for your kind note of
yesterday.
" It was impossible that Mr. Wilson's wife and relations
could hear of Sir C. Trevelyan's appointment without feeling
some pain, but this the information contained in your note
must very much diminish.
" It would be untrue to say that I feel no anxiety as to
Sir C. Trevelyan's future course in India for he is undeniably
a little erratic ; but nothing can be more satisfactory than his
present opinions, and in every way I am sure he will be better
than Mr. Laing."
Sir Charles Wood answered this note enclosing one from
Sir Charles Trevelyan to him.
" INDIA OFFICE, BELGRAVE SQUARE,
" 2nd December, 1862.
" MY DEAR SIR,
" Your letter was written in so kind a spirit that I
could not resist sending it to Trevelyan, and I now enclose
his answer, which I am sure will be gratifying to all Mr.
Wilson's friends and relatives.
"They were not men to differ except on public grounds,
honourable alike to both, and there was, and is, nothing petty
or crooked in either of them.
"Yours truly,
" C. WOOD."
INDIA 347
"DEAR WOOD,
" I am glad you sent me Mr. Bagehot's note. I
have never yielded to the weakness of under-rating my pre-
decessor or successor, and of Wilson I can only think and
speak as of a very able, indefatigable public servant, who did
much for his country while he lived, and ended by sacrificing
his life for it, after he had laid the foundation of the new
system of Indian Finance which I hope to finish. My personal
relations with Wilson while we were in India together were
perfectly friendly, and I regret that I did not preserve a letter
which he wrote me after my recall reminding me that our
difference had been entirely public and expressing his regret
that India was to lose my services, and warmly thanking me
for some attentions I had been able to pay to his family.
Whatever faults I may have, to do injustice to my predecessor
is not one of them, and in this case the circumstances are such
as would induce a man from mere self-interest to pretend a
kindness which he did not feel.
" Sincerely yours,
" C. TREVELYAN.
" GROSVENOR CRESCENT."
In the Economist of 6th June, 1 863, Bagehot writes : " The
Budget of Sir C. Trevelyan has now been received in this
country. Front actual facts we are now justified in saying that
the Indian deficit is extinguished." After enumerating other
sources of revenue, Bagehot writes : " Lastly, there has been
the produce of between £1, 500,000 arid £2,000,000 of Mr.
Wilson's income tax. Such has been the final extinction of
the deficit which Mr. Wilson went out to cure. It will be
universally admitted that by the impetus which he gave to the
career of improvement, by the military commission which he
created, and which really effected the enormous economy
which we have mentioned, by the additional taxation he im-
posed, and by the general vigour which, even in a short time,
his imperturbable will imparted to all the financial measures
of Government, he essentially contributed to the great result
which has now indisputably been attained,"
CHAPTER XII.
"THE ECONOMIST"
BAGEHOT was sworn in as Justice of the Peace for the County
of Somerset at the Epiphany Session held at Taunton, and
on 1 8th January, 1861, he attended Petty Sessions for the
first time with Sir Arthur Elton. They drove together to Long
Asheton, where Petty Sessions were held.
My father had appointed his brothers and Bagehot his
executors. It was settled that Bagehot should undertake the
Directorship of the Economist, to continue, in fact, to hold the
same position my father gave him when he left for India. He
was beginning to feel that the daily railway journeys were
exhausting, and determined that it would be better for him
and my sister to live in London. About this time Lord
Ellenborough wrote to my mother offering to relinquish his
lease of 1 2 Upper Belgrave Street which he had taken for five
years, the term of my father's Indian appointment. It was
decided that she should accept this kind offer, and that the
Bagehots should make their London home with us in Upper
Belgrave Street. A change was made in Bagehot's work in
Stuckey's Bank. He resigned the local management of the
branch in Bristol and undertook to supervise the work of the
Bank in London.
A change also was made in the staff of the Economist.
Mr. Meredith Townsend, who was conducting the Friend of
India in 1859, had obtained an introduction to my father
while he was in Calcutta. Mr. Townsend wished to leave
India and start a newspaper in England. My father advised
him to obtain, if posible, the aid of Mr. Hutton. Much as
my father and Bagehot valued Mr. Hutton, they agreed in
thinking that his particular gifts would work better on the staff
of a newspaper such as Mr. Townsend wished to start, than
on that of the Economist. On arriving in England Mr.
348
" THE ECONOMIST" 349
Townsend found that the Spectator was in the market.
Following my father's advice he made the acquaintance of
Mr. Hutton, and together, as co-proprietors and co-editors,
they revived the Spectator. The complete success of this
venture is now well known.
Bagehot did not replace Mr. Hutton but undertook the
work of editing as well as directing the Economist himself.
By living in London he found this was possible, at all events,
for the time being. The uprooting from The Arches took
place in May, 1861.
In the July number of the National Review, 1 86 1, appeared
Bagehot's essay on William Pitt, the text being " Life of the
Right Hon. William Pitt by Earl Stanhope, author of the
History of England from the Peace of Utrecht ". It was a
subject after his own heart. Pitt's commanding character,
his courage, his fortitude, his singular good fortune, his un-
rivalled opportunities while he still possessed the fervour of
youth, all appealed to Bagehot's imagination. But perhaps what
fascinated him most were certain characteristics in Pitt which
cannot fail to remind those intimate with Bagehot of himself.
" He (Pitt) was preserved," Bagehot writes, "from the char-
acteristic degradation of well-intentioned and erudite youth by
two great counteracting influences — a strong sense of humour
and a genuine interest in great subjects. His sense of fun was,
indeed, disguised from the vulgar by a rigid mask of grave
dignity ; but in private it was his strongest characteristic.
4 Don't tell me,' he is said to have remarked, ' of a man's being
able to talk sense ; everyone can talk sense ; can he talk non-
sense ? ' And Mr. Wilberforce, the most cheerful of human
beings, who had seen the most amusing society of his genera-
tion, always declared that Pitt's wit was the best which he had
ever known. And it was likely to be ; humour gains much by
constant suppression, and at no time of life was Pitt ever
wanting in dexterous words. No man who really cares for
great things, and who sees the laughable side of little things,
ever becomes a ' prig'." Again, how much of the following
description of Pitt suggests Bagehot's own moods. " In all
descriptions of Pitt's appearance in the House of Commons, a
350 LIFE OF WALTER B AGE HOT
certain aloofness fills an odd space. He is a ' thing apart,'
different somehow from other members. Pitt was spare, digni-
fied, and reserved. When he entered the House, he walked to
the place of the Premier, without looking to the right or
to the left, and he sat at the same place. He was ready to
discuss important business with all proper persons, upon all
necessary occasions, but he was not ready to discuss business
unnecessarily with anyone, nor did he discuss anything but
business with any save a few intimate friends, with whom his
reserve at once vanished, and his wit and humour at once
expanded, and his genuine interest in all really great subjects
was at once displayed. In a popular assembly this sort of
reserve, rightly manipulated, is a power. It is analogous to
the manner which the accomplished author of Eothen recom-
mends in dealing with Orientals : ' it excites terror and inspires
respect'. A recent book of memoirs illustrates it. During
Addington's administration, a certain rather obscure 'Mr. G.'
was made a privy councillor ; and the question was raised in
Pitt's presence as to the mode in which he could have obtained
that honour. Someone said, ' I suppose he was always talking
to the Premier and bothering him '. Mr. Pitt quietly observed,
' In my time I would much rather have made him a Privy
Councillor than have spoken to him '." (In a letter to one of
his sisters-in-law, Bagehot writes : " It is inconceivable to me
to like to see many people and even to speak to them. Every
new person you know is an intellectual burden because you may
see them again, and must be able to recognise and willing to
converse with them.") " It is easy to conceive the mental ex-
haustion which this well-managed reserve spared him, the
number of trivial conversations which it economised, the
number of imperfect ambitions which it quelled before they
were uttered. An ordinary man could not, of course, make use
of it. But Pitt at the earliest period imparted to the House
of Commons the two most important convictions for a member
in his position : he convinced them that he would not be the
king's creature, and that he desired no pecuniary profit for
himself. As he despised royal favour, and despised real money,
the House of Commons thought he might well despise them."
« THE ECO NO MIS T" 351
Lord Ellenborough did not at once find another London
house to suit him, therefore our return to Upper Belgrave
Street was delayed till the winter of 1861. Meanwhile my
mother and the Bagehots took a house in Ennismore Gardens
— belonging to a very great friend and admirer of my father's,
Mr. Bonamy Price, Professor of Political Economy at Oxford.
There Madame Mohl spent most days with us. She was
writing the Life of Madame Recamier and sought my sister
Julia's aid in correcting her proofs.
Bagehot was then writing the article on " The American
Constitution " for the National Review, suggested by stirring
events then happening in America. During that year he
wrote no less than thirty-one articles in the Economist on the
Civil War, and the main side issues resulting from it.
In the early days of August the death occurred of Lord
Herbert of Lee, and a tribute to him by Bagehot appeared
in the Economist. " Lord Herbert's untimely death is one
of those rare calamities," he writes, " which all men of all
parties unite not only in deploring as a public loss, but in
feeling as a personal grief. We cannot say ' we could have
better spared a better man,' — for among our statesmen no
better man was to be found ; but assuredly we could have
better spared a cleverer man, — and many cleverer un-
doubtedly exist. But Lord Herbert was an unique man ; and
unique men are of all the most difficult to replace. He was
also an unstained and undamaged man — and such can seldom
be met with among politicians who for years have taken a
prominent part in the struggles of the Parliamentary arena or
the toils of official life, and are perhaps scarcer than ever now.
He was in the prime of his mature strength; he had the
highest position in the State in almost certain prospect ; and,
what was more important still, he had great services yet to
render to his country. He did much, but has left his special
work undone. He was disinterested and sincere ; he was not
specially ambitious of distinction or of power ; he was fortun-
ate in that his position as to rank and wealth left him nothing
to desire ; more fortunate still in that this happy independence
was in him combined with a public courage which is not
352 LIFE OF WALTER B AGE HOT
always its concomitant. From his freedom, from his honesty,
from his earnestness, he drew that proper spirit — half the in-
heritance of the English gentleman, half the endowment of
the moral and religious thinker — which refused to fall in with
popular prejudice or to bow to popular clamour. He sym-
pathised largely and warmly with the people ; he served them
zealously and faithfully ; but never for a moment would he
either flatter them or yield to them. On the question of Re-
form his views were liberal as well as moderate ; he repeated
no party Shibboleth ; he really studied the subject, and was
one of the few public men ; who showed himself a willing and
intelligent recipient of new ideas. Power, in his estimation,
was too sacred a trust to be either neglected or abused : he
could not, knowingly, have made a bad appointment ; he could
not have deliberately foisted into the public service an incom-
petent relative or friend ; he could not, at the head of a great de-
partment, have suffered recognised abuses to survive, if a way
of reforming them could be devised. He was above everything
a man to confide in ; you always knew where to find him ; he
had courage, but it was not aggressive ; he had zeal, but it
was according to knowledge. He has left no similitude be-
hind him."
The great event of the winter of 1 86 1 was the death of
the Prince Consort. Bagehot published a short article in the
Economist of 2ist December on this grave national calamity.
" If our loss," he wrote, " is not — as has been extravagantly
said — the greatest which the English nation could have sus-
tained, it is among the most irreparable. . . . The royal family
of last week is still (and without change) the royal family of
to-day ; but the father of that family is removed. For such
a loss there is not, in this world, any adequate resource or any
complete compensation. In no rank of life can anyone else
be to the widow and children what the deceased father and
husband would have been. In the Court as in the cottage,
such loss must not only be grief now, but perplexity, trouble,
and perhaps mistake hereafter. The present generation, at
least the younger part of it, have lost the idea that the Court
is a serious matter. Everything for twenty years has seemed
" THE ECONOMIST" 353
to go so easily and so well, that it has seemed to go by itself.
There is no such thing in this world. Everything requires
anxiety, and reflection, and patience. And the function of
the Court, though we easily forget it when it is well performed,
keeps itself much in our remembrance when it is ill-performed.
The Crown is of singular importance in a divided and con-
tentious free State, because it is the sole object of attachment
which is elevated above every contention and division. But
to maintain that importance, it must create attachment. We
know that the Crown now does so fully ; but we do not ade-
quately bear in mind how much rectitude of intention, how
much judgment in conduct, how much power of doing right,
how much power of doing nothing, are requisite to unite the
loyalty and to retain the confidence of a free people. . . . His
(Prince Albert's) circumstances and perhaps his character, for-
bade him to attempt the visible achievements and the showy
displays which attract momentary popularity. Discretion is
a quality seldom appreciated till it is lost ; and it was discre-
tion which Prince Albert eminently possessed."
No quality was more adequately appreciated by Walter
Bagehot than such discretion — the active principle of good
sense.
In the month previous to the Prince Consort's death
Walter Bagehot lost his old friend Arthur Clough, the poet
and the subject of Matthew Arnold's " Thyrsis ". He died
of fever at Florence on the 1 3th of November in his forty-
third year. To quote afresh Mr. Hutton's words: "Clough
ever remained to Bagehot a theme of profound intellectual
and moral interest which lasted him his life, and never failed
to draw him into animated discussion long after Clough's own
premature death." At the time, however, of Arthur Clough's
death Bagehot was engaged in work, the interest of which had,
I think, somewhat freed him from this " intellectual fascina-
tion ". His admiration for my father had also tended to effect
this.
Of my father Bagehot wrote : "His conscientiousness was
of a plain but very practical kind ; he had a single-minded
rectitude which went straight to the pith of a moral difficulty—
23
354 LIFE OF WALTER B AGE HOT
which showed him what he ought to do. On such subjects he
was somewhat intolerant of speculative reasoning. ' The com-
mon sense is so and so,' he used to say, and he did not wish
to be plagued with anything else." I think Bagehot felt the
simplicity of my father's views had a wholesome effect upon
his own mind. In the National Review of October, 1862,
appeared Bagehot's article " Mr. Clough's Poems ". In it we
find together with much subtle appreciation the following : —
" Mr. Clough's career and life were exactly those most
likely to develop and foster a morbid peculiarity of his intel-
lect. He had, as we have explained, by nature, an unusual
difficulty in forming a creed as to the unseen world ; he could
not get the visible world out of his head ; his strong grasp of
plain facts and obvious matters was a difficulty to him. Too
easily one great teacher inculcated a remarkable creed ; then
another great teacher took it away ; then this second teacher
made him believe for a time some of his own artificial faith ;
then it would not do. He fell back on that vague, impalp-
able, unembodied religion which we have attempted to de-
scribe."
Bagehot still continued to feel a reverence and admiration
for his old friend ; this he shows in his essay on his poetry ;
but circumstances no less than the natural trend of his own
nature had, I think, changed his attitude towards what he
called the peculiarity of Mr. Clough's intellect. He felt more
and more that this peculiarity tended to a hair-splitting in
moral and religious speculation which led to no definite en-
lightenment.
During the years spent together in Upper Belgrave Street,
between our returning there in 1861 and my marriage in 1868,
we had much of Walter at his best. Ordinary conversation
became extraordinarily stimulating. Constantly there was an
unexpected charge of wit given out in a quaint restrained
tone of voice, a twist of whimsical fancy turned on to a
very commonplace matter, which made the hours spent with
him a revelry of good things. No subject was needed to make
a conversation notable, everything was a subject with Walter
Bagehot. The discussion of serious matters, equally with
"THE ECONOMIST" 355
those of a frivolous kind, was of no less original a quality.
Everything he said carried with it that profound sense of
reality which was so strong a characteristic of his mind. A
passage in the essay on Shelley shows how he treats of the
"higher air" which does not carry with it this sense. He
writes : " Of course, all his [Shelley's] Works contain ' Spirits,'
'Phantoms,' 'Dream No. I,' and 'Fairy No. 3,' but these do
not belong to this world. The higher air seems never to have
been favourable to the production of marked character ; with
almost all poets the inhabitants of it are prone to a shadowy
thinness ; in Shelley, the habit of frequenting mountain-tops
has reduced them to evanescent mists of lyrical energy."
Who but Walter Bagehot could hint with so neat a humour
at the flimsy, dictatorial element in some of Shelley's ar-
rangements when he flies into this "higher air "?
The natural affinity of one side of Walter Bagehot's mind
was clearly for such wisdom and understanding as is taught
us in the Book of Proverbs. In his Essay on Bishop Butler
he applies Dr. Arnold's expression, moral thoughtfulness to
his subject. The expression partly suggests his own attitude of
mind. But in him this attitude, though certainly existing,
was mitigated in rigour by elasticity of temperament, buoyant
spirits, and a general happiness of nature. He knew, through
personal experience, that an attitude of moral thoughtfulness
need not be allowed to overpower all other valuable qualities.
He writes that it cannot but be doubted " how far such teach-
ing as that of Arnold tends to introduce a too stiff and anxious
habit of mind ; how far the perpetual presence of a purpose,
will interfere with the simple happiness of life, and how far
also it can be forced on the ' lilies of the field ' ; how far the
care of anxious minds and active thoughts is to be obtruded
on the young, on the cheerful, on the natural ".
The tenet which Walter Bagehot held, and consistently put
into practice, was Live and let Live. This tolerance infused
into the atmosphere of family life a singularly nutritious flavour.
The saying " A gentleman is careful of the dignity of others "
fits well into the memories of Walter Bagehot, recalling the
invariable consideration he paid to every feeling or interest in
356 LIFE OF WALTER B AGE HOT
those about him, however different from his own they might
be, providing always they were real feelings and real interests.
He writes : " we may admire what we cannot share ; reverence
what we do not imitate. As those who cannot comprehend a
strain of soothing music, look with interest on those who can ;
as those who cannot feel the gentle glow of a quiet landscape,
yet stand aside and seem inferior to those who do ; so in char-
acter, the buoyant and the bold, the harsh and the practical,
may, at least for the moment, moralise and look upwards,
reverence, and do homage when they come to a close experi-
ence of what is gentler and simpler, more anxious and more
thoughtful, kinder and more religious than themselves." 1 A
strong sympathy and kindliness towards his fellow-creatures
as fellow-creatures, especially towards the young and those
with whom he was connected, made him highly sensitive
to their interests. To those of his sisters-in-law he proved
himself as keenly alive as if they had been sisters of his own.
In family life, no less than in political and financial affairs,
it was the sense of absolute trust inspired by Walter Bagehot
which won confidence and secured the great influence he pos-
sessed. Even had he not inherited strict principles as to right
and wrong, he was too wise not to have preferred the straight
to the crooked paths. Intellectually as well as morally he
was profoundly sound. He allowed no personal predilections,
no inclination of his mind or of his feelings to over-ride his
reasoned opinions. None of the " taking " qualities that in-
spire passing engouements and fashions in the public mind, no
exciting movements, ever made his judgment swerve from the
reality of truth. A friend of ours who had been a constant
inmate of our home before and after Walter Bagehot entered
it, would converse in a singularly pleasant and ingenious
fashion on questions affecting the prosperity of the country ;
but was apt at times to indulge in eloquent flights of argument,
aerial theories, and prophetic convictions, all based more or less
on a cloud arrangement of his own creation. After a lively
spurt of such ingenuity, I remember Walter, in a kindly, sarcas-
1 Essay on Bishop Butler.
" THE ECONOMIST" 357
tic, slightly speculative tone, opened his dark, round eyes very
wide, turned his head a little on one side, and said quietly :
" Most valuable information, if true ! " much in the same spirit
as he would — to quote Mr. Hutton — utter his satirical " Hear,
hear ! " — 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 apt to reduce a
man, as the mathematical phrase goes, to his " lowest terms ".
Walter Bagehot keenly felt the responsibility of eloquence, and
how morally cheap it could be when let forth merely as an ex-
citing game, or to support an unsound argument in too per-
suasive a fashion (see passages in his article " Mr. Gladstone ").
He thought eloquence not safe unless it were the outcome of
profound conviction and deep feeling. It was a power likely
to do mischief and lead astray if not safeguarded by rigid
conscientiousness and a power of true perception. His
own mental survey embraced a wide horizon. He looked
beyond the obvious expediency in a question, and from this
wider outlook worked back, so to speak, on to the considera-
tion of every-day practical matters. He recognised the im-
portance of acting deliberately and wisely in these common-
place occurrences, for he knew the influence commonplace
events can have on the lives of the great majority, who in
this world lead commonplace lives. But, however far-reaching
might be the ideas which Walter Bagehot brought to bear on
daily concerns, they were conveyed invariably in a natural,
familiar manner, without any alarming impressiveness.
In those Belgrave Street days he was especially talkative
at breakfast. It was flattering to hear him say that he found
it more amusing to breakfast with his sisters-in-law than to
join breakfast parties to which he was asked, given by Glad-
stone and other notable people. At The Arches he had
generally had before him the anxiety of catching his train.
Here he had not, so would linger, wandering about the room,
and continuing to talk, his mind fresh, his spirits buoyant.
No attitude of " moral thoughtfulness " ever extinguished the
boy in Walter Bagehot. It is exasperating to think of the
3S8 LIFE OF WALTER B AGE HOT
many good things that came out while he paced up and down
the Belgrave Street dining-room, and yet to have made no
record of them. But there are warnings against the attempt
to put them down on paper. Others have made the attempt.
I think it is wiser to refrain. I feel with Henry Sawtell that it
is useless to try to conjure up Bagehot's wit for those who have
no picture of Bagehot himself in their mind's eye. President
Woodrow Wilson, never having seen him, wrote a brilliantly
understanding essay on Bagehot as " A Wit and a Seer," in-
spired by his writings. His talk, however, was more amusing
even than his writings. But the gist of it was evoked by the
subject of the moment, by the person to whom he was speaking,
by his or her peculiar interests or characteristics. The pith
of it could not be conveyed without a vision of Bagehot him-
self, and the situation which evoked it. Egoism was totally
absent. The last rdle he would have wished to play was that
of a professional wit. He was never known to have been
guilty of a monologue. Conversation never went beyond the
limits of conversation proper. As Lord Bryce, in a letter
to Mr. Hutton, after Bagehot's death, wrote : " one seemed
to gain more profit as well as pleasure from a talk with him
[Walter Bagehot] than with almost any one else, all the more
so because, however much one felt his superiority, it always
remained conversation, and not, as so often with great talkers,
a lecture or a declamation ".
The charm of his funny sayings lay in their unpremeditated
quaintness, in their not being made up. He knew no more
how his wit came out than did those who enjoyed it. It was
inspired nonsense, and Walter's nonsense would have satisfied
Pitt, or any other, fastidious in the art.
Besides the breakfast-table at home another happy field
for expansion in this art was the Spectator office. From
early days Mr. Hutton was accustomed to get his full share.
Bagehot soon became intimate with Mr. Townsend, his co-
editor. "I go round to the Spectator Office," he used to say,
" to know what is going to happen. Townsend can always
prophesy." In after years, referring to his constant visits, Mr.
Meredith i Townsend writes: "Do you know I doubt if I ever
" THE ECONOMIST* 359
received a letter from Mr. Bagehot in my life. If he had any-
thing to say he ran in to the Spectator, and if I had anything
to say I ran in to the Economist. I am quite sorry, for any
letter of his was sure to be full of witty wisdom." In a
letter to my sister written in 1905, Miss Helen Gladstone
records a saying of Walter's, uttered about that time : "I
think the only time I met Mr. Bagehot to speak to was a very
long time ago when he came to one of my father's Thursday
breakfasts at 1 1 Carlton House Terrace, but we left that house
over thirty years ago ; I only remember distinctly one thing
that he told us ; that he knew what a nut felt like when it was
going to be cracked, as he once got his head caught between
a cart-shed and a lamp-post."
To the world at large who did not know him personally,
Bagehot was viewed as a sedate and reserved person, the
grave director of the Economist, who interviewed statesmen on
important questions ; who went down to the City and was
treated as a person of importance when he got there ; who
edited the National Review, and wrote essays which were
thought much of by those whose opinion was of moment.
President Woodrow Wilson writes :|" He [Bagehot] be-
came editor of the London Economist and brought questions
of finance to the light in editorials which clarified knowledge
and steadied prediction in such fashion as made him the
admiration of the Street. The City had never before seen its
business set forth with such lucidity and mastery, j^
" Such a capital as London is a huge intellectual clearing-
house, and men get out of it, as it were, the net balances of
the nation's needs and thoughts. Bagehot both took and
gave a great deal in such a place. His mind was singularly
fitted to understand London, and every complex group of
men and interest. He had the social imagination that Burke
had, and Carlyle, — that every successful student of affairs
must have, if he would scratch but a little beneath the sur-
face or lift the mystery from any transaction whatever.
For minds with this gift of sight there is a quick way opened
to the heart of things. Their acquaintance with any individual
man is but a detail in their acquaintance with men; and it is
360 LIFE OF WALTER B AGE HOT
noteworthy that, though they gain in mastery, they do not
gain in insight by their contact with men and with the actual
business of the world." This was most aptly true of Bagehot,
whose insight was singularly intuitive.
Notwithstanding a very full life of grave occupations, he
found time to ride with his sisters-in-law in the park, to drive
his wife nearly every day in their phaeton, and to join much
in the social life of our family, keeping up the while with his
old friends and early associations. He continued to pay con-
stant visits to Herd's Hill, combining these, with the fortnightly
meetings of the directors of Stuckey's Bank, and quarter
sessions held at Wells or Taunton. He occasionally stayed
with his old friends Sir Arthur and Lady Elton at Clevedon
Court, and with Mr. Freeman, the historian, who, in 1860,
bought a place called Somerleage, near Wells. Walter and
my sister did not as a rule pay many country visits, as most
of the available time out of London was spent at Herd's
Hill. Mr. and Mrs. Bagehot were very generous in their
invitations to all our family, and we constantly enjoyed their
hospitality.
Much going out and much entertaining at Upper Belgrave
Street went on in those days, drawing-rooms, state balls,
political "At Homes," dinners, luncheons, balls, the opera
and theatres. Friends would come in every afternoon to five
o'clock tea. Walter, however, never assisted at this function.
Mr. Greg, who was then Controller of the Stationery Office,
would come nearly every day straight from his office at five
o'clock, and often returned to dinner. Our house was a
second home to him, while his own, on Wimbledon Common,
was at our disposal when any member of our family wanted
change of air. There was a constant going to and fro between
Park Lodge and Upper Belgrave Street. Mr. Greg wrote
on political questions, and he and Bagehot discussed these
subjects together. They had mutual friends notable in the
literary and political world, and pleasant dinner-parties took
place at both houses, remarkable for the intellectual distinction
of the guests. It suited Bagehot to have social life going on
around him, provided he was not responsible for the arrange-
" THE ECONOMIST " 36 1
ments, and that he could join, or not, as he felt inclined. On
the occasion of a ball my mother gave, my sister wrote to
Mrs. Bagehot : " I think our ball went off well. It was very
full (nearly 300 people) and spirited, and we kept it up till
half- past three. Walter really enjoyed it, and behaved quite
nicely, not retiring once till he slipped away to bed at a
quarter before three." My sister wrote almost every day to
Mrs. Bagehot giving her an account of the doings of the family.
All these letters were preciously preserved, and exist unto this
day.
Every one consulted Bagehot about any event that happened
in our family. Walter could always understand. He gave
the best advice in an amusing form, and was never known to
rub any one the wrong way. The romances of his sisters-in-
law were subjects of interest to him ; he never in fact seemed
indifferent about anything concerning those about him. I
remember going to him to air some grievance I had against
" disturbing influences ".l He was sympathetic and consoling ;
" Get to your Ruskin, — you will soon forget all about it. I
have been through the same sort of thing over and over again,
and books have always come to the rescue." Throughout his
life, books were as healing balm to Bagehot. He never
smoked, and when, as a youth, a friend told him that his
cigars cost him ^30 per annum, Walter exclaimed, "But
imagine how many books that would buy ! "
On Sundays he would often lunch with his friends, Lord
and Lady Carnarvon, and in the afternoons drive my sister to
Hampstead to see his Uncle and Aunt Reynolds, or ride to the
Priory, St. John's Wood, where on Sunday afternoons Mr.
and Mrs. Lewes (George Eliot) entertained their friends.
His uncle was the chief supporter of the Evangelical news-
paper The Record, and Mr. and Mrs. George Lewes were
steeped in German philosophy of most unorthodox tendencies !
1 I had been living with Ruskin's Modern Painters and his Elements
of Drawing for two years. Mr. Ruskin had kindly given me lessons, and
I had through his advice been studying painting in Mr. Arthur Hughes's
studio, and was too much engrossed in these matters to care to go into
society, and, not being strong, felt the constant sociability going on at
home somewhat oppressive.
362 LIFE OF WALTER B AGE HOT
The quaint contrast amused Bagehot. His power of detach-
ment enabled him to feel an interest in all varieties of creeds
and opinions, the while retaining complete independence of
thought and belief.
When paying a visit to Mr. Chichester Fortescue and Lady
Waldegrave at Strawberry Hill, Walter and my sister met the
Due and Duchesse d'Aumale, then living at Orleans House,
Twickenham. This acquaintance with Bagehot the Due
d'Aumale furthered.
Bagehot seldom remained in London long at a time. If
he had any special piece of writing to get through, he and
my sister would go for a few days to the sea, or to any place
where pleasant scenery tuned his mind to a happy key and
stimulated the growth of ideas. He would carry about with
him minute pocket-books and in very faint pencil marks dot
down notes when he was travelling, walking, riding or driving,
or lying down on a sofa to rest. He always preferred lying
down or standing to sitting. He had high desks made at
which he would stand when writing.
In September, 1861, the Bagehots were in search of a quiet
out-of-the-way seaside place, not too far from London. In
the Diary, 23rd September, is recorded : " We started for
Christchurch at 3 and reached it at 7, and put up at Newly n's
Hotel. 24th. — Drove till dark looking for watering places —
to Mudeford, Milford and Kielhaven — nearly as far as Hurst
Castle. 25th. — Drove to Mudeford and took Mount Pleasant.
Found Zoe and Emy arrived from London at hotel. 29th
September, Sunday. Beautiful mild day. Walter and I sat
on beach and he read me poetry from Palgraves Collection.
Walter, Zoe and Emy walked afternoon to opposite hills
across the ferry. 3Oth. — Walter, Zoe and Emy went to
beach before breakfast. Afternoon. — I had a donkey and we
all went to the opposite hills, taking the donkey in the ferry-
boat, and sat in the heather. Went round by sand hills, and
donkey lay down with me and sunk in the mud. We were
obliged to get assistance and leave Walter with the donkey
boy, and got home in the dark. A sea-captain helped the
donkey out."
"THE ECONOMIST" 363
This is the plain statement of an event which lives in my
memory as a very amusing picture. Walter's boyish delight
in a comical situation came out in full force. He had always
enjoyed a joke against my sister for her preferring donkeys
to more spirited animals. He entirely enjoyed the donkey's
behaviour on that evening. The sun had gone down behind the
sand hills above us, and a deep shadow was cast over the
group surrounding the passive animal, who did not seem to
mind in the least how far down in the mud he sank. It was
a lonely piece of country, without trees or houses in sight.
Walter managed with difficulty to get the donkey to stand on
its legs, but the legs began sinking into the mud. Then he
sent the donkey boy to fetch boards, and scooped each leg
separately out of the mud, and placed them on the boards.
But boards and legs together began to sink, and were con-
tinuing to do so when we sisters fled, leaving Walter and the
donkey boy to cope with the situation, as twilight was fast
turning into darkness. How the " sea-captain " succeeded in
extricating the donkey history does not relate, but Walter
returned to Mount Pleasant saying that he had.
The October number of the National Review containing
Bagehot's article on " The American Constitution " came out
while we were at Mudeford, and from Mount Pleasant, Walter
wrote to Mr. Gladstone : " I have ventured to desire the
publishers of the National Review to send you the last
number, which contains an article of mine on the ' American
Constitution ' and its effects just now. It has seemed to me
that these have been a good deal overlooked in the midst of
the more striking facts of the present crisis, and yet that they
are very important. I should not, however, send you my
article if what I have heard called the ' Plenary power of not
reading ' did not place the remedy in your own hands.
" I am,
" Yours sincerely,
"WALTER BAGEHOT."
Mr. Gladstone wrote in answer from Hawarden : —
" DEAR MR. BAGEHOT — I thank you very much for having
364 LIFE OF WALTER B AGE HOT
favoured me with a copy of the National Review : and I have
lost no time in reading your very able and highly instructive
article on the American Constitution.
" I have always thought, and still think it, the greatest
work that was ever struck off at a heat by the makers of such
articles. Nor do I think the framers of 1787 are discredited
by the failure of 1861, when we remember what has occurred
between I am afraid the case stands much worse for their de-
scendants than for them. Not the rupture but the work of
meeting the rupture is damaging indeed. I agree, however,
in all your strictures upon their work ; but there is one point
on which I am moved at any rate to a suspense of judgment.
I am by no means clear that the secession is expressly for-
bidden by the Constitution, and think it arguable — as far as my
recollection goes — that the present case is a Casus omissus
in the document. If it be so, the South have much to say on
the point of competency, however bad may be the result of
their movement."
In February, 1862, Bagehot delivered a lecture at the
Langport Literary and Scientific Institution. His subject was
Literature and he advised his audience to make it a rule of
reading the whole of the Times every day, including the ad-
vertisements. It would know then, he said, what the world
was really about.
In May, 1862, there is an entry in the Diary: "Walter
dined at Mr. Crabb Robinson's to meet Mr. F. D. Maurice,
Dr. Martineau, Mr. Taylor, and Mr. Cookson ". The day after
this dinner it is recorded that the Bagehots left for Bognor in
the afternoon. The following day Walter began writing his
pamphlet on the " Great Expenditure in Preparation for War ".
He had gone into retreat to Bognor for the purpose of writing
this pamphlet. It was finished in two days and christened
Count your Enemies and Economise your Expenditure.
During that visit to Bognor, Walter read to my sister Mr.
Hutton's " Tract for Priests and People on the Incarnation ".
This "Tract" was Mr. Hutton's declaration of faith, which
severed him unmistakably from every grade of religious
opinion outside the Roman or Anglican Church. He resigned
"THE ECONOMIST" 365
the editorship of the National Review in June, 1862. Mr.
Charles Henry Pearson, Fellow of Oriel College, Oxford,
succeeded him. In 1862 Mr. Pearson wrote in The Story of
My Life : " I was asked if I would take the editorship of the
National Review, which Hutton had just resigned. He and
Grant Duff recommended me for the post, and I indiscreetly
accepted it, partly because I did not thoroughly understand
the difficulties of the situation. Although not professedly an
organ of Unitarian views, the National Review had been
founded by James Martineau and a few friends who disliked
the tone of the Westminster Review as too negative. Under
the brilliant editorship of Hutton and Bagehot the Review
rose to a circulation of 1,500 in England and America, and
was able to pay its way. When the American war broke out
the American sale stopped altogether, and the editors had to
fall back upon the founders of the Review for support. This
was forthcoming, but could only be looked upon as a tem-
porary expedient. . . . Hutton, who had long wished to break
off his connection with the Review, now definitely resigned.
The intense conviction with which he held the doctrine of the
Incarnation made even a neutral position on that point dis-
tasteful to him, and he chafed under the pecuniary obligation
to a Unitarian benefactor whose views could not be represented
in the Review. I saw no insurmountable difficulty in the
situation. I could not have worked a Unitarian review, but
the idea of inviting impartial criticism and discussion from
men of all opinions appeared thoroughly satisfactory. I was
reasonably confident that I could enlist several of the more
liberal Anglicans in the service of the Review''
A cordial feeling sprang up between Bagehot and Mr.
Pearson. On 23rd May, 1863, the Diary relates that " Walter
and I went to Oxford — dined with Mr. Pearson in the Fellows'
common room at Oriel College, and met the Master of Lincoln
and Mrs. Pattison, Mr. Henry and Miss Smith, Mr. Grote,
Mr. Hutton and Dr. Acland. 24th. — Walter breakfasted at
Oriel with Mr. Pearson, the Smiths, etc. After service Mr.
Pearson took us and Mr. Hutton to the Museum, Exeter
Chapel, and Balliol, where we lunched with Dr. Jowett.
366 LIFE OF WALTER BAGEHOT
Walter dined in Balliol Hall and I with Miss Smith, where
the gentlemen joined us."
Differences of opinion arose, however, between Mr. Pearson
and Bagehot as to the proportion theology ought to take in
the pages of the National Review. Mr. Pearson considered
" that theology was the dead weight against which the Review
had to struggle ". Bagehot thought that there ought to be
at least two religious articles in every number. " I determined,"
wrote Mr. Pearson, " to resign the editorship. My connection
with the Review lasted altogether a year. (July 1862 to July
1863.) I felt giving up the National Review very much." *
Bagehot remained sole editor till the end of 1 864, when
the Review died. Bagehot's interest in it had been great. It
had brought him congenial work when he had felt a special
need of it. That need no longer existed, but he felt parting
with it as from an old friend.
In the month of August, 1863, the Bagehots made a
journey in France to visit some of the cathedrals and churches
at Abbeville, Rouen, Caen, Vitre, Mont St. Michel. They
came upon the Francis Palgraves making a similar tour.
Bagehot writes to one of his sisters-in-law from Avranches :
"We are here in Normandy, moving about and amusing
ourselves in old French towns. It amuses me and is
beautifully idle, as we do not see the monumens parti-
cularly or laboriously. I met here, however — that is in Nor-
mandy and not at Avranches — an old friend of mine, Palgrave,
— the man whose artistic handbook to the exhibition was so
much abused, — and he has expounded the cathedrals, and
made us understand a little. He is just married to a young
wife of a Unitarian family, after writing poetry about a mil lion
women, and publishing much of it." During this tour the
Bagehots paid a visit to M. Guizot at his Chateau Val Richer,
near Lisieux. His daughters, the Mesdames de Witt and
their husbands were living there with him at that time.
It was in 1863 that the friendship began between Bagehot
and Lord and Lady Carnarvon. After paying his first visit
1 The Story of My Life, Charles Henry Pearson.
"THE ECONOMIST" 367
to Highclere he writes in a letter : " I have been at Highclere,
Lord Carnarvon's, who is one of my sort, and has run to mind,
and wanted me to help to keep his house more decently
reasonable while the fast people were there. We had Lord
and Lady Ashley, Lord Stanhope (Lady Carnarvon's brother),
Lady Dorothy Neville — a pretty woman with an old husband,
and several young men. The women wore wonderful dresses,
and we played cards rather high, always in the evening and
sometimes in the morning — at least some people played in the
morning. — I kept my character for wisdom and did not.
Lord Carnarvon will be Secretary of State for the Colonies
when the Tories come in. Lady Carnarvon is very clever and
literary — at least with snaps of Literature. They will be
people for some years to come, for they are both clever, very
ambitious and have a beautiful place near London to entertain
in." The friendship formed at this time between Bagehot
and the Carnarvons resulted in pleasant intercourse and fre-
quent visits which continued up to the time of Bagehot's
death.
After this first visit Lord Carnarvon writes from Torquay :
" Lady C. has just; shown me your letter to her and I
see by it that you .are in the West of England. We hope
to go to-morrow to our Somersetshire place, which my
mother makes her head-quarters, and as you will then not be
at any great distance I cannot resist pressing you to come
over and let me show you what is — I need not scruple to say
— a beautiful country, though it is somewhat out of the world.
My mother will be delighted to make your acquaintance and
you will like to know her. We propose to stay there till
next Monday, 28th, and on any day between this and that day
you will be welcome. I ought to warn you that you will have
a rather long drive, though a very pretty one, from Tiverton.
I have just finished Freeman's Norman Conquest. It is by far
to my mind the best thing he has ever done, and in my humble
judgment I rate it very highly as a piece of historical criticism.
If you come to us I shall look forward to talking some of the
points over with you. I have educated myself too much on
Sir F. Palgrave to accept one or two of his doctrines."
368 LIFE OF WALTER B AGE HOT
His best energies Bagehot expended in writing. During
the year 1862 he wrote the pamphlet Count Your Enemies
and Economise Your Expenditure, three articles for the National
Review — "Lady Mary Wortley Montagu," "The Ignorance
of Man," and "Mr. Clough's Poems," — and at least two
articles every week for the Economist. In its pages between
the years 1859 and 1877 are found articles by him on all the
events political and commercial of any significance that took
place during that time. For these eighteen years he was
responsible for everything that appeared in the Economist,
and having regard to the special character of the journal,
he naturally felt it to be all-important that nothing should
appear, or be supposed to appear, without the full sanction
of the one who was directly responsible. Frequently would
he emphasise that it was the Economist and the Economist
alone, that spoke. Glancing, however, through those old
numbers, Bagehot's own pen is very easily discerned, not
merely from the style, but from the manner in which the
matter is treated. The authoritative tone, denoting full know-
ledge and a deliberate judgment, the wide aspect taken of a
subject, the general principles on which arguments were based,
the realistic and humorous asides worked into most questions,
distinctly mark the articles to be by him. Take, for instance,
two characteristic articles headed, " The Emperor of the
French," in the issues of 28th November and 5th December,
1863, written at the time when Europe was alive with rumours
of war. Since the days of the Coup d'£tat Bagehot had watched
the career of Napoleon III. with keen interest, speculating on
what would come next, what would be the denouement of it
all — whether or not, his own theories would be corroborated
by events. Ending the first of these articles he writes :• —
"To sum up all, he has a restless, scheming, brooding,
cavernous mind ; daring in idea — hesitating when it comes to
action ; a singular mixture of tenacity and inconsistency ;
recoiling before the difficult and hazardous ; shrinking from
the irrevocable ; and certain not to venture on the desperate.
For the rest, unusually far-seeing and forecasting ; thoroughly
understanding his nation, his day, and his position ; and,
« THE ECONOMIST" 369
perhaps, beyond any other statesman in the world, acting
with a purpose and on a system."
Bagehot felt very keenly the death of Sir George Corne-
wall Lewis which occurred in 1 863. " There has been no states-
man in our time whom he [Bagehot] liked so much or regretted
so deeply," wrote Mr. Hutton. Sir G. C. Lewis felt a singularly
warm affection for my father. It was rare in him to entertain
any such distinct feeling for a colleague.1 It was this friend-
ship which started in the first instance an intimacy between
him and Bagehot. They met frequently. Sir G. C. Lewis's
intellectual attainments attracted Bagehot even more perhaps
than his powers as a statesman, great as these were. As a
study his unique personality was eminently interesting to
Bagehot, as shown in the article which appeared in the October
number of the National Review, i863.2
In the Economist of loth September, 1864, Bagehot wrote
on " The Tribute at Hereford to Sir G. C. Lewis," on the
occasion of the uncovering of his statue. The article con-
cluded with the following passage : " Sir George Lewis is gone,
but he has left a remembrance in many minds which will not
grow cold while they are still warm. For many years it will,
to many, be much to have known one who was learned and
yet wise, just but yet kind ; considerate and observing, and
yet never in the least severe."
These words might justly be quoted of Bagehot himself.
In answering a letter from Mr. Gladstone, who had read the
1 This friendship dated from early days. Kent House, Knightsbridge,
where Sir G. C. and Lady Theresa Lewis lived in London, is associated
with many memories of childhood, tt was there my two sisters (Mrs.
Orbey Shipley, and Mrs. W. S. Halsey) and I (aged eight) made our debut
at a children's ball given by Lady Theresa for her two young daughters.
She also arranged classes for singing and drawing in order that they
should have companionship, which classes I joined. Every Saturday
afternoon during the summer Alice Lister (Lady Borthwick) entertained us
in the garden of Kent House. I remember well the grace and kindness of
her elder sister (Mrs. Vernon Harcourt), and the delightful geniality of
Lady Theresa. Sir G. C. Lewis I can only recollect as a grave figure,
seen, if at all, in the distance.
2 A Dialogue on the Best Form of Government, by the Right Hon.
Sir G. C. Lewis, Bart., M.P., London, 1863.
24
37° LIFE OF WALTER BAGS HOT
article, Bagehot writes : " I am very gratified to find that you
think I have not entirely missed the mark in my estimate.
There is no picture of Sir G. Lewis in the public mind, and I
suppose there will never be. The Times said he was ' a dis-
tinguished expositor of Niebuhr's opinions,' and I suppose if
there was anything he wished not to have been said, this
was it."
In November, 1863, we were painfully reminded of our
great calamity resulting from the Indian climate. We were
seeing Lady Augusta Bruce and her sister, Lady Charlotte
Locker, who were staying at St. James's Place. In the Diary
there is an entry : " 27th November. — Lady Charlotte Locker
called in the morning and lunched with us. Had a telegram
from Lady Elgin stating that Lord Elgin had been very ill ;
but was better." " 28th November.— Telegraph published
announcing Lord Elgin's life despaired of on the I4th."
Lord Elgin telegraphed from Dharmsala his resignation of
the Governor-Generalship, and " summoned to his bedside
from Calcutta Dr. Macrae, the same physician who had
attended James Wilson in his last illness ". He died before
the month was out. Bagehot wrote a striking article in the
Economist of 5th December, headed, " The Indian Vice-
royalty," in which he stated how universally the appointment
of Sir John Lawrence to replace Lord Elgin had been approved,
and explained the reason of this general satisfaction, both in
England and in India. He describes the difference of the
qualities required in an English Premier and an India Viceroy.
" ' He'll keep the horses straight,' say the clubs of a Minister
whom they expect to be efficient, the movement of the horses
being taken for granted. ' He'll make the horses " chub "
(go) will be the remark on Sir John Lawrence, the immobility
of the steeds being the habitual starting-point. . . . Above
all, the Viceroy has from the special necessity of his position,
as representative of a civilised race among a half-civilised one,
to keep a vast population which wants to recede, perpetually
advancing. He must compel it somehow to become every
year a little more orderly, a little more enlightened, a little
more wealthy, a little more ready to keep step with the march
" THE ECONOMIS T" 371
of European ideas ; and to do it he must have driving power.
Wisdom, knowledge, originality, experience, tact, everything
Englishmen value are, without this one faculty, simply value-
less. Be the road laid out ever so well, the mass will not stir
till it is pushed, and he who pushes hardest gets it along most
inches. The single quality, in fact, without which an Indian
Viceroy fails, is that which, for want of a better word, we
must term ' force ' ; and it is because Sir John Lawrence has
force, and has it in an exceptional and most unusual degree,
that he will make a better Viceroy than any of the many
statesmen who in every quality, save that, may surpass him."
During the autumn of 1864, various circumstances necessi-
tated Bagehot's remaining within easy reach of London. After
staying a month at Herd's Hill he and my sister settled at
Great Mario w for six weeks in the Angler's Inn on the river.
The associations of the place with Shelley were attractive.
From boyhood Bagehot had found a friend in Shelley.
When at Bristol College, at the age of thirteen, he wrote to
his father that he had found consolation in a fit of depression
by reading Shelley. In 1849 he wrote a paper on Shelley
which he sent to his friend Roscoe to criticise. This did not
appear in print, though probably some of it was incorporated
in the article which was published in the National Review in
1856. The intensity of Shelley's genius fascinated Bagehot.
"An idea," he writes, "an emotion grew upon his brain, his
breast heaved, his frame shook, his nerves quivered with the
'harmonious madness' of imaginative concentration." The
crystalline delicacy of Shelley's verse awoke a thrill of delight ;
the strange tragedy in Shelley's life aroused a pitiful specula-
tive wonder. " It shows," Bagehot wrote, "how the impulsive
temperament, not definitely intending evil, is hurried forward,
so to say, over actions and crimes which would seem to in-
dicate deep depravity, — which would do so in ordinary human
nature, but which do not indicate in it anything like the same
degree of guilt. Driven by singular passion across a tainted
region, it retains no taint ; on a sudden it passes through evil
but preserves its purity. So curious is this character that a
record of its actions may read like a libel on its life." In
24*
372 LIFE OF WALTER B AGE HOT
1816 Shelley and his wife visited Thomas Love Peacock at
Great Marlow, and in 1817 returned there for a year. They
lived in Albion House, a dwelling now divided into two resi-
dences, making part of a street, but then a house by itself on a
country road. Still can be seen the garden which Shelley
describes, and the " mound surrounded by cypresses and yews
with a cedar tree among them ". " My thoughts for ever
cling to Windsor Forest and the copses of Marlow," wrote
Shelley from Lucca. In his boat The Vaga he had wandered
up and down the reaches of the Thames. " I have often met
him," writes one of Lady Shelley's friends, " going or coming
from his island retreat near Medenham Abbey. . . . He was
the most interesting figure I ever saw ; his eyes like a deer's,
his white throat unfettered." 1 It was at Great Marlow, maybe
in this island retreat, hidden by leaning willows and crowded
quivering rushes, near the ancient Abbey, that Shelley wrote
" Laon and Cythna " and " The Revolt of Islam ". In that
year at Great Marlow the pamphlet " A Proposal for putting
Reform to the Vote " and Mrs. Shelley's " Frankenstein " also
were written.
Soon after arriving at Great Marlow, the Bagehots asked
me to join them there. It was a delightful visit. Much time
was spent on the river, and there were many lovely things to
draw. The ponies had arrived from Herd's Hill, and Walter's
horse from London. Nowhere was he so happy as in the
saddle, and driving the ponies came next among out-of-door
pleasures. Everything connected with Walter Bagehot seemed
to borrow something of his own individuality. His ponies,
" Charlie " and " Fanny," his horse " Plaything," were somehow
more distinctly his own than other people's horses and ponies
seem to be theirs. Most mornings Bagehot rode, most after-
noons he drove us in my sister's phaeton, most evenings we
rowed on the river and much poetry was read.
At Great Marlow, besides writing articles for the Economist,
he was engaged on his last contribution to the National
Review : " Wordsworth, Tennyson and Browning, or Pure,
1 See quotation from Professor Dowden's Life in Clement Snorter's
High-ways and Byways in Buckinghamshire.
"THE ECONOMIST" 373
Ornate and Grotesque Art in English Poetry ". Poetry fitted
well into the atmosphere of the place. The incidents of one
afternoon I recollect very clearly. A lady friend of mine,
also staying with the Bagehots, drove the ponies instead of
Walter. He rode, and I walked by " Plaything's" side. We
went along paths by the river-side, out-of-the-way lanes, and
through the copses immortalised by Shelley, talking as we
went, Walter humorous and quaint, "Plaything" ambling
and inclined to resent being restrained to keep pace with me.
It was an afternoon when every colour was intensified. The
sun struck with dazzling storm-heat on the river, a bright
steely light flashed on the river reeds, the grass was aglow
with gold shining through the green. We had wandered on
for a couple of miles, not noticing that one side of the sky was
inky purple. Then we saw drops like big black wafers fall at
our feet ; things began to move, — before, nothing had moved ;
a wind got up, fretting tbe surface of the water, sweeping the
rushes flat with the stream, swaying the branches of the trees
and whisking the foliage this way and that. Sheaves of silver
willow sprays bowed low across the banks. Then the rain
fell in torrents, the storm was there in good earnest, and we
were two miles from the Anchor Inn. As at the Needles in
the Isle of Wight, in the sea-storm, so, in this land storm,
Walter's spirits rose as the elements became turbulent. He
was very happy and much enlivened. The return journey was
hilarious. We were being pelted on and buffeted by wind
and driving rain. " Plaything " was exasperated at having to
go at foot's pace. I did my best to hurry up. At last we
got back to the inn, — in the highest spirits — drenched.
Early in January, 1865, while the Bagehots were paying
their annual Christmas visit to Herd's Hill, Mr. Gladstone
wrote to Walter saying he should like to see him with refer-
ence to the Bank Notes Issue Bill which he purposed bringing
forward. The bill caused much discussion. Many interests
were at stake. It was altered and re-altered. Bagehot wrote
exhaustively on it in the pages of the Economist, and took an
active part in the discussions at the bankers' meetings which
took place in London, and by communicating confidentially
374 LIFE OF WALTER B AGE HOT
with Mr. Gladstone, he appears to have acted as a medium
between the bankers and the Chancellor of the Exchequer.
After seeing Bagehot in January, Mr. Gladstone writes from
Hawarden the following letter marked Private : —
" On Friday when I had the pleasure of seeing you I
mentioned that I had had under consideration last summer a
plan which would have abolished all Banking restrictions for
issuing banks, and would have imposed on them a moderate
charge in consideration of the boon. I mentioned to you at
the time that I was not clear in the recollection of particulars ;
and I have not had the means of correcting my recollection
since I saw you by reference to papers. But I have it to a
certain degree by reflecting on what occurred : and I am now
desirous to beg you to consider what I send as good for no
purpose but the precise one for which I quoted it, namely as
supporting the view that the proper basis for a voluntary
commutation would not therefore of necessity be the proper
basis for a compulsory measure.
" The compulsory or general form was that in which the
plan first occurred to me : but that I think had been altogether
cast aside before the time when I had some communications
with you on the subject of a voluntary arrangement. Forgive
this trouble."
In March Bagehot writes to Mr. Gladstone : —
" Since I saw you the deputation on bank issues have sent
round the heads of the remonstrances they addressed to you.
I cannot admit that as a principle it is vicious for a bank to
draw on itself. Indeed it would be absurd to prevent the
branches of a bank drawing on one another or on the head
office. By an accident certain banks are excluded from
London, but they draw on any place where they are allowed
to have a bank. There is no magic in the place, London : if
it be vicious for a bank to draw on itself, it is as vicious to
draw on Bristol as on London. Secondly. This notion has
nothing to do with banks of issue. The London & South
Western Bank, which was established yesterday and has no
issue, is allowed to draw on London, but if this banking were
right a bill ought to he brought in to prevent it. The alleged
"THE ECONOMIST" 375
principle is a principle of banking, not of issue. Thirdly.
The whole notion, I maintain, is based on a confusion of bills
based on the sale of goods with remittance bills, bills having
reference to the transit of money. It is of course vicious that
a firm should draw a sale bill on itself, for it cannot sell to
itself. The notion of purchase implies a distinct buyer, and a
distinct seller. But it is otherwise with the remittance of
money. If £100 is paid to Rothschild in Paris for remittance
to England, Rothschild in Paris gives a bill on Rothschild in
London, and surely without objection. There is no reason
why the remitter and the remittee should be distinct people, as
there is why the seller and buyer should be distinct people.
Of course remittance business may be badly conducted like
any other business, and it requires a certain capital, but, within
proper limits, the transmission of money from place to place,
by means of drafts by a bank with establishments in both
places, is quite legitimate. Fourth. If the practice is to be
put down it will revolutionise the Exchange business of the
world. Time out of mind it has been conducted by family
drafts of Jew on Jew. In an account published yesterday
the Agra Bank shows nearly £$ ,000,000 of such exchange
drafts. If the practice is bad there are the flagrant criminals.
The inland drafts of the country are diminishing in conse-
quence of the increased use of cheques, but the exchange in
foreign drafts of bank on bank are growing and likely to grow
with a marvellous rapidity.
" I beg your pardon for writing this to you, but I am very
angry at seeing my name in the same paper with opinions from
which I entirely dispute, and with the promulgation of which
I had in fact nothing to do."
Mr. Gladstone forwarded this letter to a colleague who,
when returning it, adds this note : —
" Thanks many. I am glad to think he has in his hands
better reasons than any other person of explaining his own
views to the world with efficient authority.
In April, Bagehot writes to Mr. Gladstone : —
" I am very much obliged to you for sending me in writing
the proposed changes in the Bank of Issue Bill.
376 LIFE OF WALTER B AGE HOT
" Mr. Rod well will send you the formal thanks of the
Committee. The matter will take a little time in consequence
of the scattered residences of the issuing bankers, but I hope
and believe that you will have very little, if any, further
trouble with us. Any other changes we may suggest will, I
hope, be of a very subordinate character, and that the bill as
altered will have the entire assent and the substantial support
of the issuing bankers."
A day later Bagehot writes to Mr. Gladstone : —
"It of course is not possible to predict with certainty what
such a body as the bankers may precisely do, but in this case
I have no reasonable doubt that after the alterations you have
so kindly made, they will give their best aid to the bill. I am
sure they ought, and I am confident they will."
In the spring of 1865 Bagehot and Mr. Goschen (Lord
Goschen) held consultations together on the proposed Con-
solidated Bank, a question which had been fully discussed in
the Economist. The Goschen family had been for some years
among our London acquaintances, but it was at this time that
a closer intimacy sprang up between Mr. Goschen and Bagehot,
and the esteem and liking each had for the other led to a fre-
quent intercourse which continued to the end of Bagehot's life.
At Highclere, Bagehot was frequently meeting Liberal
no less than Conservative politicians. In this year, 1865, Lord
and Lady Salisbury and Mr. Robert Lowe were fellow guests
with Bagehot Lord Carnarvon had no party prejudices. He
was drawn towards Bagehot none the less because his creed in
politics was opposed to his own.
CHAPTER XIII.
"THE ENGLISH CONSTITUTION."
ON Sunday, 26th February, 1865, the Diary states: "Walter
called on Mr. Lewes to talk over the Fortnightly Review,
and saw Mrs. Lewes". This was the first of the many
visits he paid to The Priory, St. John's Wood, which visits
continued till the year of Walter's death. As a rule very
reserved, Mrs. Lewes (George Eliot) would at times speak
intimately to Walter Bagehot of her own personal experi-
ences. In him she could count on an understanding of no
ordinary quality. Walter described how she would discuss
with him what she designated " the pain of composition ".
He liked her, and she interested him greatly. Beyond
appreciating her genius he also regarded her as a rare
physiological study. She seemed somewhat unfitted for ordin-
ary society, he said. She was too big, too weighty a being
for the usual world and its ways, and somewhat strange in
respect to its small amenities. He discussed with Mr. Lewes
during these first visits to The Priory the starting and prospects
of the Fortnightly Review. Mr. Lewes, as the editor, was
anxious to obtain contributions from him.
The Fortnightly Review made its debut on I5th May, 1865.
The first chapter of Walter Bagehot's English Constitution
headed the list of contents. At intervals, during a year and
a half the nine chapters of this work appeared under the titles —
(i) " The Cabinet," (2) " The Monarchy," (3) " The Monarchy
(continued)," (4) "The House of Lords," (5) " The House of
Commons," (6) " On Change of Ministry," (7) " Its supposed
Cheques and Balances," (8) "The Pre-Requisites of Cabinet
Government, and the Peculiar Form which They Assumed in
England," (9) " Its History and the Effects of that History
377
378 LIFE OF WALTER B AGE HOT
(conclusion)." The last chapter came out on 1st January,
1867, after Mr. Lewes had ceased to edit the Fortnightly
Review. It would be superfluous to make any comments on
the worth of this book, or the appreciation it has won for itself.
In 1872, from The Poplars, Wimbledon, Bagehot wrote a
rather lengthy introduction to the second edition, explaining
the difficulty a writer experiences in attempting " to sketch a
, living Constitution — a Constitution that is in actual work and
power. The difficulty is that the object is in constant change."
He describes that the best plan, considering what has altered
in the working of the Constitution since the book first appeared
is, " to keep the original sketch in all essentials as it was first
written, and to describe shortly such changes either in the
Constitution itself or in the Constitutions compared with it,
as seem material ! "
Mr. George Lewes gave up the editorship of the Fort-
nightly Review at the end of 1866. The number in which
the last chapter of the English Constitution appeared was un-
edited. On loth February, 1867, the Diary states that "Mr.
John Morley, the new editor of the Fortnightly Review, and
Mr. Sanford dined with us ".
About this time Mr. Goschen wrote to Bagehot : " I sent
you some time ago an essay of Morier on local government.1
I ought to tell you, he was very anxious that you should
see it, as he says, ' I admire Bagehot's writings more than
anybody's, the more so as they form such a delicious contrast
to the only mode I can find of attacking a subject '. I hope
I am not violating a confidence in telling you this."
Also referring to the English Constitution, Mr. A. V.
Dicey writes to Mr. Hutton : " The more, by the way, I study
Bagehot's book the more I admire it, though it so happens
that the legal aspect of the Constitution^with which I am
mainly concerned is that side of it which did not fall within
the scope of his work. I only wish one could accomplish a
tenth as much for the explanation of the law as he did for the
illustration of the Constitution. I do not think any one has
1 Sir Robert Morier, the distinguished diplomatist, brilliant writer of
despatches, and the arch enemy of Bismarck,
« THE ENGLISH CONSTITUTION" 379
read Bagehot's works more carefully than I have. They
really fill one with despair, for he seems to explain with per-
fect ease the kind of things which one can, after the greatest
labour, only make clear (if at all) in language which is so stiff
and pedantic that it disgusts oneself as much as it is likely to
disgust one's readers."
On Sunday, 2nd April, 1865, there is this entry in the
Diary: "Walked in Eaton Square, called on Mrs. Moffatt.
While with her Mr. MofTatt came in from attending Mr.
Cobden's deathbed." At the age of twenty, as already quoted,
Bagehot had written to his old school-fellow, Sir Edward Fry,
" I do not know whether you are much of a free-trader or not.
I am enthusiastic about — , am a worshipper of Richard Cob-
den." When students together at University College, London,
Mr. Hutton and he would fly about London to any gathering
where they had the chance of hearing Cobden speak. Twenty-
one years later Bagehot embodied the vivid impressions of
those days in the first leader in the Economist of 8th April,
1865. " Twenty-three years ago — and it is very strange that it
should be so many years — when Mr. Cobden first began to
hold Free-Trade meetings in the Agricultural districts, people
there were much confused. They could not believe the Cob-
den they saw to be the ' Mr. Cobden that was in the papers '.
They expected a burly demagogue from the North, ignorant
of rural matters, absorbed in manufacturing ideas, appealing
to class-prejudices — hostile and exciting hostility. They
saw a sensitive and almost slender man, of shrinking nerve,
full of rural ideas, who proclaimed himself the son of a farmer,
who understood and could state the facts of agricultural life
far better than most agriculturalists, who was most anxious
to convince every one of what he thought the truth, and who
was almost more anxious not to offend any one. . . . The
tradition is dying out, but Mr. Cobden acquired, even in those
days of Free-Trade agitation, a sort of agricultural popularity.
He excited a personal interest — he left what may be called a
sense of himself among his professed enemies. They were
surprised at finding that he was not what they thought ; they
were charmed to find that he was not what they expected ;
380 LIFE OF WALTER B AGE HOT
they were fascinated to find what he was. The same feeling
has been evident at his sudden death — death at least which
was to the mass of occupied men sudden. Over political Bel-
gravia — the last part of English society Mr. Cobden ever
cultivated — there was a sadness. Every one felt that England
had lost an individuality which it could never have again, which
was of the highest value, which was in its own kind altogether
unequalled. . . . He was a sensitive agitator. Generally
an agitator is a rough man of the O'Connell type, who says
anything himself, and lets others say anything. You ' peg into
me and I will peg into you, and let us see which will win/ is
his motto. But Mr. Cobden's habit and feeling were utterly
different. He never spoke ill of any one. He arraigned
principles but not persons. We fearlessly say that after a
career of agitation of thirty years, not one single individual
has — we do not say a valid charge, but a produceable charge
— a charge which he would wish to bring forward, against
Mr. Cobden. . . . Very rarely, if even ever in history, has a man
achieved so much by his words — been victor in what was
thought at the time to be a class struggle — and yet spoken so
little evil as Mr. Cobden. There is hardly a word to be
found, perhaps, even now, which the recording Angel would
wish to blot. We may on other grounds object to an agitator
who lacerates no one, but no watchful man of the world will
deny that such an agitator has vanquished one of life's most
imperious and difficult temptations.
" Perhaps some of our readers may remember as vividly as
we do a curious instance of Mr. Cobden's sensitiveness. He
said in Drury Lane Theatre, in tones of feeling, almost of
passion, curiously contrasting with the ordinary coolness of
his nature : ' I could not serve with Sir Robert Peel '. After
more than twenty years, the curiously thrilling tones of that
phrase still live in our ears. Mr. Cobden alluded to the charge
which Sir Robert Peel had made, or half made, that the Anti-
Corn Law League and Mr. Cobden had by their action and
agitation, conduced to the actual assassination of Mr. Drum-
mond, his secretary, and the intended assassination of himself,
— Sir Robert Peel. No excuse or palliation could be made
« THE ENGLISH CONSTITUTION" 381
for such an assertion, except the most important one, that
Peel's nerves were as susceptible and sensitive as Mr. Cobden's.
But the profound feeling with which Mr. Cobden spoke of it
is certain. He felt it as a man feels an unjust calumny, an
unfounded stain upon his honour. . . . There has never,
perhaps, been another time in the history of the world when
excited masses of men and women hung on the words of one
talking political economy. The excitement of these meetings
was keener than any political excitement of the last twenty
years, — keener infinitely than any which there is now. It may
be said, and truly, that the interest of the subject was Mr.
Cobden's felicity, not his mind ; but it may be said with equal
truth, that the excitement was much greater when he was
speaking than when any one else was speaking. By a kind
of keenness of nerve, he said the exact word to touch, not
the bare understanding, but the quick individual perception of
his hearers. . . . He did not possess the traditional education
of his country, and did not understand it. ... The late Mr.
Wilson used to say, ' Cobden's administrative powers I do not
think much of, but he is most valuable in counsel, always
original, always shrewd, and not at all extreme '. . . . He
has left us, quite independently of his positive works, of the
repeal of Corn Laws, of the French Treaty, a rare gift — the
gift of unique character. There has been nothing before
Richard Cobden like him in English history, and perhaps
there will not be anything like it."
It was ever the personality — the man himself — the woman
herself — distinctive from their opinions, their achievements,
their position, which stirred in Bagehot his most vivid sym-
pathies. Having that within himself which passed beyond
what is expected of most people, — beyond classifications of
any sort, he felt those who likewise were thus separated from
ordinary people as his nearest fellow-creatures, with whose
natures he could feel a real intimacy. It requires genius to
feel quite at home with genius.
"Sunday, 9th June, 1867. Great Marlow. We strolled
by the river bank opposite Bisham Abbey. Rowed down the
382 LIFE OF WALTER B AGE HOT
river. Evening. I went to church afternoon, and Walter began
his article on Hazlitt for the Fortnightly Review." No record
can be found of this article.
While Bagehot was at this time leading a stirring social and
family life, and at the same time one of pressing business, —
while he was watching every public event at home and abroad,
weighing the rights and wrongs of every current question of
importance and giving judgment thereon in the pages of The
Economist, — interviewing and advising statesmen respecting
measures to be brought before Parliament, a subtle machinery
was at work in his brain weaving into some leading ideas borne
in upon him certain new aspects of thought and science which
had been evolved during the past fifty years or so, and turn-
ing these new aspects on to his own special subjects. The first
chapter of Physics and Politics appeared in the Fortnightly
Review on ist November, 1867, ten months after the con-
clusion ot The English Constitution^
As in the case of the English Constitution it would be su-
perfluous to make many comments on a book which for many
years, in many countries, has taken its place as a classic.
It is at once short, original, easy and profound. Perhaps
more than any other of Bagehot's writings, Physics and Politics
evinces signs of his multifarious gifts, and of the power he
possessed of bringing first principles to bear on practical
usages.
Sir Henry Maine writes : —
"Mv DEAR BAGEHOT,
" Thank you very sincerely for your book on Physics
and Politics. It is practically an old friend. I do not know
that I was ever more struck with anything than with the essays
when they first appeared. I don't think it was your hand-
some allusions to me which influences me — but I am much
obliged to you for them all the same.
" Very sincerely yours,
"H. I. MAINE."
1 This first chapter of Physics and Politics Bagehot then named
" The Pre-economic Age," but when the work came out in book form he
re-christened it " The Preliminary Age ".
" THE ENGLISH CONSTITUTION" 383
^
President Woodrow Wilson wrote : —
" Bagehot's thought is not often constructive. Its business
is generally analysis, interpretation, but in Physics and Poli-
tics it is distinctly creative and architectonic. It was always
his habit to go at once to the Concrete reality of a subject,
lingering scarcely a moment upon its conventionalities : he sees
always with his own eyes, never with another's ; and even anal-
ysis takes from him a certain creative touch. The object of his
thought is so vividly displayed that you seem to see all of it,
instead of only some of it. But here, in speaking of ages past
and gone, his object is reconstruction, and that direct touch
of his imagination makes what he says seem like the report of
an eye-witness. You know, after reading this book, what
an investigator the trained understanding is, a sort of original
authority in itself. Nor is his humour gone or exiled from
these solemn regions of thought. There is an intermittent
touch of it even in what he says of the political force of religion.
' Those kinds of morals and that kind of religion which tend
to make the firmest and most effectual character,' he explains,
' are sure to prevail ' in every struggle for existence between
organised groups or nations of men, ' all else being the same ;
the creeds or systems that conduce to a soft limp mind tend
to perish, except some hard extrinsic force keep them alive.
Thus Epicureanism never prospered at Rome, but Stoicism
did ; the stiff, serious character of the great prevailing nation
was attracted by what seemed a confirming creed. The in-
spiriting doctrines fell upon the ardent character, and so con-
firmed its energy. Strong beliefs win strong men, and then
make them stronger. Such is no doubt one cause why Mono-
theism tends to prevail over Polytheism ; it produces a higher,
steadier character, calmed and concentrated by a great single
object ; it is not confused by competing rites, or distracted
by miscellaneous duties. Mr. Carlyle has taught the present
generation many lessons, and one of these is that ' God-fearing '
armies are the best armies. Before his time people laughed
at Cromwell's saying ' Trust God, and keep your powder dry '.
But we now know that the trust was of as much use as the
powder, if not of more. That high concentration of steady
feeling makes men dare everything and do anything. "
384 LIFE OF WALTER B AGE HOT
Bagehot's reputation as an authority on finance was al-
ready widespread on the Continent in the middle of the sixties.
In the spring of 1865 when M. Rouher was Finance Minister
in France, he invited Bagehot to give evidence before the
Enquete sur les Principes et les Faits generaux qui regissent
la Circulation monetaire et fiduciaire he was about to hold in
Paris. On February 5th Walter and my sister arrived in
Paris where they took rooms in the Grand Hotel. There they
entertained at breakfast many political and financial magnates.
They dined with notable people, attended evening parties,
balls and concerts, and saw much of M. and Mme. Mohl.
The Political Economy Society held their dinner in the Grand
Hotel on the evening after the Bagehots' arrival, and M.
Wolowski fetched Bagehot to introduce him to the Society,
placing him at dinner next M. Passy, the President. A very
interesting three weeks in Paris followed. The Emperor
opened the Corps Legislatif on the I5th, and Bagehot went to
the Grande Salle of the Conseil d?e"tat on the 1 7th to give evi-
dence before the " Conseil Suptrieur charged with the inquiry
into the principles and general facts which regulate the
circulation of money ". The manner in which he was enter-
tained in Paris was flattering and agreeable to him. He found
that in the best Paris society people knew how to talk, more-
over that they had found out that he also could talk. The
briskness and the finish notable in the intellect of the French
savant had an exhilarating effect on Bagehot's nerves, ever
most sensitive to the mental atmosphere about him.
Louis Napoleon had recently published his life of Julius
Caesar, and Bagehot while in Paris wrote the article for the
Economist to which he gave the title C&sarism^
In May, 1865, Bagehot was approached with a view of
his standing in the Liberal interest for Dudley in opposition
to Mr. Sheridan. This he declined doing, but in the follow-
ing month he was asked to stand for Manchester and con-
sented. Mr. Charles Villiers, an old friend of my father's,
and other leading Liberals were interested in Bagehot's
1 See vol. iv. complete edition — reprinted from the Economist, 4th
March, 1865.
" THE ENGLISH CONSTITUTION" 385
prospects of success, and Mr. Gladstone wrote him the
following letter : —
" ii CARLTON HOUSE TERRACE, S.W.,
" \7.thjune, 1865.
" DEAR MR. BAGEHOT,
" It would be very great presumption on my part, in
expressing an opinion as to your qualifications for Parliament,
were I to connect that opinion with any particular constitu-
ency. But of the qualifications themselves neither I, nor, as
I believe, anyone who knows you can have any doubt what-
ever ; and undoubtedly they point, of themselves, to the class
of our great commercial and manufacturing constituencies in
an especial degree. If thorough acquaintance with economic
science, extensive and accurate knowledge, ready and practical
habits of business and a conciliatory disposition, go to fit a
man for the representation of these great national interests,
it certainly appears to me that your fitness must stand without
dispute in the first rank."
The diary, however, narrates : "Walter spoke at a meeting
in the Town Hall at Manchester to about 400 people, but was
badly received and gave up standing ".
In a family letter Walter wrote : " I tried to get
into Parliament for Manchester this year, but Manchester
could not ' see it '. I had a letter from Mr. Gladstone re-
commending me, but it was of no use. They said, ' If he is
so celebrated, why does not Finsbury elect him ? '
The lack of success which attended the three attempts
Bagehot made to get into Parliament was a fact which puzzled
many of his friends. Manchester was severely criticised in
some of the newspapers for having rejected him, but these
criticisms did not explain the reason why Manchester had
done so. Walter Bagehot was known among his friends as a
brilliant talker, but the success of his talk depended much on
what the person was like to whom he was talking. As noted
before, he never monologued, and when he made a speech he
seemed to have failed in rhetorical power. His voice was
not adapted to public speaking. Still, many men get into
Parliament who are not successful public speakers and who
25
386 LIFE OF WALTER B AGE HOT
have no distinguished powers such as Bagehot possessed. To
those who knew him most intimately, the puzzle that presented
itself was, not why he did not succeed in getting a seat in the
House, but why he ever attempted to do so ; why he ever
thought of complicating his existence with duties which in
nowise would aid his inner life of thought already rinding ex-
pression in such work as that of the English Constitution. The
answer to this puzzle would be found, I believe, in the fact
that strong home ties still influenced Bagehot's actions. His
father, though deeply interested in politics, would not have
attached much importance to any worldly prominence which
Bagehot's gifts might have obtained for him, but his mother
would have thoroughly enjoyed distinction of that kind for
him. His position was not sufficiently defined to please her.
That distinguished politicians held a high opinion of him was
not enough, she wished him to be a distinguished politician
himself. Bagehot would have done much to give his mother
any pleasure. He felt so sorely for her in her saddest of
troubles ; but he could not put much real zest into his attempts
to get a seat. He was expected to get into Parliament, and
he went so far as to take the necessary measures when pressed
by others to do so, but he had no fervent faith in the advant-
ages of a Parliamentary career, no belief that it could aid the
higher life — at all events not his higher life. There was a
grain of cynicism in his attitude towards the electors which
doubtless crept out and which tended to damp enthusiasm
when it came to a contest. Many candidates may view with
cynicism the part they have to play at an election, and feel
that a little acting is necessary in their intercourse with the
Philistine elector, and forthwith they set about to act their
part. But acting was not in Bagehot's line:
Much more to his liking were the wonders of the Alps.
Twenty-one years had passed since he had been ravished by
the beauty of the mountains of Switzerland in company
with his Uncle and Aunt Reynolds. In August, 1865, he
found himself there again with my sister, driving over passes,
riding mules on long day excursions, rowing in boats on the
Lake of Geneva, watching storms and rainbows — marvels of
« THE ENGLISH CONSTITUTION" 387
light and colour on the heights of Mont Blanc — walking by
moonlight along the lake, reading Ruskin's rapturous utter-
ances on mountain forms in Modern Painters.
Diary, " Qth September, 1865, Chamonix. Studied
Ruskin's chapter on Aiguilles with the examples under my
own eyes from the window. loth. We had mules and went
to the ' Source de 1'Arderon ' and into the grotto of ice at the
foot of the glacier des Bos. (the writing is interrupted here
and there by a dried piece of heather and tiny flowers picked
that day — still staining the page of Pawsey's London Diary).
1 4th. Walter wrote all day for the Fortnightly — English Consti-
tution. 1 6th. Sat in the garden reading nearly all day. We
rowed on the lake in the afternoon." Many days, the diary
relates, it was sitting in the garden all day and rowing on the
lake, with now and then an article sent off for the Economist.
From Geneva, Walter writes : " We are here amusing our-
selves on the lake in as idle a manner as it is possible to con-
ceive. So far from climbing mountains, we object to walk up
a hill, and if we stay long enough, shall order a carriage to
cross a molehill. I never can enjoy scenery when I am racket-
ted; I like to sit down quietly in some charming place and
let it sink into my mind."
By the middle of October, when the Bagehots and the rest
of our family, after being scattered for the autumn months,
had collected together again in Upper Belgrave Street, an
event of great public importance occurred, one which also
awakened in us many personal memories connected with my
father. On the i8th October, 1865, Lord Palmerston died at
Brockett Hall, Herts. From the year 1846, when my father
first entered Parliament to the time of his leaving for India,
he had had constant intercourse with Lord Palmerston, and the
family attended Lady Palmerston's parties, which were expected
to take place as regularly as Court functions, and were the
most notable gatherings •, for all who moved in the so-called
London world. Bagehot had had no personal intercourse with
Lord Palmerston, but had studied his career as he did that of all
contemporary and past statesmen, and wrote an article on him
in the Economist three days after his death,
388 LIFE OF WALTER B AGE HOT
In the previous year in the article entitled " The Tribute
at Hereford to Sir G. C. Lewis," is to be found the following
passage relating to Lord Palmerston : " It is very curious that
Lord Palmerston, who spoke, so to say, Sir George Lewis's
epitaph, should have had the slowest, and that Sir George
Lewis should have had the most rapid political rise of our
time. Unquestionably, Lord Palmerston is in some sense a
buoyant man, and Sir George Lewis was in some sense a
heavy man, yet the latter came to the surface far quicker.
Lord Palmerston was a quarter of a century in Parliament
before he was anything at all — before he was more than a sub-
altern official ; Sir George Lewis was only thirteen years in
Parliament altogether, and in that time he was Secretary of
the Treasury, Chancellor of the Exchequer, Home Secretary,
Secretary for War, and had acquired the perfect respect and
confidence of the House of Commons. He finished his
whole career as a statesman in about half the number of
years that it took Lord Palmerston to become a statesman
at all."
In the Economist of 28th October, 1865, an article appeared
by Bagehot on " The New Ministry," commencing with the
following passages : " The Queen acted wisely in desiring that
Lord Palmerston might be buried in Westminster Abbey. As
we trace these lines his remains are being borne thither. It is
easy to scoff at these great national ceremonies, for such they are.
But such jests are weak and harmless. It will be centuries be-
fore Englishmen are indifferent to Westminster Hall or West-
minster Abbey — ' the place,' Lord Macaulay said, ' where the
great men of twenty generations have contended, the place
where they sleep together.'
" The best epitaph on Lord Palmerston is the effect
of his death. It is the end of a political period. It has
been said that the new Government would be Lord Palmer-
ston's Government minus Lord Palmerston ; it would be
as wise to propose a solar system minus the sun. Lord
Palmerston was the centre of attraction of his system. He
had an influence, not over any single party or set of men, for
he was disliked, or but half-liked, by the real zealots of every
" THE ENGLISH CONSTITUTION" 389
party ; but over the common, sensible, uncommitted mass of
the nation who now-a-days do not strictly or rigidly adhere
to any party. Through all the divisions of our present England
there is a common element which consists of fair, calm, sensible
persons, who have something to lose, who have no intention
of losing it, who hate change, who love improvement, who will
be ruled in a manner they understand. The business of the
nation in all departments is transacted by such men as these.
These are the men who really rule in all localities, in all under-
takings, in all combinations ; and it was over these that Lord
Palmerston possessed unequalled and marvellous influence".
Early in the following spring Bagehot made friends with
one who was a typical example of the " careful, quiet, practical "
Englishman (Bagehot's description of Lord Palmerston's ad-
mirers), though distinguished on important lines apart from
most Englishmen. Bagehot had previously met Lord Avebury
(then Sir John Lubbock) frequently in the City, but it was in
February, 1 866, that they first became intimate.
Diary, i5th February, narrates : "Walter and I dined at
Mr. Greg's and met Sir John and Lady Lubbock, the Froudes,
Henrys, Brodhursts, and Dr. Martineau," and on the i/th,
" Walter and I went to Chiselhurst afternoon where we found
Sir John Lubbock's carriage and drove to High Elms to stay
with him and Lady Lubbock. Four brothers were there,
Mr. Fergusson, and others." i8th. "Walter walked with Sir
John Lubbock and Mr. Fergusson to a Roman camp afternoon.
Mr. Hurst, the mathematician, and Mr. Herbert Spencer joined
the house party. Sir John showed us his collection of flint
implements."
Concern in certain lines of science having been early
awakened in Bagehot through intercourse with his relative Dr.
Prichard, he soon found subjects of mutual interest with Lord
Avebury beyond banking. In one respect there was a notable
similarity in their natures. Both were remarkable for great
kindliness of disposition ; both were essentially human in their
sympathies in a very marked degree.1
1 Lord Avebury was about to write an appreciation of Walter Bagehot
to appear in this Memoir when he was attacked by his last illness. He
390 LIFE OF WALTER B AGE HOT
In June, 1866, Lord Russell's Government was beaten on
the Reform Bill. The week after the Queen accepted his
resignation and Lord Derby came in. In the Economist of
loth November, 1866, Bagehot wrote, "Ought the Tories to
touch a Reform Bill ". He was distinctly of opinion that they
ought not to touch a Reform Bill. In February, 1867, Lord
Derby's Government brought forward their proposals on
Reform, and in the same week Bagehot's friend Lord Carnarvon,
and also Lord Cranbourne, resigned office.
Notwithstanding Manchester's discouraging verdict Bage-
hot's friends in Somerset pressed him to stand for Bridgwater
in the summer of 1866. On May 3rd he saw Mr. Brand and
settled to do so. Deputations arrived at Upper Belgrave
Street from the borough, and Bagehot promised to come for-
ward as the Liberal candidate when the writ was issued, but
not before. Bagehot's friend Mr. Kinglake, the author of
Eothen, and others who knew him well in Somerset, came to
London to talk over electioneering matters with him, and he
certainly became interested in the prospects which were de-
cidedly favourable to him. The writ was issued on 3ist May,
and Bagehot travelled down to Bridgwater on 1st June,
where, the diary says, " He was met by 4000 people, banners
and four grey horses, and addressed the people from the
carriage ". Here, among his own people, he was supported
with enthusiasm, and Mr. Hutton writes, " was completely at
his ease, and his canvass and public speeches were decided
successes ". But it was not to be. Diary, 6th June : " Nomi-
nation at Bridgwater election. Show of hands given in Mr.
Patton's (the Conservative candidate's) favour. The Mayor a
Tory, /th June. Poll at Bridgwater —
wrote on 1 4th January, 1913, from High Elms: "Dear Mrs. Barrington,
I doubt if I can send you anything worthy of Bagehot, for whom, as you
know, I had great admiration and much affection, but I will try. . . .
Bagehot and I met so frequently that we always discussed matters viva
voce, and I am now sorry that that was so, as the result is that I have no
letters from him of any public interest. I am very glad you are writing
his life. His friendship was a great privilege."
" THE ENGLISH CONSTITUTION" 391
8.15 a.m. Bagehot 29
Patton 14
10.15 Bagehot 230
Patton 1 97
4. Patton 301
Bagehot 294
Walter lost by 7."
On Mr. Patton being appointed Lord Advocate a few
weeks later, he had to be re-elected and lost the seat, Mr.
Vanderbeyl beating him by a majority of thirty-seven. In
1868 Bagehot had written in the Economist on the Bribery
Debate in the House of Commons, and later an article on " The
True Way to Prevent Bribery". In the following spring —
the General Election having taken place in the late autumn of
1868 — Mr. Kinglake and Mr. Vanderbeyl were unseated for
bribery at Bridgwater by Mr. Justice Blackburne, who reported
that corrupt practices extensively prevailed in that borough. In
October, 1869, Commissioners were sent down to Bridgwater
to inquire into this corrupt state of things. A tragic incident
occurred, connected with accusations made against candidates
who had stood for the borough, which pointed somewhat to
the necessity of the Commission being held. The Bagehots
were abroad at the time but immediately returned to Eng-
land, and Walter wrote to the Bridgwater Commissioners
asking to be examined, and on I3th October he gave his
evidence. Mr. Hutton writes : " His examination before the
Commissioners was a great success. He not only entirely
defeated the somewhat eagerly pressed efforts of one of the
Commissioners, Mr. Anstey, to connect him with the bribery,
but he drew a most amusing picture of the bribable electors
whom he had seen only to shun.
" ' 42,01 8 (Mr. Anstey). Speaking from your experience of
those streets, when you went down them canvassing, did any
of the people say anything to you, or in your hearing, about
money ? — Yes, one, I recollect, standing at the door who
said, ' ' I won't vote for gentlefolks unless they do something
for I. Gentlefolks do not come to I unless they do something
of I, and I won't do nothing for gentlefolks, unless they do
392 LIFE OF WALTER SAGE HOT
something for me." Of course, I immediately retired out of
that house.
"'42,019. That man[did not give you hispromise? — Ire-
tired immediately ; he stood in the doorway sideways, as these
rustics do.
" ' 42,020. Were there many such instances ? — One or two,
I remember. One suggested that I might have " a place ". I
immediately retired from him.
" ' 42,02 1 . Did anybody of a better class than these voters,
privately, of course, expostulate with you against your resolu-
tion to be pure? — No, nobody ever came to me at all.
" ' 42,022. But those about you, did any of them say any-
thing of this kind : " Mr. Bagehot,you are quite wrong in putting
purity of principles forward. It will not do if the other side
bribes"? — I might have been told that I should be un-
successful in the stream of conversation ; many people may
have told me that ; that is how I gathered that if the other
side was impure and we were pure, I should be beaten.
" ' 42,023. Can you remember the names of any who told
you that ? — No, I cannot, but I dare say I was told by as many
as twenty people, and we went upon that entire considera-
tion.' "
" In his address to the Bridgwater Constituency," again
writes Mr. Hutton, " he criticised most happily the sort of
bribery which ultimately resulted in the disfranchisement of
the place. ' I can make allowance,' he said, ' for the poor
voter; he is most likely ill-educated, certainly ill-off, and a
little money is a nice treat to him. What he does is wrong,
but it is intelligible. What I do not understand is the posi-
tion of the rich, respectable, virtuous members of a party
which countenances these things. They are like; the man
who stole stinking fish ; they commit a crime, and they get
no benefit.' " After the Commission was over Bagehot writes
to Mr. Hutton : " You will like to hear that my reputation for
ability is much raised at Bridgwater since my examination.
They say, 'Ah ! Mr. Bagehot was too many for them. They
broke Westropp but they could not break him.' They regard
it as a kind of skill, independent of fact or truth. ' You win
" THE ENGLISH CONSTITUTION" 393
if you are clever, and you lose if you are stupid,' is their idea
at bottom.
" Constantine Prichard is dead, leaving a large family not
well off, I fear. The old world of our youth breaks up, and the
best people get the worst of it."
In the autumn of 1866, the year of the Bridgwater elec-
tion, Walter's mother became very ill — so ill that she had to
leave home. Walter went down at once to see her at the
doctor's house to which she had been taken. When his
father failed in his endeavours to help her Walter often suc-
ceeded. On a second visit he found her very depressed physic-
ally as well as mentally. He saw Dr. Symonds, the famous
adviser in mental cases, who gave his approval to Mrs. Bagehot
being moved to Sidmouth. Walter and my sister changed
the plans they had made to go elsewhere, and Walter met
his mother at Bristol and took her to Sidmouth, and Mr.
Bagehot and my sister arrived there the same day. This plan
of Walter's was entirely successful, his mother becoming quite
reasonable in mind and well in body under these more cheer-
ful conditions. Underlying the strenuous active life which
Bagehot was habitually leading, two realities acted as magnets
to the deeper feelings of his nature — the home trouble, and the
desire to express in literature the rich crop of ideas ever
germinating in his brain. Compared to these, other interests
seemed to him tame.
Yet another attempt was made by Bagehot's friends in
1867 to secure a seat for him in the House of Commons. Mr.
Hutton was in this case the moving spirit, and the seat was
the University of London. A very long list of influential
supporters was printed and circulated with the following letter
from Walter Bagehot which served as an address to the elec-
tors : —
" Unquestionably we are on the eve of a great change in
our politics. Our University is the most considerable creation
— I was about to say the only considerable creation — of the
'Parliament of 1832'. The labours of that Parliament have
been excellent and fruitful ; but by far the greater part of them
were labours of demolition. It found a great heritage of bad
394 LIFE OF WALTER SAGE HOT
laws, and it was energetic in repealing them. But most of
those laws are gone. And upon that account we every day
hear middle-aged politicians say that 'everything great has
already been carried, and that the new Parliament will have
nothing to do '. I am sure that this is a mistake. The work of
demolition (though not complete) is more than half over, but
the work of reconstruction is yet to begin. Our work is more
difficult, more delicate, more gradual, perhaps, than that of
our fathers ; they had mostly to pull down that they knew to
be evil ; we have tentatively and slowly to erect what we hope
will be good.
" The very name of our University of itself suggests the
greatest and most urgent of our tasks. Thirty years ago we
founded a University for an excluded class ; now we have to
frame, upon the very same principles, an education which will
suit the whole nation. Our University has shown upon what
principles a sound and sensible culture can be given to young
men sincerely bred in different religious creeds, without sacri-
ficing either the faith to the culture or the culture to the faith.
For myself, I believe that the experiment is capable of inde-
finite development. The sudden extension of the franchise
is one of those facts ' of the first magnitude ' which are never
long resisted. After the first Reform Act the cry was, ' Re-
gister ! Register ! Register ! ' The cry should now be,
' Educate ! Educate ! Educate ! ' The State will have to
intervene far more widely than is as yet thought ere the
problem of wide education in a mixed society is solved, and
before the principles of our University are developed to their
proper limit.
" The now secure predominance of popular power must
greatly mitigate our traditional jealousy of the Executive
Government. The English State is but another name for the
English people, and to be afraid of it, is to be alarmed at our-
selves. From countless causes the age of great cities requires
a strong government. The due extension of the functions of
the State in superintending the health and in lessening the
vice and misery of our large towns must receive speedy at-
tention from a Parliament in which most of the inhabitants
of those towns are for the first time directly represented.
" THE ENGLISH CONSTITUTION" 395
" The co-operative, if not the compulsory agency, of the
State ought, too, to be used far more than now in applying to
our complicated society those results of science which are new
to this age, and in aiding such investigations as require com-
bined and costly effort, lasting, perhaps, a long time, and dis-
tributed over many countries. The relation of a free and
intelligent Government to practical science is a new subject,
because such science is very modern, and such Government
almost inconceivably rare.
" But there yet remain ' organic ' questions which are not
as yet set at rest. We have still not only to discuss how we
shall use our Government, but also, in part at least, what shall
be the shape and structure of our Government. Few indeed
will at once again wish — I certainly should not wish — to alter
the franchise, but the size and place of our constituencies have
now been altered just enough to upset old prestige and not
enough to satisfy new events. The growing North of Eng-
land has still far too little weight as compared with the
stationary South, and whatever may once have been the uses
of little boroughs, they will now become wretched nests of
dangerous corruption, which will introduce into Parliament
no remarkable mind and represent there no peculiar interests.
A statesman should sweep away such pernicious remnants
of an extinct organisation, and seek a modern substitute cap-
able of the useful function which they once performed.
" I fear the abolition of these boroughs will cost much time
and many quarrels. Corruption is costly, and it dies hard.
" But another subject more fruitful of strife yet remains.
In Ireland we still maintain a Church of one religion, though
the country is of a different religion. The pretence of its be-
ing a missionary Church has now been given up. Its advocates
have not yet answered the question of Sir Robert Peel, ' Do
you think you can claim a balance of three hundred converts
in three hundred years? ' The Irish Church is no longer sup-
ported by argument, and only lives from day to day because
the old school of Liberal politicians never forget that they once
hurt their party by endeavouring to touch it. But a better
day is, I hope, beginning. A new, and therefore more impul-
sive, Parliament will sweep away the cobwebs of old politicians.
396 LIFE OF WALTER B AGE HOT
The last Liberal Government gave to Ireland the benefit of a
University just like our own ; let us hope that comparatively
small gift may be the beginning of a wiser mode of dealing
with her highest and best interests.
" The first duty, in my judgment, of the next Parliament
will be to restore Mr. Gladstone to power. He is the natural
leader of the Liberal party, and if the Reform Act be a true
improvement, it will strengthen the progressive mind of Par-
liament and augment the Liberal party. I believe that, in
spite of the present triumphs of subterfuge and artifice, Mr.
Gladstone will return to power. His wonderful gifts have
already charmed the nation. In amplitude of knowledge, in
intensity of labour, in a flexible eloquence suited either to the
highest discussions or to the meanest details of public business,
he has no living equal ; and it is no light matter that he will
lead the House of Commons with an eager and noble morality
which tends to raise it and awaken all the nation."
Again, however, it was not to be. The University of
London chose Mr. Robert Lowe as her member, and from
that time Bagehot gave up all idea of entering Parliament.
The following year the Liberal party in'Somerset, especially
the voters in Yeovil, were very desirous that Bagehot should
stand for the county, but he declined doing so. In the
Economist of 7th February, 1874, Bagehot wrote on "The
Advantages and Disadvantages of becoming a Member of
Parliament ". He enumerates the advantages, but concludes
by saying there is a good deal to be said on the other side.
The great financial crisis took place in May, 1866.
Bagehot in the first leader of the Economist of I2th May
writes : " The failure of Overend, Gurney & Co. has given
occasion to a panic more suitable to their historical than to
their recent reputation ". Dated 1 1 th May are notes by
Walter Bagehot written to Mr. Gladstone and preserved by
him marked " W. Bagehot on the City Crisis ".
" A complete collapse of credit in Lombard Street and a
greater amount of anxiety than I have ever seen. Large
orders for notes are sent from the country by country Bankers
and the notes are going down this evening.
" THE ENGLISH CONSTITUTION" 397
" The English Joint Stock Bank has failed. It is small,
but it has scattered branches in different localities and there
are demands for notes for each locality.
" The Banks are said to have discounted largely to-day, and
this would tend to reduce their reserve, but if the notes do
not go into the country, they will come in again.
" There is much foreign money in London invested in bills,
many due in May ; I fear this money will be withdrawn from
a general apprehension that English credit is not to be relied
on. — W. Bagehot, nth May."
"We may congratulate our readers," he writes in the
Economist of iQth May, "and we own that we rejoice our-
selves that the Friday on which we write is not like last
Friday. Last week, Lombard Street looked more like a
country fair than its usual self; most people were asking —
Will the Act be broken? What will Mr. Gladstone do?"
Mr. Gladstone suspended the Bank Charter Act, and Bagehot
writes further in the same article : " The whole mercantile
community quite assents to the infraction of the Act ; indeed,
if it had not been broken this month, it would have been
repealed next. The matter resembled what Mr. Lowe so
happily said of the cattle plague report. He remarked that
all the press wrote down the recommendations of the Com-
missioners, but the disease 'took the' matter' into its own
hands and showed that they were right. Just so the ' panic '
took the matter into its own hands and proved that the Act
could be no longer maintained, — proved it not to theoretical
minds or by fine argument, but to the great bulk of ordinary
men, and by the palpable argument which strikes the massive
common sense of the world."
Bagehot wrote lengthily on the panic in the Economist,
and the following to Mr. Gladstone : —
" 12 UPPER BELGRAVE STREET, S.W.,
"list May, 1866.
" You said to me a few days since that you thought late
events proved the necessity of legislation as to the country
issues, and I am not prepared to deny the truth of the observa-
398 LIFE OF WALTER B AGE HOT
tion or at all to contend that the country as a nation is in a
fit state abstractedly ; but at the same time I very much wish
to bring before you what I think is the true relation of the
country issues to the late panic, as it is a little different from
what the first appearance of the facts might suggest.
" I have no doubt at all that the panic of last Friday week
was 80 per cent, at least of a deposit panic and not more than
20 per cent of a note panic. I believe I might use with truth
figures debiting even more to the deposits and less to the
issues. In my own mind I doubt if 5 per cent, was owing to
the issues. My reasons are : —
" 1st. That Banks not of circulation supplied themselves on
the whole as much as Banks of circulation. The National
Provincial, which now has no notes of its own, took down, I
know, half a million to their various branches, and a great deal
went to the north of England to districts where no notes but
those of the Bank of England ever circulate.
" 2ndly. That the magnitude of the deposit liability is now-
a-days so enormously greater than that of the note liability that
in a panic provision it is much more thought of. I cannot
doubt that the country deposits are much more than thirty
times the country issues, and naturally the idea of the greater
in time of fear a good deal absorbs the less.
" 3rdly. I believe that in the present day the note liability is
a less delicate liability and less liable to be affected by distant
events than that for deposits. In the recent very severe drain
on Gurney's Bank in Norfolk — one of the heaviest, I appre-
hend, that any country bank ever successfully met — almost the
whole demand was for the deposits. And theory would sug-
gest that this was likely. A considerable number of deposi-
tors has sums of considerable value to them at their bankers
of which the loss would be inconvenient, and even a momen-
tary non-payment disagreeable. But no ordinary educated
person now-a-days holds notes to any such amounts. Nobody
would care if he could not pass the £10 or £$ which is all
he ever possesses in notes. Years ago large hoards of notes
existed, the savings of rural districts were largely held in them,
and in those days a note drain was more fearful than a deposit
" THE ENGLISH CONSTITUTION" 399
drain. Such events too as have recently occurred affect more
the minds of the richer class than those of the poorer. Of
those, if I may say so, above the banking line — the line at
which people begin to keep bank accounts — than below the
banking line. The poorer people in Somersetshire never
heard of Overends or Peto and they do not care for their
failure. But all depositors almost have heard of them and it
might not unreasonably be expected that they might care.
" There are still some little hoards of notes about £20 or
£30 each about among dairymen and other little people. But
this is a very opaque class, and though they might cause a
secondary run sometimes after the primary, they would almost
certainly be too late for the latter.
" I am very sorry to have written at such length, but I
wished to show fully the reasons for my opinion such as it is.
If it is true, it is important, because it follows that almost the
whole of the late panic, and the suspension of Peel's Act, would
have taken place, if there had been no country issues and if
the whole circulation of the country had been supplied either
by the Bank of England or by the State."
According to his custom, Bagehot did not preserve the
answer to this letter, but on the 28th May a note which Mr.
Gladstone did preserve runs : " Might I breakfast with you on
Thursday next, as you were so kind as to ask me ? " and the
discussion was doubtless concluded viva voce. In this way it
will be seen Bagehot often guided the actions and the opinions
of Chancellors of the Exchequer. He not only gave them
reliable information on City affairs but helped to guide their
judgment in taking action on the events.
Other officers of State also knew that the Economist was
Bagehot, and not unfrequently interceded with him when they
wanted his help in guiding public opinion.
In July, Mr. Charles Villiers wrote confidentially to Bage-
hot enclosing " a memorandum relating to the memorable
Poor Law Bill which after much difficulty has just passed the
House of Commons, but which is now probably in jeopardy
in the House of Lords owing to the same interested objects
that obstructed its progress in the Commons ". Having seen
400 LIFE OF WALTER B AGE HOT
" a very able notice of this Bill in the Economist as far back
as April last recommending its enactment strongly," Mr.
Villiers expressed a hope that Bagehot would insert, if he
thought right, " a few lines in the paper favourable to the
measure, believing it would be of use while the Bill was under
discussion in the Lords."
Again Mr. Charles Villiers writes at the time of the
American War and the consequent distress in Ireland : —
" I do not know if any notice will be taken in the Econo-
mist of Lancashire distress this week, but, in case there should
be, I merely send this document, which was prepared for the
Cabinet only, that any figures might be corrected by it if that
was thought worth while. The reason why it was not deemed
expedient to make it public as official at present, is, that as
we are as uncertain as ever about the termination of the war,
it is not an object that the subscriptions to the Distress should
cease, and the account here given would lead people to think
that we now have enough — which we have till March next no
doubt ! but will the distress end then ? Perhaps you will
have the goodness to let me have it back after examining it,
which, as it is quite correct, you might wish to do.
" I remain,
" Yours very truly,
"C. P. VILLIERS."
Lord Granville concluded a confidential letter he wrote to
Bagehot on nth October, 1870, by these words : —
" May I ask you in anything you say, which always comes
with so much weight both from the high character of your
paper and the great ability of the articles, not to write anything
which will give thoughtful Germans reason to believe that they
have just cause of complaint against us. You will believe me
when I say the request is exclusively on public grounds.
" Yours sincerely,
" GRANVILLE."
CHAPTER XIV.
" PHYSICS AND POLITICS."
IN the autumn of 1867, Walter and my sister made a tour in
North Devon and Cornwall, revisiting places he imagined in
childhood to be the most beautiful in the world. From Bos-
castle he wrote a letter to the Spectator. In the autumn of
1868 he and my sister spent August and September in the
Pyrenees, and from San Sebastian Bagehot sent*another letter
to the Spectator enthusiastically praising the country and the
charm of living under the " Golden Light " of the southern
sun. " This north-west corner of Spain," he wrote, " 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 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 be-
fore 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 alarmed 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 Devonshire is the finest of our counties),
and the charm, the ineffable, indescribable charm of the South
too. Probably the sun has some secret effect on 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."
It was while under the spell of this charm that letters
arrived from two of Bagehot' s friends,1 Mr. Chichester Fortescue,
(Lord Carlingford) and Mr. A. E. Freeman, the historian,
begging him to stand for Mid-Somerset. More than ever,
401 26
402 LIFE OF WALTER BAGEHOT
while basking in a southern clime, did he feel disinclined to
enter into political or any other conflict ; moreover, knowing
Somerset as he did, he saw no chance of the Liberals coming
in on the Disestablishment of the Irish Church question. He
wrote declining to stand, but on his return to Somerset. in
October he took an active part in helping Mr. Freeman and
the other Liberal candidate. He attended their meetings at
Glastonbury and took the chair at a Liberal meeting at Lang-
port. Before the election, while in London, he had an attack
of his old complaint, but sufficiently recovered from it to go
to Herd's Hill for the polling day.
While in London, Bagehot was informed of an incident
which had occurred with reference to his standing for Mid-
Somerset, and which was the subject of the following letter
from him to Mr. Gladstone, dated Windham Club, igih
October, 1 868. " Mr. Glyn has just asked me to call in Parlia-
ment Street, and has shown me a most extraordinary telegram
sent to you from Yeovil in which my name has been used. I
cannot conceive its meaning, but much regret that I should
have been brought before you in such a ridiculous way.
" I was asked to stand for Mid-Somerset some time ago
when I was abroad, and declined, as I have not enough re-
covered from the illness I had earlier in the year to be equal
to such a contest. I only arrived in England three or four
days ago, and I have not yet been in the West of England, so
what the Yeovil people meant by troubling you I cannot think.
I hope you were only amused at such an expression of elec-
tioneering zeal."
The said telegram arrived at Hawarden on a Sunday
morning when Mr. Gladstone was in church, and his servant
took it to him there. Its import was to beg Mr. Gladstone
to induce Walter Bagehot to stand at the coming election.
There was undoubtedly no lack of zeal in his countrymen
in Somerset to secure him a seat, however little zeal he may
have felt himself.
Diary. " 3Oth November, 1868. Mr. Bagehot and Walter
drove morning to the polling for Mid-Somerset at Somerton
and were much cheered. Defeat of Liberal canditate by 1,550
"PHYSICS AND POLITICS" 403
votes. Mr. Neville Grenville and Mr. Paget therefore elected."
In the previous week Mr. Gladstone had been thrown out
in the contest for South- West Lancashire. His pamphlet
A Chapter of an Autobiography had just appeared, on which
Bagehot wrote a fine and subtly reasoned-out paper for the
Economist.
" Mr. Gladstone's account of his change of opinion on the
subject of the Irish Church," he writes, "is full of character,
both intellectual and moral. The intellectual interest lies in
the curious process by which the very substance of his present
creed on the relation of Church to State is developed from
that minute germ of exception to his former creed which he
stated to Lord Macaulay in 1839. The moral interest lies
partly in, the delicate and scrupulous honour by which Mr.
Gladstone guarded himself from the danger of succumbing to
mere self-interested motives, and partly in the evidence that his
intellect was completely moulded into his present opposite
views by causes infinitely more powerful than any self-interested
motives could possibly have exerted over his mind — namely,
that sympathy with the growing political freedom of the day
which compelled him year by year to assign an ever-increasing
importance to influences wholly unprovided for in his early
creed and yet clamorously demanding recognition in any prac-
tical view of the future relations between Church and State."
The elections went against the Government, and the Queen
telegraphed for Mr. Gladstone, who was at Ha warden when
this summons to Windsor arrived. On Mr. Disraeli taking the
town by surprise and resigning at once after the elections had
gone against him, Bagehot wrote in the Economist: "Mr.
Disraeli's resignation is a singularly graceful act. We were
about to go through a laborious formality of which every one
knew the end, but which every one fancied to be necessary.
From meetings, declarations, and pledges — binding because
new — it was certain what the judgment of Parliament on the
late Ministry would be, and to require that Parliament should
go through long nights and long speeches to register the
decision was childish. Mr. Disraeli has many defects but he
has one merit ; when he means a thing he knows how to do it.
26*
404 LIFE OF WALTER B AGE HOT
He has saved the nation the painful spectacle of a solemn
farce by not waiting to be ejected when they knew he must
go ... Mr. Disraeli's resignation is, as we have said, most
good and excellent ; nevertheless, those who know what the
power of the Crown once was in England, and how much it
has declined even during the present reign, will have read with
a curious interest Mr. Disraeli's ' memorandum ' in the Times.
We should like to know what George IV. or even William
IV. would have said to the announcement of his resignation
in a newspaper before his successor had reached Windsor.
To George III. the idea would have been incredible. 'No
Minister,' he would have said, ' could commit such an indis-
cretion. If he did, he must be for ever excluded from public
circles.' Yet such is the change of times, not any one now
notices the incongruity or much thinks of the Queen in the
matter."
Though Bagehot's health had from boyhood been delicate
he was attacked by the first serious illness of his life in
December, 1867, when he was forty-two years of age.
Returning on Christmas Eve from the midnight service at
St. Alban's, Holborn, he caught a chill which developed into
a severe attack of internal inflammation. Our old friend of
Westbury and Claverton days, Mr. Orby Shipley, was working
at that time with Mr. Maconochie at St. Albans, and about to
become engaged to be married to my sister Zoe.
Diary. " Zoe and Matilda went to Vespers at St. Albans
at 8 o'clock with Mr. Orby Shipley. Walter and Emmie
joined them for the midnight Mass, which was very beautiful."
Walter's illness was very persistent ; great weakness
followed, and serious relapses recurred during January and
February. While he was laid up he was visited often by Mr.
Hutton and other friends, among them Sir John Lubbock,
Matthew Arnold, Mr. Forster and Mr. Sanford. He felt
often two weak even to read — the first time in his life when
he had found himself unable to do so. He managed never-
theless to write a letter to Mr. Hutton to be forwarded to the
graduates of the London University on the Disestablishment
of the Irish Church and on Education generally.
"PHYSICS AND POLITICS" 4°5
When he had sufficiently recovered to travel, he and my
sister went to spend a month with his parents at Herd's Hill,
and on 24th March moved on to Lyme Regis, a place im-
mortalised by Miss Austen in Persuasion. It was from the
curious jetty which forms a breakwater called The Cobb that
the wilful Louisa insisted on jumping down and, alighting on
her head, lost consciousness, and thereby complicated the situa-
tion. To Lyme Regis, Lord and Lady Chatham would fre-
quently drive from Burton Pynsent, and their eldest son, the
second Lord Chatham, studied there with a retired officer of
the army.
Diary. "We left Langport 3 for Lyme Regis, stopped at
Axminster for tea and to write letters, sending off revise of
second number Physics and Politics for Fortnightly Review.
Reached Lyme Regis at 7. 2 7th March. We drove to
Axminster before lunch to send the Money Article for
Economist"
Even at Lyme Regis, Walter continued to have slight
relapses. He never, in fact, fully regained the strength he
lost by this illness, and he found it necessary to engage an
assistant editor to aid him in the work for the Economist.
He was most fortunate in securing the services of Mr. Robert
Giffen (Sir Robert Giffen) who, in every sense, proved to be
the right person for the post.1 Sir Robert Giffen's writings
on Bagehot after his death prove that he had justly estimated
the powers of his chief and had discerned the ever-expanding
quality of Bagehot's genius.
Two marriages in our family took place in the summer of
1868. On 9th June, in St. Albans Church, Holborn, my
sister Zoe was married to Orby Shipley, and on 1st July in
1 Sir Robert Giffen gave valuable help to Mr. Hutton in editing the
Economic Studies, the work Bagehot did not live to complete. In the
Prefatory note Mr. Hutton writes of " the most valuable help of Mr.
Robert Giffen, the head of the Statistical Department of the Board of
Trade, who, during the last years of Mr. Bagehot's life, had a better know-
ledge of his economic mind than any other person. . . . It only remains for
me to express my hearty gratitude to Mr. Giffen for his willing and most
important help, without which I should have felt no little hesitation in
deciding on the true sequence of some passages in this volume."
406 LIFE OF WALTER B AGE HOT
St. Peter's, Eaton Square, I was married to Russell Barrington.
Walter fathered both events, taking all the trouble of the busi-
ness arrangements upon himself, and also " giving us away "-1
The week after our wedding Walter and my sister came to
stay with us at Sonning on the Thames where we were pass-
ing our honeymoon in the old Manor House, where fuchsias
and old-fashioned flowers grew tall in the garden. We rowed
most of the day on the river. On our first Sunday there we
walked along its bank with Bishop Samuel Wilberforce, who
was intimate with some members of the Barrington family.
He had preached in the morning at the Sonning Church, and
scolded the farmers, I remember, for always grumbling at the
weather.
Once the acute stage of his illness over, Bagehot wrote
much during the year 1868. Besides continuing the chapters
of Physics and Politics, and writing an article entitled " Mat-
thew Arnold on the London University " for the Fortnightly
Review, his pen was prolific in utterances in the Economist on
questions which came before the House during the spring,
summer and autumn sessions, and on International Coinage.
On the disestablishment of the Irish Church, the subject of
the letter he wrote to the graduates of the London University
while he was ill, he felt strongly. In the House of Commons,
the struggle for and against was chiefly sustained by speeches
from Mr. Gladstone and Mr. Disraeli. In the House of
Lords, according to Bagehot, Lord Carnarvon made the really
great speech on the question. The article which appeared in
1 Whenever Walter was on the scene, and whatever the occurrence
might be, some funny little incident would happen connected with him
which tickled the fancy and gave a welcome quaint flavour to the
solemnities. Such incidents remain fixed fast in the memory whatever else
is forgotten. On the day of my marriage, after returning from the church, we
(the bride and bridegroom) retired with Walter into his study to sign our
wills and eat a quiet luncheon, there being at the breakfast a vast assemblage
of relations and old friends. The wills, however, were not forthcoming.
Walter had had charge of them, but at the critical moment could not
produce them. Ultimately they emerged from the butler's pantry. " The
wills are found," he said. " They went down to be brushed with my
evening clothes."
"PHYSICS AND POLITICS" 407
the Economist on this speech supplies the clue that explains
the strong attachment which Bagehot and Lord Carnarvon
had for one another, though their political views were not the
same. Both possessed that quality of mind ascribed to
Bagehot by Matthew Arnold — "a concern for the simple
truth," and such purity of aim eliminated in both any
partiality tainted by self or party interest. It raised debate
from the level where it is weighted by prejudice to that in-
spired by moral and intellectual insight. Of Lord Carnarvon's
speech on the Disestablishment of the Irish Church,1 Bagehot
writes : " Only Lord Carnarvon's speech had the clear impress
of perfect impartiality and deliberate consideration, as well as
great ability ; he alone spoke in the tone of an umpire who
admitted the full force even of those arguments the guidance
of which he nevertheless could not accept because he felt the
greater force of those of the opposite drift. The regret Lord
Carnarvon expressed that ' there should be anything like an
appearance of party action,' because ' Ireland learns, as she
has learned on previous occasions, that she apparently gains
more by partisanship and vehemence than she does by the
wisdom of the Imperial Legislature,' is a very just matter for
regret. Unfortunately, it is one which almost uniformly
results from party government, because no wholesome reform
has any chance unless it is taken up warmly by one or other
of the two parties, and nothing, as a rule, is taken up warmly
by either of the two parties, unless it is a battle-cry against
the other.
"... Lord Carnarvon is quite right 'in saying that it is
very material alloy of any good which Mr. Gladstone's policy
may effect, that it teaches Ireland how much more she can
gain from ' partisanship ' than by the impartial conscientious-
ness of Parliament. Nor was Lord Carnarvon less wise in
rejecting the idea that this disestablishment of the Protestant
Church in Ireland will be any panacea to remove Irish discon-
tent. That it will remove some widespread discontent, that
it will give an earnest of our wish to be just, we of course
believe. But it is most true that it will leave us ' face to face
1 See Economist^ 4th July, 1868.
408 LIFE OF WALTER B AGE HOT
with still larger and more important social questions '. And
if we shrink from acknowledging this, — if we allow ourselves
to suppose for a moment that the Irish difficulty would be
surmounted when the National property is taken away from
the Church of a small minority, we should be making this
concession of practice an intellectual mischief to ourselves,
and a source of bitter disappointment afterwards. It is only
by those who clearly define to themselves what may fairly be
expected, and what cannot fairly be expected from this change,
that the true advantage can be taken of the step which Mr.
Gladstone proposes, and which the House of Peers has refused
to take. Again, we think it is equally true that we must de-
duct, as Lord Carnarvon bids us, from the advantages of what
we are doing, the tendency to diminish loyalty amongst the
section of the population which is now the only heartily loyal
section, and perhaps also the tendency (though of this we are
much more doubtful) to favour Ultramontane tactics which
this apparent victory of theirs may produce. All these
admissions of Lord Carnarvon's, so far from diminishing the
weight of his conclusion, give it tenfold force, because they
show how truly and honestly he had weighed the real reasons
against it. His exposition of the reasons for the Bill was less
elaborate, because in fact the reasons are so very simply."
In answer to a letter Bagehot wrote congratulating him on
his speech, Lord Carnarvon wrote : " Your very kind note was
most welcome. There is no one whose opinion I value so
highly, and — being greatly dissatisfied as I was — with what I
said on Monday night, I was proportionately pleased with the
view that you took of my speech."
The year 1 869 began by Walter being summoned on 2nd
January to Langport to help his father in the home trouble.
He was ailing himself often during this year, and in March
went to Weston-super-Mare to seek health. He never how-
ever ceased work.
In April he wrote an article on " The Indian Budget "
praising Sir Richard Temple, then Indian Chancellor of the
Exchequer, for his courage in having insisted that the income
tax, which my father had in the first instance imposed, should
"PHYSICS AND POLITICS" 4°9
not be taken off, though it was very unpopular. Bagehot
writes : " It is a wise tax, because it accustoms the people to
the only form of demand which can be relied on in an
emergency, and helps to remedy the great economical evil of
India, the comparative exemption of the wealthy from taxa-
tion. It is no doubt very unpopular, but it will be least
unpopular while it is so low, and Sir R. Temple has shown a
true courage in facing the unpopularity when he had not the
excuse of absolute necessity, but saw his way to do a great
service to the State."
On the death of Lord Derby, in the autumn of 1869,
Bagehot wrote an instructive article in the Economist which,
like those on Lord Herbert, Cobden, Lord Palmerston, Lord
Brougham, gave in less than two columns of the paper an
epitome of Lord Derby's career, his special powers, the place
he held in his own party, and the peculiar merits which
secured for him the leadership of that party.
Bagehot's articles in the Economist on Statesmen had a
special value at the moment they were written. They gave
to current events an historic importance. The exact reason
why famous politicians are famous is apt to be a somewhat
vague quantity in the public mind. A column or two in the
Economist by Bagehot dispels this vagueness and gives an
epitome of a career on comprehensive lines, but in so concise
a form that it lodges firmly in the memory. For instance —
Lord Palmerston dies and he explains the particular place he
held among great politicians by meeting the exact require-
ments of our national character, and Bagehot emphasises this
national character with extreme ability. Lord Brougham
dies, and by giving a graphic description of the " misused
trial time of the Tory party in England" from 1815 to 1832,
Bagehot shows how such conditions gave " ' Henry Brougham,'
as men used to call him," his chance and developed his special
gifts.1
In the end of July, 1869, Walter was again ill, but did not
1 Bagehot had more exhaustively treated the character and career of
Lord Brougham eleven years previously, in his essay in the National
Review.
410 LIFE OF WALTER B AGE HOT
lie up. He was brave — indeed rash in the treatment of his
own health : unless absolutely obliged he never gave in, and
but most rarely gave up working. Diary. " 1st August.
Walter very poorly — saw Dr. Garrod, small dinner-party at
home. Mr. Charles Villiers, Sir Frederick Peel, Sir Richard
Temple, and Mr. Somerset Beaumont. 3rd August. Walter
still at home poorly. He saw Mr. Giffen and Mr. Somerset
Beaumont in his room." On the 4th of August he was out
again, and on the 5th my sister left London for Spa with my
mother and sister Julia to take the baths, it being arranged
that Walter should join her later to make a tour. in Germany.
However, a week after she had left I received a telegram —
" I am ill — will you come and nurse me". My husband and
I were staying in Hertfordshire with my father-in-law at
Watton Rectory. It was ten o'clock, and we were at family
prayers, I remember, when the alarming telegram arrived.
My husband started at once, but only arrived at Upper Belgrave
Street at five o'clock next morning. I followed by earliest
train next day. We found Walter very ill and all the best-
known doctors away taking their holidays. However my
husband secured Dr. Garrod's understudy. Walter was a
delightful patient, always good company, though often in
great pain. I read poetry to him and he dictated his Economist
articles to me. They came out with great ease, and though so
ill, it seemed no difficulty to him to use his mind. As soon
as he could be moved, we took him to our house on Wimbledon
Common. He was still very weak, but took drives on the
Common which revived him, and by the end of a month from
the time this serious illness began, he was able to join my
sister at Ostend. Diary. " 3oth August. I left Spa at 1 1.30.
Mamma, J. and M. saw me off. Spent seventeen hours in
waiting-room at Brussels and reached Ostend at 8. Found
Walter at the Hotel de Prusse on the shore, looking very
delicate after his month's illness." Instead of taking the
intended tour in Germany the Bagehots returned to England,
for Walter to give his evidence at Bridgwater, where the
Bribery Commission was sitting.
CHAPTER XV.
"LOMBARD STREET."
IN 1870 the house in Upper Belgrave Street was given up and
the Bagehots moved for three years to The Poplars on
Wimbledon Common where my husband and I were living.
Early in the year an event occurred of great import in
Walter Bagehot's life. Though Mrs. Bagehot had been
suffering from an attack of influenza, her death was quite un-
expected. Without pain or any consciousness of the ap-
proaching end, she died peacefully at Herd's Hill in the night
of 2 ist February. The news was telegraphed to The Poplars
in the morning after Walter had left for London. My sister
forwarded the telegram and he returned at once. My husband
had started from Wimbledon by a later train, and met Walter
on the platform of Cannon Street Station on his return journey
to The Poplars. The news had come to him as a staggering
blow. He looked scared, my husband said, and his eyes wild.
He exclaimed briefly, as if astonished at the sound of his own
words — " My mother is dead ". The great space she had
filled in his life for joy and for pain, and the idea that it was
all over, stunned him. It was difficult for him to realise life
without all that her existence had meant to him. Besides
his strong natural affection, a special tenderness towards her
had been engendered owing to the great pity he had felt for
her. Since he had grown to manhood the relationship between
himself and his mother had become somewhat reversed. His
had become almost a feeling of motherly care and anxiety —
hers one of dependence on his affection and the strength of his
judgment Hardly ever was the idea quite absent from his
mind that she might at any moment be wanting him. On
returning from her funeral I remember his saying, " The worst
of it is, that by many it was looked on as a relief". Strangely
4"
412 LIFE OF WALTER B AGE HOT
pathetic to him was the idea that such an event should appear
in the light of a relief "to any one, and yet no one knew better
than Walter how natural it was that those who had not loved
her should entertain such an idea. " It looks a very desolate
home without her," poor Mr. Bagehot said in greeting my sister
on her first coming to Herd's Hill after Mrs. Bagehot's death.
For some months both Mr. Bagehot's and Walter's health
appears to have been affected by their loss. In February and
in April Mr. Bagehot was very ill and Walter was constantly
ailing. On the other hand, the strain on Walter's nerves
occasioned by his mother's attacks was relaxed, and he felt a
sense of freedom that had not been possible up till then.
It was about this time that he became interested in the
decorative art of William Morris and his school. He had a
fine taste and a quick eye, and easily discerned in this work a
distinguished quality which would be lastingly satisfying.
Through Ruskin and Arthur Hughes, I had become acquainted
with Rossetti, William Morris, and Wolner, the sculptor, and
through Miss Octavia Hill, with William De Morgan1 whose
work had a special interest for Walter Bagehot he being a
son of -Professor De Morgan. I had not been slow in giving
Walter the benefit of my raptures on the merits of the school
of which these were the prophets. In order that he should
1 Ruskin had some years previously given over his London property
in Marylebone to Miss Octavia Hill, who had carried on the management
of it on enlightened lines. Her sister Miranda had started the Kyrle
Society, and both sisters held that to bring some beauty into the lives of
the poor was no less a duty than to supply their material needs. In one
courtyard in Marylebone Road they instituted May-day festivals. The
houses round the court were dull and ugly-looking enough. Miss Hill
planned an alleviation to this dullness in the form of a frieze of De Morgan
tiles, beautiful in colour, meaning, and design, which should run round
the courtyard on the front of the houses. One sunny morning she and
I went to Chelsea to the old-fashioned house in Cheyne Row where
Mr. De Morgan then lived and worked, to choose the decoration for this
May-day festival court. We walked through the house and the workshops
into the little garden where stood the one solitary kiln in which were burnt
tiles and vases, epoch-making treasures in the history of English pottery.
There we arranged with Mr. De Morgan for the making of the frieze. In
those days he little thought of being a writer of novels.
"LOMBARD STREET" 413
have a larger library certain changes were being made at
Herd's Hill. He and my sister decided to have this room
and others, which were being renovated, hung with Morris
papers and the furniture covered with leather provided by
Mr. Webb who belonged to Morris's firm. We drove in
from The Poplars to choose these papers in Morris's original
premises in Queen's Square, Bloomsbury. The moral severity
with which these prophets treated decoration and all matters
of taste was not at that time quite understood in the rural
districts of Somerset. The few smart houses near Herd's
Hill were still decorated by second-hand French designs and
white and gilt ornament. Relations and neighbours were
puzzled by Walter's choice. They were inclined to think
Morris papers and furniture too plain and " rather queer ".
From Highclere, Walter writes : " They (the Carnarvons) are
doing a heap of improvements, and among others have gone
into Morrisinismy and have done up one of the very best
rooms with my paper in my study at Herd's Hill. You
might throw this in my father's teeth, as he would not believe
in it. They are much amused here at my knowing anything
about it."
However, the world of Miss Austen was quickly passing
by, and Mr. Bagehot resigned himself easily to any choice in
such things made by Walter and my sister.
A literary friend of Bagehot's, Mr. Bernard Cracroft, was
a musician and interested in all the arts. He had been a
constant visitor at our house in Upper Belgrave Street. As
an amateur violinist he could hardly be excelled. Joachim
affirmed he was the best in Europe. He would spend whole
mornings and afternoons playing duets with my sister, Mrs.
Horan, who was a good amateur pianist. His literary gifts
and a notable distinction in Mr. Cracroft's manners and ap-
pearance attracted Walter Bagehot, ever sensitive to " good
looks," so he "excused his music". But even music itself
presented a possible interest to Bagehot From The Poplars
my husband and I would go to the popular concerts at St.
James's Hall, and after the concerts meet Joachim at the
Cracrofts' house in Saville Row. These vivid enjoyments
LIFE OF WALTER B AGE HOT
were enlarged on to Walter when we returned to The Poplars.
George Eliot and Mr. Lewes were very constant attendants at
the popular concerts, and Walter would hear their enthusiasm
on the subject of Joachim's playing when calling at The Priory.
Madame Goldschmidt (Jenny Lind) lived in Wimbledon Park.
She was a friendly neighbour, and at her house we met Madame
Schumann. Music of the best was in the air, and Walter
Bagehot never came across any interest that excited those
about him without trying to understand the source of it. His
mind conceived the idea that possibly he might get to under-
stand in what consisted the great influence music possessed
over many natures. Had he lived he would himself, I believe,
have experienced some delight in it, as his sensibilities were
singularly keen in all other directions.
He was at that time obliged to remain many days at
home owing to illness, and would then ask my sister or me to
drive to Smith's library at Wimbledon Station, and bring him
some " easy novel, Miss Braddon or the like, not George Eliot,
that was work ". Reading, when the book read required no
thought, had become a rest to him. It prevented his brain
from working on his own severer subjects. For the same
reason he liked to play bezique with my sister Mrs. Horan, or
with my husband. He would generally ride in the morning,
and when at home, and not ill, would drive my sister in the
afternoon. Hardly a day passed but there was some inter-
course between Park Lodge at one end of Wimbledon
Common and The Poplars at the other end. Either Mr.
Greg would come to us, or we would drop in on him as we
drove to or from London. The Bagehots occasionally dined
out and gave dinners in town. They would go to political
evening parties, as Walter liked to hear what people had to
say on current events, and at Lady Granville's, Lady Walde-
grave's, Mrs. Gladstone's, Lady Maine's and Lady May's
there was much to be gathered of political interest from
the talk that went on ; otherwise general society had no
attraction for him. Old friends he saw constantly, either in
London or at The Poplars, and visits to Hampstead to see
his Uncle Reynolds were frequent as ever.
"LOMBARD STREET" 415
In October, 1870, Bagehot began writing Lombard Street,
the book which together with The English Constitution and
Physics and Politics has made his name famous. Unlike his
other two complete works it did not appear in numbers. It
was not published till the spring of 1873. Bagehot wrote
in the " Advertisement " with which he prefaces the volume :
"The composition of this little book has occupied a much
longer time than, perhaps, my readers may think its length or
its importance deserves. It was begun as long ago as the
autumn of 1870, and though its progress has often been
suspended by pressing occupations and imperfect health, I
have never ceased to work at it when I could. ... I fear
that I must not expect a very favourable reception for this
work. It speaks mainly of four sets of persons — the Bank of
England, Joint Stock Banks other than that Bank, private
bankers, and bill brokers, and I am much afraid that neither
will altogether like what is said of them. I can only say that
the opinions now expressed have not been formed hastily or at
a distance from the facts ; that, on the contrary, they have been
slowly matured in Lombard Street itself, and that, perhaps, as
they will not be altogether pleasing to any one, I may at least
ask for the credit of having been impartial in my criticism."
As an estimate of Lombard Street, which may be put in the
balance against these extremely modest words written by the
author, are the following written by Mr. Hartley Withers,
"Lombard Street in 1910," in an introduction to the edition
published by Smith, Elder & Co. in 1912. " It is a wonderful
achievement, that a book dealing with the shifting quicksands
of the money market should still, after forty years, be a
classic of which no one who wishes to understand the subject
can afford to be ignorant."
Mr. Gladstone writes : —
"10 DOWNING STREET,
"WHITEHALL, ibtk October, 1873.
" MY DEAR Mr. BAGEHOT,
" I hope that I sent you at the proper time an
acknowledgment of your kindness in presenting to me a copy
of your work happily named Lombard Street.
416 LIFE OF WALTER BAGEHOT
" But in my new capacity of Chancellor of the Exchequer
I must not be content with that bare acknowledgment.
" I have now read it through attentively, and know not
whether most to admire its clearness or its force. I should
be disposed, were it worth your while, to fight a little side
battle with you about Saving Bank Balances. I do not admit
the doctrine of Bank Reserves to be applicable to them with-
out qualification ! But I made a step, nay a stride, towards
you in the large conversion of Saving Bank Stocks into
annuities which brings at short intervals a very large roll of
money into the coffers.
"But this is a mere parenthesis, and not meant as any
qualification of the thanks which I tender to you for this
new and important contribution to the comprehension by the
public of the great money question. I expect to spend most
of November in town, and hope you will some day look in
upon me."
From Howick, Tesbury, Northumberland, Lord Grey
wrote : —
" DEAR MR. BAGEHOT,
". . . I have now read your Lombard Street, which
I have found very interesting and I have learned from it a
great deal of which I was ignorant. It strongly confirms me
in my previous opinion as to our currency, for it seems to me
that you clearly make out that the danger of the existing
state of things is even greater than I had supposed. You
hold out to us no hope of escaping under it from a repetition
of panics, or of its being possible if they again occur for the
Government of the day to refuse to act as their predecessors
have done. It may also I think be gathered from what you
say, that there is a probability that each succeeding exercise
of irregular power by the Government will be carried further
and be more lightly adopted than the one before, nor do I
perceive that you are able to point out any good grounds for
feeling confidence that the Government and the Bank together
may not so act as to render a suspension of cash payments
almost unavoidable. Indeed if some great political disaster
" LOMBARD STREET1' 4*7
were to happen at the same time that a period of over-spending
came to its natural end of a panic, that is what would probably
happen.
" But I also agree with you in thinking that however great
may be the objections to the existing system it is too firmly
established to be suddenly and violently altered. And it is
on this ground especially that I think the measure I have
recommended would be useful. It nominally would make
little difference in the position of the Bank. The Act of 1844
has already professed to divide entirely the trading business
of the Bank from the duty of issuing the paper currency, I
only propose to make this dividing more real and at the same
time to apply more completely than at present the principle
which is recognised as the right one with regard to the issue
of paper. The importance of the change would consist first
in the moral effect on the other Banks in leading them to
feel that they must not depend too much on the Bank of
England, and secondly in its making it for their interest to
have reserves of their own independent of their deposits in
the Bank of England. These deposits yield them no interest
at all, whereas if they kept the same amount partly in stock
and partly in bullion, what was in stock would give them
interest though at a low rate, and they would be able at any
moment to command the whole amount of their reserve in
notes, not only without pressing on the Bank of England or
the money market, but with the effect of relieving the market
by throwing a fresh supply of cash into it. I should anticipate
that all the great joint stock Banks would then be led to keep
their reserves themselves, and that by this voluntary action
on their part we should soon be relieved from the danger of
having practically only a single reserve. I attach so much
importance to providing for this and for the sudden expansion
of the currency during a panic without a violation of the law,
that I should recommend that the Currency Committee should
be authorised to accept f instead of •£ the value of the notes
they issued in stock if I were confident that by so far re-
ducing the proportion of bullion given to them for notes,
there might not possioly be a danger of their being left with
27
4i 8 LIFE OF WALTER BAGEHOT
too little bullion to make the convertibility of the notes secure.
This might possibly be averted by a stringent provision for
the sale of stock to buy bullion whenever it began to fall too
low.
" Yours very faithfully,
" GREY."
Mr. William Stanley Jevons, the economist and logician,
wrote of Lombard Street : —
"z^rd/une, 1873.
" I had carefully read the work some time before with the
object which I have not been able to carry out, of reviewing
it. So far as I am able to judge it is by far the best account
which we have of the working of our banking system, and
your wonderful power of delicate analysis and description
have never been more strikingly applied even in your English
Constitution. I cannot entertain a doubt that you fully expose
the weak points of our financial system, involving as it does
an extreme and perilous economy of capital and bullion.
Although certain changes which you suggest would probably
be for the better, I do not think that anything can do per-
manent good except a wide diffusion among bankers and
merchants of a correct comprehension of the subject which
will lead them to perceive that excessive economy and the
absence of any appreciable reserves must give rise to violent
fluctuations. It is only the general increase of caution and
foresight which can cope with the difficulties arising from the
enormous increase of the scale of transactions. Lowe's bill
is a very mild one, and though apparently sound will have no
effect beyond rendering acts of indemnity unnecessary. If
he could have obliged the Bank to publish the amount of the
Banker's balance (in the aggregate) the effect would have been
much greater, but I confess I think legislative remedies will
not do much."
Of Lombard Street Sir William Hunter, a nephew of my
father's and the author, among other important works on
India, of Rural Bengal, a book which Bagehot greatly admired,
"LOMBARD STREET" 4*9
wrote in 1890: "I have just re-read, for the fourth or fifth
time, Mr. Bagehot's Lombard Street. My edition is the fourth,
which I purchased in India in 1873, very shortly after the
book appeared. If I may venture to say so, it still seems
in my judgment to be quite the greatest work on the subject
which I have read in any language."
President Woodrow Wilson writes : —
"His (Bagehot's) Lombard Street is the most outwardly
serious of his greater writings. It is his picture of the money
market, whose public operations and hidden influences he
exhibits with his accustomed, apparently inevitable lucidity.
He explains as perhaps only he could explain, the parts
played in the market by the Chancellors of the Exchequer
whose counsellor he often was, by the Bank of England, and
by the joint-stock banks, such as his own in Somersetshire ;
the influences, open and covert, that make for crisis or for
stability — the whole machinery and the whole psychology of
the subtle game and business of finance. There is everywhere
the same close intimacy between the fact and the thought.
What he writes seems always a light playing through affairs,
illuminating their substance, revealing their fibre."
Much of stirring public interest happened in the year 1 870.
Bagehot had brought forward the question of the Irish land
tenure at the Political Economy Club dinner as early as 4th
February, and on I5th February, in a speech of three hours,
Mr. Gladstone propounded the nature of the bill in the
House. On 3ist May it was passed. Mr. Forster brought
forward his famous Education Bill and this was passed with-
out a division. Lord Clarendon died in June and Mr. Bright
retired in December. On loth July War was declared by
France against Prussia in the French Chamber ; on 1st Septem-
ber the Emperor of the French surrendered himself and his
army of 80,000 men to the King of Prussia.
It was seven years after the notable articles on " The
Emperor of the French " were written, that a scene occurred
which I can very vividly recall. On that 1st September, 1870,
while Walter, my husband, and I were lunching together at
The Poplars, a telegram was brought in ; Walter read it out
27*
420 LIFE OF WALTER B AGE HOT
aloud. " Emperor Napoleon surrendered with army of 80,000
to the Germans at Sedan." He uttered a low exclamation
and gave an expressive jerk of his head. The news impressed
him greatly ; the curtain had dropped on the career which he
had watched for twenty years with a strange, almost personal
interest. Suddenly, dramatically, Napoleon III. had given up
the game. To quote Bagehot's words, the Emperor had a
mind " daring in idea ; recoiling before the difficult and
hazardous ; shrinking from the irrevocable, and certain not to
venture on the desperate ".
The following extracts are from his article in the Econo-
mist of 2Oth August, 1870, " The Collapse of Caesarism " : —
"The marvellous failure of the French Imperial system to
effect that which seemed most likely to be within its power,
the complete military organisation of France, and the still
more marvellous success of the Prussian system in the attain-
ment of that end for Prussia — a success such as, if you con-
sider the proportion between the military strength attained and
the wealth and population of the nation which has attained it,
is not to be paralleled in the history of the world — present a very
instructive contrast. You can hardly say that in France it is
' personal government ' which has failed, without admitting
that in some true sense in Germany it is ' personal govern-
ment ' which has succeeded. . . . We think we may say safely
that it is Csssarism that has utterly failed in France — meaning
by Caesarism, that peculiar system of which Louis Napoleon —
still, we suppose, nominally the Emperor of the French — is
the great exponent, which tries to win directly from a plebiscite,
i.e., the vote of the people, a power for the throne to over-
ride the popular will as expressed in regular representative
assemblies, and to place in the monarch an indefinite 're-
sponsibility ' to the nation, by virtue of which he may hold in
severe check the intellectual criticism of the more educated
classes and even the votes of the people's own delegates.
That is what we really mean by Caesarism, the abuse of the
confidence reposed by the most ignorant in a great name to
hold at bay the reasoned arguments of men who both know
the popular wish and also are sufficiently educated to discuss
"LOMBARD STREET" 214
the best means of gratifying those wishes. A virtually irre-
sponsible power obtained by one man from the vague prefer-
ence of the masses for a particular name, that is Caesarism,
and that is a system which has undoubtedly undergone a
sudden and frightful collapse such as none but the very worst
hereditary monarchies in Europe have sustained. The reverse
for France is infinitely greater than the reverse of 1866 for
Austria. Everyone knew that Austria was a weak, divided,
and all but bankrupt State, torn by the internal divisions of
populations of the most diverse blood, language, and religion,
and behind the world in the application of science to the
military arts. With France it was in every respect different.
Homogeneous, as few States in Europe are homogeneous —
animated by but one spirit in relation to this particular war —
if not leading the military science of the day, at least known
to be one among the leaders — rich in money — full of credit —
high in military pride — there was hardly one element of failure
which she had in common with Austria, and yet her reverses
have been as signal and all but as complete. . . .
" We hold, therefore, that Napoleon has failed, not only
through that loneliness of power which has given him no
natural allies among the educated people of France, and com-
pelled him to seek the aid of men of little honour or scrupulous-
ness, but that he has failed also exactly in consequence of
his abject dependence on that ignorant Conservatism of the
peasantry to which he has looked for the popularity of his
regime."
For the June number of the Fortnightly Review, 1870,
Bagehot wrote " Bad Lawyers or Good," and for the Meta-
physical Society a paper " On the Emotion of Conviction "
which was published in the April number of the Contemporary
Review, 1871. The organiser of this Metaphysical Society was
Mr. James Knowles (Sir James Knowles) the then editor of the
Contemporary Review, but who is better known as the editor of
the Nineteenth Century Review, which he afterwards became.
By profession an architect, he had designed Lord Tennyson's
house in Surrey. Poets, Philosophers, Theologians, serious
thinkers belonging to all denominations, were invited to join
422 LIFE OF WALTER B AGE HOT
the Metaphysical Society provided they were distinguished as
thinkers. Tennyson, Cardinal Manning, Dean Stanley, Glad-
stone, Huxley, Hutton, Ward, Bagehot, Dr. Martineau, Froude,
Magee, Bishop of Peterborough, Greg, Professor Clifford, all
these and more than these were members. They dined to-
gether about once a month, and a paper was read which led
off the discussion on the subject chosen for debate. Bagehot
found these meetings extremely interesting. He would often
retail to us something of what passed at them. The discus-
sions revived trains of thought which he and Mr. Hutton had
shared together, lines of argument which they had threshed
out in conversation or correspondence in earlier days. The
area of such speculations was enormously widened when dis-
cussed at the Metaphysical Society. To hear the views of
those as various in their tenets of belief as were Dr. Ward,
Martineau, Dean Stanley, Huxley, Bishop Magee and Clifford,
when arguing on the same subject, naturally enlarged greatly
the aspect of each subject. In the same year, 1871, Mr. Froude
read a paper on " Evidence," Dean Stanley one on " Authority,"
each being discussed with perfect freedom. Many of the
papers were published in the Contemporary Review, but the
discussions that followed were treated as confidential.
Bagehot had for some years belonged to the Political
Economy Club and found the debates which took place after
the dinners given by the Club, very suggestive. Many ideas
which found expression in the Economic Studies most probably
germinated during the discussions of this Society. Bagehot's
mind was ever alert in seizing a suggestion, and such sugges-
tions were ever fruitful in creating an original thought. There
was no " padding " — to use the word he invented in the literary
sense it is now used — in his intellectual life, all was ingeniously
to the point.
On 2nd July, 1870, Bagehot's Tribute to Lord Clarendon
appeared in the Economist. " The late Lord Clarendon," he
wrote, " belonged to a very small and very remarkable class
of peers. There are many peers, as the lawyers, who have no
birth, but who worked hard in their youth ; and there are also
many who have the highest birth, and have never worked the
"LOMBARD STREET" 423
least. There are many who have earned rank, and many who
have inherited rank. But it is rare to find a peer who inherits
his rank and yet who knows what it is to earn his bread. . . .
When Lord Clarendon was in the Excise Office in Dublin and
all through his younger life, there was but a distant probability
of his coming to the title, and he had to work really for his
bread. And the training of his young days was probably of
use to him always.
" To the last week of his death he was a curiously unre-
mitting worker. With somewhat peculiar hours and times he
got through more work probably in the twenty-four hours
than most administrators of his time, and finished it all with
care and accuracy. There were none of the gratuitous blunders
and hurried errors which mostly characterise the work of one
who is so much praised for great activity ; everything was
carefully considered and carefully executed.
" Perhaps it is not unconnected with this praise that there
was an indescribable repose about Lord Clarendon's manner
and appearance. No one who saw him, in his later years at
least, would have ever thought him a specially active man.
He seemed a very calm, sensible, and singularly courteous old
gentleman ; and it would scarcely have occurred to a casual
observer that he was an exceedingly indefatigable worker.
But those who have watched the habits of men of business in
politics and out of it will have seen many cases in which a still
and quiet man who does not seem to be doing much, and
probably is talking of something quite different, has in matter
of fact and at the week's end accomplished much more than
the ' rushing mighty wind ' ; the very energetic man who is
never idle or at rest and who has no thought but his office
business. A still man like Lord Clarendon has time to think
what he will do, and most incessant men are apt to act before
they have thought, and therefore land where they should not,
or else lose half their time in sailing back again.
" It was, perhaps, the result of Lord Clarendon's early
training that he always took great interest in commerce, and
whenever he had the power steadily used the agency of the
Foreign Office for its advantage. ... In one respect we are
424 LIFE OF WALTER B AGE HOT
not inclined to join in the universal praise which within the
last few days Lord Clarendon has received. He has been
greatly praised as a writer, and no doubt he wrote not only
with great facility but with much elegance. But there is one
great difficulty about almost all his despatches. Each sentence
is clear, and no word brings you to a stop ; but yet after a
few paragraphs a careful reader suddenly pauses to think
where he is and what he has assented to. And even when
he reads the paragraphs over again he will not always find it
easy to be sure that he sees the limits of what was meant and
the limits of what was not meant. The limpid flow of delicate
words takes him steadily on, but where at any precise instant
he is he cannot be very confident. For the old intercourse of
foreign Courts this sort of style has immense advantages : it
gives no present offence, and, having no marked sentences,
leaves no barbed words for after irritation. . . .
" But we do not need now to dwell at length on a point
so subordinate. It is much for a man of Lord Clarendon's
standing to have written nearly perfectly in the old style, it is
no ground for serious blame to him that he did not invent a
new style. He will be remembered by posterity as a Minister
singularly suited to the transition age in which he lived, and
as possessing both the courtly manners which are going out,
and also the commercial tastes and the business knowledge
which are coming in. Some critics will, as we have said,
find fault with his want of special designs and of a far-reaching
policy. But to this generation of Englishmen this was no
fault at all. . . . And for an age like this Lord Clarendon
was a fitting Minister, for he had a wise sagacity to interfere
as little, and to refrain from acting as much as prudence
rendered possible."
On " The Retirement of Mr. Bright," Bagehot wrote in
the Economist of 24th December, 1870 : —
"The retirement of Mr. Bright from the Cabinet, owing to
failing health, will give all the older readers of the Economist a
peculiar feeling of sadness. A new generation is attaining
life and vigour to whom the ' Anti-Corn Law League ' is a
matter of history. If you chance to speak of it as 'the
"LOMBARD STREET" 425
League ' as we always used to speak of it, they ask ' What
League ? ' But the great majority of active men still re-
member the details of that great agitation, and how Mr.
Bright's voice rang full and penetrating, second in power only
to one if second to any, over those great open stages. That
Mr. Bright has to abandon active administration will come
home to many as an unwelcome hint that it is time for them
to give up themselves.
" If, as has been said, 'it is a proud thing to have
millions of opponents and no enemy,' Mr. Bright has a full
right to be proud. Persons at a distance who disapprove of
his principles, and who only think of him as an incarnation of
them, undoubtedly hate him with a strong political hatred ;
but no one brought close to him does so. There is an evident
sincerity and bluff bona fides about him, which goes straight to
the hearts of Englishmen. We have been often amused to
see how much, in the depths of Tory districts where ' John
Bright ' was bitterly execrated, the regular residents were
puzzled because their own M.P.'s and the most conservative
people who went to London always mentioned him with
geniality and toleration, and if young, would say, in the
modern dialect — ' Well, after all, he is a great institution '."
In 1871, besides Lombard Street, Bagehot was still work-
ing at Physics and Politics. He also wrote another article for
the Fortnightly Review on "Senior's Journals". Mr. Glad-
stone had affirmed in the Edinburgh Review that " unhappily
we scarcely possessed in England the kind of writer who
abroad is called a publicist ". Bagehot thought Mr. Senior
" came very near to it ".
Though constantly interrupted in his work by illness,
Bagehot nevertheless managed to write pretty continuously
for the Economist. When too ill to go into London, Mr.
Giffen would come to The Poplars to see him and arrange
matters relative to the editing of the paper. Before Mr.
Giffen joined the staff, Bagehot, as a rule, wrote the money
article himself. After that time the actual writing of these
articles was generally done by Mr. Giffen after consultation
with Bagehot.
426 LIFE OF WALTER BAGEHOT
Sir Robert Giffen writes in his article on " Bagehot as an
Economist " : l " It was my happy fortune," in the last nine
years of his life, "to be intimately associated with him in the
conduct of the Economist newspaper. During this period,
accordingly, I had not only to discuss topics of political
economy with him, especially the topics of banking and the
money market, incessantly, but I had to know his mind so
thoroughly on all leading subjects of the day as to be able to
write in accordance with his views when he was himself at a
distance."
1871 was a year of stirring excitements in France, the
year of the siege of Paris, the Commune, anarchism and Civil
War, the destruction of the Column in the Place Vendome,
part of the Tuilleries and other monuments and buildings in
Paris ; the assembly at Bordeaux to settle terms of peace, and
the subsequent meeting at Versailles, when M. Thiers and
Jules Favre signed these terms and Bismarck accepted their
signatures. On all these thrilling events Bagehot wrote in
the Economist. He had early mastered the characteristic
qualities of the French nature, consequently all the events
resulting therefrom in this crisis of their national life he
watched with peculiar interest.
Through our old friend, Mme. Mohl, we heard many
particulars of the actual state of things during the siege, and
the Commune. She had fled to London before the horrors
began, leaving M. Mohl and her precious cats, whom she
loved, in charge of the old confidential servant, Julie. When
she returned to 120, Rue du Bac, the cats were no more.
They had fallen victims to the starving populace during the
siege. Mme. Mohl was heartbroken and hated the Emperor
Napoleon, to whom she attributed all the misfortunes of
France, with more violent hatred than ever. When all was
quiet in Paris, M. Mohl came to London to escort her back.
They, Mr. Goschen and Mr. and Mrs. Townsend, dined with
the Bagehots to discuss all the strange things that had come
to pass within the past twelve months. Such discussion be-
1 The Fortnightly Review, ist April, 1880.
"LOMBARD STREET" 427
tween M. Mohl and Bagehot was most instructive. On the
general condition of France, Bagehot had written nine articles
in the Economist besides many more on the particular events
of the war, and on the terms of peace. He thought these
exorbitant and Bismarck too unmerciful to the conquered.
On home politics his articles on " Mr. Lowe on Education,"
" Mr. Forster and Educational Compulsion," " Mr. Lowe as
Chancellor of the Exchequer," "Mr. Lowe's warning," give
in short the history of the important questions before the
House, but perhaps at the time this book is written, the most
generally interesting of Bagehot's articles in the Economist of
that year, would be that on " Mr. Gladstone on Home Rule
for Ireland " with reference to his speech delivered at Aberdeen.
"MR. GLADSTONE ON HOME RULE FOR IRELAND.
(The Economist, ^oth September, 1871.)
" The Prime Minister's speech at Aberdeen cannot at any
rate be charged with that tendency to intellectual hesitation
and finesse which is the favourite taunt of his opponents. In
speaking of the Irish cry for Home Rule, Mr. Gladstone drew
no fine distinctions, and came to no ambiguous conclusion.
He asked if the United Parliament was to be broken up
because it could not or would not do justice to Ireland, or
only to please the Irish fancy. If the former were alleged the
answer was that for the last three years the United Parlia-
ment has been eagerly engaged in doing for Ireland what it
would hardly have done for either England or Scotland — no
doubt because neither England nor Scotland stood in need of
the measures granted as Ireland did, but none the less did
this sufficiently demonstrate the perfect willingness and capa-
city of the United Parliament to redress all real Irish griev-
ances. If the latter were alleged, that the Irish do not choose
to take even good government from the hands of a United
Parliament, then the answer is that on that head the Irish have
only the right to vote with the other members of the Union ;
the whole Union has a right to decide what is in this respect
for the common benefit, and unless any party can allege that
their individual interests are trampled on by the Union, the
428 LIFE OF WALTER B AGE HOT
whole Union has a right to say whether union or separation
will best promote the interests of all. And this in point of
fact, as everybody knows, Great Britain has long ago decided.
In Mr. Gladstone's own vigorous words, ' can any sensible man,
can any rational man suppose that, at this time of day, in this
condition of the world, we are going to disintegrate the great
capital institutions of this country for the purpose of making
ourselves ridiculous in the sight of all mankind, and crippling
any power we possess forbestowing benefits throughlegislation
on the country to which we belong ? '
" That is clear, forcible language which may, we hope,
have the effect of showing the Home Rule party in Ireland
that while Ireland may gain almost anything that is reasonable
and just from the Imperial Parliament, she will not gain the
repeal of the Union for which that party is now crying out, and
which would be indeed in many respects far more mischievous
to British interests, and perhaps even to Irish interests, than
absolute independence.
" Indeed it is hard to conceive anything more mischievous
than the opening of an indefinite and indefinitely increasable
number of debatable issues between Great Britain and Ireland,
such as would be not merely suggested but forced on the public
by the division of duties between an Irish and British Parliament.
It is difficult enough to divide the sphere of properly municipal
or country from properly central and Parliamentary powers,
and almost impossible to do so beneficially without giving
Parliament an absolute overriding power in case of conflict.
But this difficulty would not only be enhanced a thousand
times by the great importance, unity, and national coherence
of an Irish Parliament, but it would be quite impossible to
give the Imperial (or as it would then be, Federal) Parliament
a power to override the decisions of an Irish Parliament
without provoking something like a rebellion on every separ-
ate occasion. It may be said, perhaps, that this difficulty has
never been felt in the United States, where the State powers
and the Federal powers are divided by a hard and fast line,
which neither State nor Federation have the power to overleap.
But in point of fact the difficulty has been felt and felt very
"LOMBARD STREET" 429
keenly, and though not for precisely the same reasons as it
would be felt in this case, yet for a similar class of reasons,
namely, because the genius and policy of a certain group of
the States diverged very widely from the genius and policy
of the remainder, the Secession War was in fact a State revolt
against the Central power, and though that Secession was due
not to race, but to a ' domestic institution ' of a most potent
and mischievous kind, yet difference of race and religion
conjointly are certainly quite capable of producing as great
a chasm of feeling between the different members of a Federa-
tion as in any difference in ' domestic institutions '. Only
consider for a moment what an Irish Parliament would be
disposed to feel if it found itself compelled to impose
taxes for a war in which the sympathies of Ireland were
directly opposed to the sympathies of Great Britain, or were
even hindered from imposing taxes for some purely Irish
object by 'the weight of the taxation for imperial purposes
which it disapproved. Is it even inconceivable that such a
Parliament could long exist without becoming a centre of the
fiercest disloyalty and even treason ? Or put aside questions
of finance, and look only at ecclesiastical policy. Would not
it be very probable that one of the first efforts of Ireland's
separate Parliament would be to re-establish a Church in
Ireland, but not this time a Protestant but a Catholic Church
— an effort which would probably give rise to civil war unless
England interfered to thwart the wish of the Catholic party,
in which case the danger of a violent disruption would arise
again from another cause ? It is in fact as plain as common
sense can make it to all who look at the condition of Ireland
with impartial eyes, that ' Home Rule ' would be but the first
step in a series of virulent disputes as to the political relations
of the two islands, which could hardly be except in separation,
or reconquest, with all the evils that that would bring in its
train. The Home Rule party would certainly be imprudent,
but they would be far more logical, if they were to raise a cry
at once for an Independent Irish Republic."
The very stirring public events of 1871 were followed on
the continent and in England by a comparative lull. In the
430 LIFE OF WALTER B AGE HOT
spring of 1872 Bagehot was writing the preface to the second
edition of the English Constitution, While he was completing
it, Mr. Sanford, his old college friend, was staying at The
Poplars, and was consulted by Bagehot as to the advisability
of leaving out the historical chapter in the book as Mr. Freeman
had quarrelled with certain views expressed in this chapter.
Mr. Sanford, a sound authority of history,1 advised its reten-
tion believing Bagehot's view to be the correct one, and Mr.
Sanford's advice was taken. When the second edition was
ready for publication in July, Bagehot made the acquaintance
of Baron Von Holtzandorf who was about to translate the
English Constitution into German, and was then attending the
Prison Congress in London, and invited him and Mr. Sanford
to dinner to discuss this muted point. When this German
edition appeared, the newspaper which was Bismarck's organ
referred to the English Constitution, as Bagehot revealed it, as
" Eine Republique in weissen glace Handschuh " (a republic
in white kid gloves). It was also in that July that Walter
finished his supplementary chapter to Physics and Politics.
Early in the year, 1873 the curtain fell finally on the
Napoleonic era. The Emperor Napoleon died on 9th January
and was buried at Chiselhurst, 2,000 Frenchmen being present at
the funeral. In the Economist of nth January, 1873, Bagehot
writes : " The death of the Emperor Napoleon throws a flood
of light upon his later life. The delays, hesitations and vacilla-
tions, together with the febrile irritability with which he pressed
forward his idea of a new plebiscite, may be attributed to the
growing, though secret influence of his malady. Under its in-
fluence he ceased to be able to examine into details, lost his con-
fidence in old friends, and began to indulge in the despondency
which sent him in 1870 to the field a man beaten in advance."
1 John Langton Sanford, Barrister-at-Law, Lincoln's Inn, was the
author of " Studies and Illustrations of the Great Rebellion, Estimates of
the Kings of England, from William the Conqueror to George III.," and
in conjunction with Mr. Meredith Townsend a series of papers which ap-
peared first in the Spectator entitled " The Great Governing Families of
England ". Mr. Sanford was preparing an important historical work when
his eyesight failed and it was never written. He died shortly after
Walter Bagehot.
"LOMBARD STREET" 431
Bagehot wrote at least fifteen articles on France and French
affairs in the Economist during that year, one of especial in-
terest in the number dated 1 3th December on " The Condemna-
tion of Marshal Bazaine," for having betrayed his country by
capitulating with the enemy during the siege of Metz.
The impeachment of the Marshal was, he points out, after
the expulsion of M. Thiers. He gives an impressive description
of the splendour of the trial that took place at Versailles, and
the manner in which, what in reality meant a political move,
was dramatised into a scene made to assume the appearance
of an heroic outburst of patriotic indignation. " Not only the
French themselves, with their national passion for Spectacle,
but the whole of civilised Europe have been impressed by the
splendour of this trial, the solemnity of the issue, the dignity
of the tribunal, the highly wrought eloquence of the prosecu-
tion and the defence, the rigorous severity of the sentence, and
the passionate protest of the accused. "
Bagehot was au fait with the characteristic moods of the
French and the methods they take to conceal their political
intrigues. He passes by this splendid drama and sets to
work to probe the real motives which made the party in
power wish " to re-open, by an inquiry into the circumstances
of the capitulation of Metz, the whole story of Bonapartist
mismanagement and corruption ".
In January, 1873, Mr. Graves, the Member for Liverpool,
died, and Bagehot was approached as to whether he would
stand as the Liberal candidate for the vacant seat, but this he
declined.
On 1 3th March, 1873, the Gladstone Ministry resigned on
the Irish University Bill. Bagehot writes on the event in the
Economist. " Some years since a great traveller who had
braved unnumbered hardships fell by a petty accident while
shooting in this country. And the fate of the great ministry of
Mr. Gladstone has been in popular feeling at least somewhat
similar. After attempting more than any Ministry for many
years, and after achieving more, on a sudden it has fallen on
what seems a question of infinitesimal magnitude." Mr.
Disraeli, however, declined office, and on I7th March, Mr.
432 LIFE OF WALl^ER BAGEHOT
Gladstone announced in Parliament that he had undertaken
to reconstruct the Ministry. Bagehot writes that this was a
piece of good fortune. "The evils of a Government in a
minority are so great that we are most anxious to save the
nation from them ; the Conservative party has on three oc-
casions in twenty years made the experiment and it has found
that, bad and painful as the trial is for the nation, it is far
worse and more painful for the party which makes it. No one
can wish — Mr. Disraeli owns that he does not wish — to revive
such a Government as we saw in 1852, in 1858, and in 1867.
The worst state of Parliamentary Government is a coalition of
Conservatives and Radicals, or as they say in France of the
extreme Right, and the extreme Left. The effect of it is that,
as in 1867, the Conservatives pass much more than most
Radicals really wish, and that they pass it unwillingly, re-
luctantly, and believing that they are doing harm."
The Bagehots travelled abroad for two months in the
autumn of 1873, beginning by a pilgrimage to Metz and the
battlefield of Gravelotte. They went on to Strasburg, Frei-
burg, Schaffhausen, Meran and Botzen. Here they caught sight
of the Dolomite mountains, and on one evening watched the
strange eerie sight far up in the sky, the socalled Rosengarten,
when, after the sun has set, a rosy hue strikes their sharp peaks,
isolating them from the world below — a world already fading
into the shades of night. The Bagehots pursued their travels
from Botzen and visited Innsbruck, Munich, Augsburg, Stuttgart,
Baden and returned home by Brussels and Ghent, stopping at
any small place between the big towns marked by special beauty
of scenery or by an historical or political association. Bagehot
carried his mind with him during his holidays, and few of his
travels were planned without their being linked to some in-
terest, literary, historical or political. When back in England
they decided to take a house in South Kensington for the
winter. Driving to and from The Poplars was becoming
irksome to Walter, especially during the winter months.
In February, 1874, at the change of Ministry, Lord Car-
narvon returned to the Colonial Office. He wrote to Bagehot :
" I hardly know whether I am really a subject for congratula-
"LOMBARD STREET" 433
tion or no, but I hope that I have done right in taking my
present office. I hope I may get the chance of a quiet talk
with you when the confusion and skurry of the present are
over. How I pity any one who has to undertake the Colonial
Office with no previous knowledge of it. Chaos would be a
trifle compared to what he would pass through."
On 7th February appeared in the Economist the first of
four articles on the change of ministry. Mr. Gladstone had
been in for six years from 1868 ; then Mr. Disraeli took his
place as Prime Minister, and likewise reigned for six years,
Mr. Gladstone returning in 1880.
" The Conservative Majority " is the first of these four
articles. " For the first time for nearly thirty years there
is the prospect of a Conservative majority in the House of
Commons. It requires more thought than we have as yet had
time to give to realise a state of things so new and so different
from that to which we have been so long accustomed. We
shall only hazard for the present one or two isolated remarks.
" First, if one party or other must hold power with a small
majority, the Conservative is the better of the two. In the
first place its majorities are more to be relied upon. The
Liberals, being a movement party, want to move in various
directions, and it is difficult to induce them to keep together ;
but as the Conservatives wish to go nowhere, they are not
tempted to diverge. The Liberals are, too, a much more
various body by class, education, and character than the Con-
servatives, though the diversities among the latter are increas-
ing. The opinions and votes of Liberals differ more than those
of Conservatives because the men differ more. In consequence,
a Conservative majority of twenty is a far better thing for the
business of the country than a Liberal majority of the same
number, for the Government can always be sure that its
majority will attend and support it. Secondly, if the Liberals
have only a small majority, the working of the constitution is
dependent on the Irish Home Rulers. Nothing is stronger
than its weakest part, and as the Home Rulers count as part
of the Liberal majority, that majority is apt to be weakened,
or perhaps annihilated, by its secession. But a Conservative
28
434 LIFE OF WALTER B AGE HOT
majority is in no similar danger. It does not depend on Home
Rulers at all. The worst that they can do is to vote against
it in conjunction with all the other Liberals, but even if they
do so the Conservative majority outnumbers them, and is a
majority still. A Conservative Government is not intrinsically
to be desired, but at least it delivers us from the rule of the
faction which is anti-English in essence, and which wishes to
destroy the Empire."
In the Economist of I4th February, 1874, Bagehot reviews
Mr. Gladstone's Ministry : —
"Most Governments since 1832 have been deficient in the
essence of a Government — power. They have not been backed
by a sufficient majority to enable them to do what they liked ;
sometimes they have not had a majority at all ; generally they
have had only a ' working majority/ as it is called — a majority
that is, enough to enable them to transact the common work
of Parliament, but not enough to enable them to enact their
own ideas or to propose large reforms adverse to great in-
terests. There have, indeed, been only two Governments of
immense power since 1832. The first is the Whig Government
which followed the Reform Act of that time ; and that was no
doubt a Government which achieved much, and which has a
great name in history. But Mr. Disraeli long ago pointed out
its defect : it was not ' presided over by a guiding and original
mind '. Lord Grey belonged to a past period ; he represented
a great tradition, but he was not a great reality. When he
passed the Reform Act his special work was almost done.
Lord Althorp was a country gentleman of strong character, but
he had no great abilities, and had no taste for office, and wished,
as he said, that he was ' back among his pheasants and his
fowling-piece '. The influence of Lord Russell, defective as it
was, did not begin to predominate till the omnipotence of the
Whigs was passed ; before he ruled, the Conservative reaction
of those years had begun. In consequence the efforts of the
Whig Cabinet of 1832 wanted effect and unity; they were
often most excellent, but they were never so impressive as they
ought to have been, and they are now most insufficiently borne
in mind because they did not emanate from, and were not
« LOMBARD STREET" 435
associated with, a single mind of vast vigour and ability.
The commanding element in life and history is a great person.
One Napoleon is worth fifty common generals ; he can do far
more, and what he does will be infinitely better remembered.
No Cabinet can effectually rule this country if it is a Cabinet
only — if it is not itself ruled by a great Prime Minister. The
element of greatness nobody will deny to Mr. Gladstone's
Government. Any time this five years it has been easy to hear
almost every kind of criticism on Mr. Gladstone ; it is particu-
larly easy now when everybody is finding out that they have
always been Conservatives. But no one ever hinted that on a
great subject, and when his mind was made up, he did not carry
his Cabinet before him, and penetrate their policy with his
peculiar personality.
" The only other Government of similar power since 1832 is
that of Sir Robert Peel, which succeeded the election of 1841.
This Government was followed by a great majority, and ruled
by a great Prime Minister ; but it was utterly weak in another
way — it had no characteristic measures, and is now known by
uncharacteristic measures. It was elected to maintain Protec-
tion, and it abolished Protection ; to maintain the Corn Laws,
and it abolished the Corn Laws. Except the Bank Act of
1844, which is an outlying matter, the Government of Sir
Robert Peel is known only by its recantations. A first-rate
Government embodies in acts and laws the principle of a pre-
conceived policy, but Sir Robert Peel's Government aband-
oned its own previous policy and adopted that of its adversaries.
" In this respect the Government of Mr. Gladstone is indis-
putably superior. It has, as everybody admits, been faithful
to the principles which it announced. A single mistake in the
Education Act is the sole exception which can even be fancied.
The Government entered office with a list of congenial mea-
sures, and it passed these and others.
" The result of our comparison therefore is that the admini-
stration of Mr. Gladstone is much superior to all others since
1832, save two, in force and power ; and that to one of these
two it is superior in possessing a suitable great man, and to
the other in having passed suitable great measures. When
28*
436 LIFE OF WALTER B AGE HOT
posterity compares the two, it will probably say that Mr.
Gladstone is not by several degrees so great an administrator
as Sir R. Peel, but that he is by at least as many degrees a
greater orator. To equal or rival Mr. Gladstone's Budget
speeches we must go farther back, to those of Pitt, and the
remains of Pitt's speeches are too fragmentary to enable us to
say what was their merit in comparison. Neither Sir Robert
Peel nor Mr. Gladstone can of course be put in the first order
of statesmen ; both their careers have one fatal fault ; they
were converted assailants — they ended by enacting what they
began by opposing. But Mr. Gladstone has been far more
fortunate. Sir Robert Peel, by changes of opinion, twice de-
stroyed his party and Government ; but Mr. Gladstone has
never destroyed either, and lived to enact his truest and best
ideas with the approbation of our strongest recent party and
the aid of our strongest recent Government. But in another
respect Sir Robert Peel was far happier. He left a school of
able and attached political pupils ; but, whether from difference
of time or character, Mr. Gladstone will leave none. When
he retires there will be no Gladstonite, though there were
Peelites for so many years."
Of the new Conservative Government Bagehot writes, in
concluding an article in the Economist of 2ist February,
1874:—
" If its policy be good, it will last long ; if its policy be
foolish, its end may not be far off. A policy of unmixed Con-
servatism is contrary to the irresistible conditions of life.
There is a special cause in politics requiring change. One
generation is, without ceasing, passing away, another is coming
on to take its place — the new generation and the old differ in
innumerable particulars. They think different thoughts, use
different words, live a different life. The mere externals — the
gait and dress and the houses of the two — are unlike, and,
therefore, their politics cannot be the same. Changes in laws,
changes in administration, changes in policy are incessantly
requisite ; the old laws, the old administration, the old policy,
will not fit 'the new men,' will annoy and irritate them, and
will be cast off with speed and anger,"
"LOMBARD STREET" 437
The last of the four mentioned articles is on " The Struc-
ture of the New Government ".
" Mr. Disraeli's Cabinet is remarkable," he writes, "in one
respect because it is the smallest of late years. It has only
twelve members whereas Mr. Gladstone's had at various times
either fifteen or sixteen, and we think some others have had
as many. The smaller number was much more in accordance
with the old custom of the Constitution, and Mr. Disraeli has
been much praised for returning to the former practice."
Bagehot's interest in theological questions was kept alive
in several directions in the winter of 1874-75. When dining
with Mr. Knowles, the Hon. Secretary of the Metaphysical
Society, he made the acquaintance of Bishop Colenso. On
December Mr. Greg read a paper at a meeting of the Society
on " Revelation," which formed subject for private discussion
between Bagehot and him. Sir Fitzjames Stephen read a
paper at the meeting of 1 2th January which treated " of a
theory of Cardinal Newman's as to believing in mysteries ".
On this occasion Mr. Gladstone was in the chair. The famous
controversy between Cardinal Newman and Mr. Gladstone on
the " Vatican Decrees " was taking place at that time. The
latter had written his first pamphlet on the subject, and a long
account of Dr. Newman's answer to it, framed in a letter to
the Duke of Norfolk, appeared in The Times.
In The Times on the i$th of January appeared Gladstone's
letter to Lord Granville resigning the leadership of the Liberal
party in the House of Commons, and on the following day ap-
peared Bagehot's article in the Economist on his resignation.
" In one respect Mr. Gladstone is unique. Many statesmen
have written books in retirement, and some have ostentatiously
commended it. But ordinarily those books are tame and
those commendations forced. Now that they feel no longer
the excitement of the Senate or of office, all else seems taste-
less to them, and you can trace that langour in every phrase
they utter. But no one can say this of Mr. Gladstone. His
writings in retirement may or may not be too many ; they
may or may not be models of style ; but no one can say that
they do not show the keenest interest in their subjects. If
438 LIFE OF WALTER B AGE HOT
he writes in the Quarterly, you wonder at the unusual vigour
of the anonymous contributor ; if he writes on the ' Vatican
Decrees,' you admire the minute research and the zeal of
disputation which no divine can surpass. In Homeric criticism
his eagerness is almost greater : it has long been said of him
that he ' cared as much about the sons of Priam as if they
had votes on a division,' and, in fact, he can pursue, with
elastic energy, inquiries which most bookworms would call
tedious. And in all this exceptional earnestness there is not
a vestige of affectation. It is the simple expression of an in-
tense nature, which singular to say is both variable and con-
centrated, which pours itself in a hundred pursuits, but which
for the time being is absorbed in each.
" This is the real explanation of Mr. Gladstone's resignation.
He can withdraw into comparative retirement, because he can
be absorbingly occupied in retirement. If he hears from a
distance the din of Parliamentary battle, he is not overpowered
with melancholy musing ; his compensations are at hand ; his
study is no place of calm to him, for it is alive with ' hot
thought ' and rings with controversies for which he cares.
" That Mr. Gladstone has judged wisely for himself in re-
signing the leadership of the Liberal Party we cannot doubt.
There can be little pleasure in leading that party in its present
state, and there must be much vexation. It will be impossible
to please everybody, and easy not to please anybody. The
toil of attending Parliament merely to ' watch the proceed-
ings ' ; to sit opposite to a Government in anxious hope that
it may make some mistake, and with little to say if it does
not ; to detect errors in figures and poke amendments into
clauses, — is an excellent training for young members, but a
dismal employment for a finished statesman. In Mr. Glad-
stone's case it would be particularly melancholy, for it would
be a striking contrast to his own Government. After just
having achieved much of which even those who question the
policy do not doubt the greatness, it would be pitiable to be
occupied for session after session in framing minute criticism
on measures of which those who approve the object cannot
deny the mediocrity. . . .
"LOMBARD STREET" 439
" The Liberal Party is, by admission, divided : what some
wish others reject ; what some think an indispensable good
others think an irreparable calamity. And many expect Mr.
Gladstone to discover the word of the enigma, the measure
which is to bring them together. But he cannot do so at this
moment, nor can anyone else. Such measures must ' grow ' ;
they cannot be made. A new race of ideas must be formed.
Long controversies and many agitations will be necessary be-
fore the Liberal Party will be united upon a single plan, and
before the nation will be prepared to accept it of them.
" If anything should happen to the present Prime Minister,
and if Mr. Gladstone perseveres in retiring, two great parties
in the State will be left with what in the cotton market would
be called ' best middling ' statesmen and with no others. And
we believe that the effect will be to make politics as a study
less elevating and less instructive to the English people than
they have been used to find it. The spectacle of the conten-
tions of first-rate men on subjects which the many care for is
the best and almost the only way of bringing home to the
many what high mental ability really is, and how completely
they are themselves destitute of it. What such men do by
intentional benefit is less instructive than that which they con-
fer by the unintentional spectacle of what they are. This it
appears likely we may before long much want. As a con-
temporary of Pitt and Fox said when they had passed away,
' We are left with pigmies whom we know to be pigmies, be-
cause we have measured them with giants '."
In the autumn of 1874 the Bagehots travelled in France,
visiting Veveys, Clermont in Auvergne, Royat, Mont Dore,
Vichy. While at Vichy Walter heard of Monsieur Guizot's
death. His funeral took place on I5th September at Val
Ricker, near Lisieux, where the Bagehots had visited him.
From Vichy Bagehot sent an article on him for the Economist.
" The announcement of the death of M. Guizot will take the
minds of many back to the cold February evenings in 1848,
when London, long used to political calm, was convulsed by
a new excitement, when we heard cried in rapid succession,
' Resignation of Guizot,' ' Flight of Louis Philippe,' ' Pro-
440 LIFE OF WALTER B AGE HOT
clamation of the Republic/ and when the present chapter of
European politics began. M. Guizot lived to see many events
and many changes, but none which restored him to pre-emin-
ence, or which made him once more a European personage.
His name was never cried in the London streets again."
Bagehot goes on to say how unlike M. Guizot was to the idea
which English people form of a Frenchman. " ' A Puritan
born in France by mistake,' is the description which will most
nearly describe him to an ordinary Englishwoman. . . . The
French national character is much more various than it is sup-
posed to be according to common English ideas, and the stern
variety which M. Guizot represents is one of the most remark-
able."
CHAPTER XVI.
"ECONOMIC STUDIES."
AFTER returning from their travels in France in the autumn
of 1874, the Bagehots moved into London to the house in
Rutland Gate they had taken for a year. The diary records
pleasant dinners given there to interesting guests, many visits
to picture galleries, to the Old Masters at Burlington House,
and to Burne Jones's studio. It was when there that the
friendly intercourse began between Lord Bryce and the
Bagehots. We were staying with them at the time, and on
one Sunday afternoon my husband accompanied Walter on a
visit to Mr. and Mrs. George Lewes at the Priory. There
they met Lord Bryce, and my husband remembers that on leav-
ing the house together, Bagehot asked him to come to Rutland
Gate to see him and my sister, which he did. This ac-
quaintanceship led to the very important results that, at Lord
Bryce's suggestion, the early essays were republished after
Walter Bagehot's death — consequently a widespread apprecia-
tion of Bagehot in America and a rebound of it in England.
After the Bagehots had returned to The Poplars in the
spring of 1874, the diary relates how the great reception on
2 1st May took place, given by Lady Derby at the Foreign
Office to meet the Emperor of Russia, the Grand Duke Alexis,
the Prince and Princess of Wales, and the Duke and Duchess
of Edinburgh. The Bagehots and my family greatly enjoyed
this evening, but the drive back to Wimbledon was long,
especially for Walter, who had to drive into London early the
next morning to breakfast with Mr. Goschen.
On the following day, 23rd May, my sister Julia and Mr. Greg
were married quietly at St. Stephen's Church, Gloucester Road.
With the exception of Lord Avebury and Sir Mountstuart
Grant Duff, my sister's trustees, only relations were present.
441
442 LIFE OF WALTER B AGE HOT
Walter fathered all the necessary business transactions and
behaved in a very characteristic manner with regard to an
amusing incident which happened in connection with the
marriage settlements. These were brought to my mother's
house in South Kensington in a hansom cab by a lawyer's
clerk on the evening before the wedding. He paid the cab
and then rang the bell. When the door was opened he turned
round to fetch his papers and found that the cab had driven
off with the settlements inside it. The ceremony was to have
taken place at nine o'clock in the morning in order that the
Cumberland Lakes should be reached the same day. Particu-
lar associations were attached to the Lakes, and Mr. Greg
made a point of this plan being carried out. It was, however,
impossible if the settlements were to be copied out afresh,
even if the clerk sat up all night, which he did. A friendly
battle ensued, Mr. Greg wishing to waive the signing of the
settlements, Walter obdurate in maintaining that no marriage
should take place before the settlements were signed. The
result of the contest appears in the diary. " 22nd May.
Mr. Greg stayed till 1 1 o'clock and notes were written
putting Julia's wedding off from 9 to II. 23rd May. They
left for Matlock at 2." Two copies of the settlements were
forthcoming on the morning of the wedding ; the cabman
returned with the original copy and the lawyer's clerk brought
the second.
During that year the Bagehots decided to buy a house in
London, and settled on 8 Queen's Gate Place, which they gave
into the hands of William Morris's firm to furnish and decorate,
De Morgan tiles, of course, being a feature of the decoration.
Walter wrote to me that "Wardle is doing most of the
house, but the great man himself, William Morris, is compos-
ing the drawing-room, as he would an ode ". Walter would
at times meet William Morris at the Bloomsbury depot when
choosing papers and tiles, and the two would talk poetry as
well as furniture. Walter's fancy was tickled at the quaint
combination, and at William Morris's autocratic attitude to-
wards all questions of taste. However amusing the culture of
aesthetics might be they could not wean Walter entirely. He
"ECONOMIC STUDIES" 443
had always had a great fondness for children. Amidst the
choice designs of an inner hall, which the Morris firm had
treated as a special feature in the new house, stood a fine large
rocking-horse, crude in colour and carving as such things are,
my sister's gift to my boy. As we were passing it one day
Walter spurted out suddenly, as he used to do when he enun-
ciated something that was really true, " That's the best thing
in the house ".
As soon as 8 Queen's Gate Place was habitable, Mr. and
Mrs. Hutton and my husband and I lunched with the Bagehots.
Walter did showman and explained William Morris's views as
to the morality or immorality of different colours and designs.
The poet was composing a specially beautiful blue damask silk
for the curtains and furniture of the drawing-rooms. This com-
position took a long time. Walter said, " They bring me
sample-threads every two or three months but the curtains
don't come ".
On the 1 3th April, 1875, Walter Bagehot was elected by
the Committee of the Athenaeum under rule 2. He wrote to
my sister who was at Herd's Hill : "The Committee elected
me yesterday at the Athenaeum quite cheerfully. By the
rules they can only elect nine persons a year, and those ' who
have attained eminence in Science, Literature, the Arts or for
public services '. I wonder in which my eminence is." One
use to which Bagehot put the Athenaeum was to play chess
there with Mr. Hutton. Both excelled in the game.
On 7th July of 1875 Sir Stafford Northcote wrote to
Bagehot : " A wish has been expressed by the Committee or
Banks of Issue to have the advantage of your evidence.
Would it be agreeable to you to attend the Committee either
on Monday or Thursday in next week or the week after ? I
should, in that case, be happy to see you and talk over the
course of examination beforehand." Again on the Qth he
writes : " I have received your telegram and have arranged
that, if quite convenient to you, we should take your evidence
on Thursday, the 22nd, which will probably be our last day of
meeting. Would it suit you to call here on Friday next at a
little- before 2 o'clock for the purpose of talking over the
444 LIFE OF WALTER B AGE HOT
course of your examination? If so I shall be very glad to see
you."
It was this examination which began the personal relations
which existed between Sir Stafford Northcote and Bagehot.
On the death of Professor Cairnes in July, 1875, Bagehot
wrote an article in the Economist notable for the fine feeling
of consideration he evinces for the pathetic conditions under
which the eminent political economist worked. With the fol-
lowing words Bagehot concludes the short notice : " In the
presence of great difficulties silence is ' better than many words/
and there are few greater difficulties than that a mind so strong
and pure should have been so cast aside from life and subjected
to so much pain ".
In the July of this year Walter lost his friend Lady Car-
narvon. Her friendship, no less than her husband's, had given
him much pleasure for many years. The visits to Highclere
and his frequent intercourse with them in London had been
among his greatest social enjoyments, whereas the more in-
timate talks when he saw them alone were intellectually
extremely interesting to him. He estimated both Lord and
Lady Carnarvon's abilities very highly. After his wife's death,
Lord Carnarvon at once sought Walter Bagehot's sympathy.
No one could be a friend of Walter Bagehot's without know-
ing that he could give help in time of trouble, the genuine
warmth of his compassion for sorrow being unfailing, and the
manner in which he conveyed his sympathy peculiarly helpful.
In February, 1875, from Rutland Gate, Bagehot writes to
Mr. John Morley : " I am very sorry to say I cannot review
Harrison. I am writing, or trying to write a book on Political
Economy which takes all my leisure (which is not very great),
and I cannot think of any other subject till this task is done."
This task, grievous to say, was never finished.
In November of the same year Bagehot writes : —
" MY DEAR MORLEY,
"As the Fortnightly Review was in the hidden
period between the ' fertilisation of the press ' and the appear-
ance of the number, I had no doubt you were abroad when
"ECONOMIC STUDIES" 445
your answer did not come. Might I write in the Fortnightly
a series of Articles on English Political Economy? or some
such title bringing out its position, — or what / think its posi-
tion,— both as to the historical method and as to the mathe-
matical which are now competing with it, besides some other
things which I wish to say on the subject. It would be six
articles and probably more, and I should want to have the
right of republishing them separately as one instalment of a
book which I have long been trying to write, but which I fear
will never be finished except in pieces. If you will have the
articles I could begin early in the next year, and go on at a
decent pace I hope"
In answer Lord Morley wrote : —
" I will have your articles with the most lively and peculiar
satisfaction. When you choose to begin, a place shall be
ready for you. It would be very pleasant if you could begin
in the January number. Your collaboration will be eminently
welcome, and I am much obliged to you."
When Bagehot's mind was engaged on any special piece
of writing he did not travel abroad but chose some attractive
place in England where he could write at leisure during the
autumn holiday. In the summer of 1875 he commenced
writing the first chapters on political economy for the Fort-
nightly Review, and in August he and my sister went into
Surrey, making their head-quarters first at Barford Bridge,
afterwards at Guildford. He would work in the mornings,
and in the afternoons they would drive together for hours
around these two centres, or, as was his habit when he had
no horse to ride, he would take long walks exploring the
country. He would often talk out his thoughts aloud during
these solitary rambles.
A visit to Herd's Hill followed the Surrey exploration,
and then a last tour in Devonshire to those places full of
happy associations with his childhood. The results of this
autumn's work, " The Postulates of English Political Economy,"
appeared in the January and February numbers of the Fortnightly
Review, 1876. It seemed he had some difficulty in continuing
the series. Perhaps he felt he could not hurry his mind over
446 LIFE OF WALTER SAGE HOT
so important a work. He writes to Mr. Morley as quoted,
that he had long been "trying to write a book which I fear
will never be finished except in pieces ". But the pieces even
seemed to require great deliberation. Instead of a third chap-
ter of the series he writes in the spring of 1876 : —
" MY DEAR MORLEY,
"Would you have an article on ' Adam Smith as a
Person ' from me ? I have it written and could easily adapt
it, I think, for the Fortnightly, and I am invited to publish it
by this centenary discussion. The general conception would
be something like that of the first article in the Economist this
week, especially the first part of that article, — but grounded
on biographical detail. No picture of Adam Smith has ever
been given that I know of. I have a third article on Political
Economy coming but not ready for July ; but even if I had
it ready, I should like to finish up this article on 'Adam
Smith ' just now that the world is thinking of him. I should
like to have the right of republishing this essay on Smith
if you like it as it was to be one of several on our Econo-
mists."
The work which Bagehot contemplated writing on
Political Economy was to consist of three volumes. The
second volume was to contain the biographies of celebrated
Political Economists. Near the beginning of the first chapter
of Economic Studies Bagehot demonstrates "The inherent
difficulty, which," he writes, " no other science, I think, presents
in equal magnitude. Years ago I heard Mr. Cobden say at a
league meeting that ' Political Economy was the highest study
of the human mind, for that the physical sciences required by
no means so hard an effort '. An orator cannot be expected to
be exactly precise, and of course Political Economy is in no
sense the highest study of the mind — there are others which are
much higher, for they are concerned with things much nobler
than wealth or money ; nor is it true that the effort of mind
which Political Economy requires is nearly as great as that re-
quired for the abstruser theories of physical science, for the theory
of gravitation, or the theory of natural selection; but, neverthe-
"ECONOMIC STUDIES" 447
less, what Mr. Cobden meant had — as was usual with his first-
hand mind — a great fund of truth. He meant that Political
Economy — effectual Political Economy, Political Economy
which in complex problems succeeds — is a very difficult thing ;
something altogether more abstruse and difficult, as well as more
conclusive, than that which many of those who rush in upon it
have a notion of. It is an abstract science which labours
under a special hardship. Those who are conversant with its
abstractions are usually without a true contact with its facts ;
those who are in contact with its facts have usually little
sympathy with and little cognisance of its abstractions.
Literary men who write about it are constantly using what
a great teacher calls ' unreal words ' — that is, they are using
expressions with which they have no complete vivid picture to
correspond. They are like physiologists who have never dis-
sected ; like astronomers who have never seen the stars ; and,
in consequence, just when they seem to be reasoning at their
best, their knowledge of the facts falls short. Their primitive
picture fails them, and their deduction altogether misses the
mark — sometimes, indeed, goes astray so far that those who
live and move among the facts boldly say that they cannot
comprehend ' how any one can talk such nonsense '. Yet, on
the other hand, these people who live and move among the
facts often, or mostly, cannot of themselves put together
any precise reasonings about them. Men of business have a
solid judgment — a wonderful guessing power of what is going
to happen — each in his own trade ; but they have never
practised themselves in reasoning out their judgments and in
supporting their guesses by argument : probably if they did
so some of the finer and correcter parts of their anticipations
would vanish. They are like the sensible lady to whom
Coleridge said: 'Madam, I accept your conclusion, but you
must let me find the logic for it '. Men of business can no
more put into words much of what guides their life than they
could tell another person how to speak their language. And
so the ' theory of business ' leads a life of obstruction, because
theorists do not see the business and the men of business will
not reason out the theories. Far from wondering that such a
448 LIFE OF WALTER BAGS HOT
science is not completely perfect, we should rather wonder
that it exists at all."
In the letter in which he offers the article of " Adam
Smith," Bagehot writes : " I should much like to write on
Althorp, but it could only be in the summer, if then."
The essay "Lord Althorp and the Reform Act of 1832,"
was written in the autumn of 1876. Walter did not ac-
company my sister to her German baths, but remained at
home writing it. On her return to England they went to the
Royal Hotel, Ascot, where it was finished, and it appeared in
the November number of the Fortnightly Review. This was
the last from Bagehot's pen which appeared in any review. I
have found it necessary to refrain from re-reading this account
of Lord Althorp, otherwise the temptation to quote nearly the
whole of it would become irresistible. Every page you turn
offers some choice sentence either witty or wise. To repeat
one to which Mr. Augustine Birrell called attention in his
Lecture on Walter Bagehot at Leighton House : " Through
life Lord Althorp continued to be a man strong, though
perhaps a little crude in religious belief; and thus gained at
the back of his mind a solid seriousness which went well with
all the rest of it ; and his grief for his wife was almost equally
durable. He gave up not only society, which perhaps was no
great trial, but also hunting — not because he believed it to be
wrong, but because he did not think it seemly or suitable that
a man after such a loss should be so very happy as he knew
that hunting would make him." Over the page are these few
words : " Nothing is so cruel as fear," — and so on, wisdom
and wit throughout.
From 5th February to 3Oth December, 1876, Bagehot
wrote seventeen important articles on the " Depreciation of
Silver ". Two thousand copies of these he had printed in the
Economist Office in pamphlet form with Preface and Appen-
dix by himself. They were all sold and have till now never
been reprinted.1
It was in the early days of 1877 tnat Sir Stafford North-
^his pamphlet will form part of vol. vi. of the complete edition of
Walter Bagehot's works.
"ECONOMIC STUDIES" 449
cote asked Bagehot's advice as to how the difficulty could be
met caused by the Exchequer Bills having fallen out of
favour with the public, while the growing demands on the
Exchequer increased owing to Parliament having authorised
an extensive system of loans to education and sanitary
authorities. Bagehot promptly invented the Treasury Bills
which were then, and have been ever since, completely success-
ful in meeting these difficulties.1
During the winter of 1876-7, when he had leisure, which
was seldom, he worked at the Economic Studies. Ideas
evidently were always cropping up in his mind on the subject.
Valuable records of these were found in a fragmentary
form, notes dotted down, which Mr. Hutton, aided by Sir R.
Giffen, pieced together into the volume which was published
after Bagehot's death in 1 879. Sir Robert Giffen writes that
the Economic Studies were really " with all their incomplete-
ness, the most important work which Bagehot left". In 1885
a " Student's Edition " was published of the two completed
chapters under the title of The Postulates of English Political
Economy? with a Preface by Alfred Marshall, Professor of
Political Economy, Cambridge. " I do not think," writes Sir
Robert Giffen,3 after citing other writings by Bagehot on finan-
cial questions, " anything he did in this way will compare in
quality with the work in Lombard Street or the Economic
Studies. His work in this respect, to use Mr. Hutton's phrase,
was that of the least part of him ; he was often not deeply
interested in it himself, taking it only as ' all in the day's work,'
to use his own phrase ; but what he did was none the less
considerable, enough, and more than enough, to account for
his authority and reputation, and to have made a name for
him as an economist alone. Even here, however, he succeeded
by qualities not specially economic, by quickness to see and
say the right thing because his point of view commanded
so large a field. ... I have already hinted at the infinite
regret which must be felt at the non-completion of the pro-
1 See Lord Welby's letter, p. 22, chap. i.
3 Longmans, Green & Co.
8 "Bagehot as an Economist," Fortnightly Review, ist April, 1880.
29
450 LIFE OP WALTER B AGE HOT
gramme sketched out in these Economic Studies. No event
could more powerfully suggest the notion of a life beyond life,
so as to explain the mystery of so fair a work being left incom-
plete. . . . The fragments left are those of a grand building,
the design went much farther than what we see, and that, fine
and noble as the work is, it is greatly interesting as proving how
much finer and nobler the whole structure would have been."
After quoting Mr. Mutton's description in his Memoir of
Bagehot, from the point of an intimate friend, Sir Robert
Giffen writes : — l
" No one who drank even for a little of the champagne of
Bagehot's wide discursive talk, full of humour and sidelights
on every subject he touched, will fail to appreciate this de-
scription. He was as far as possible from giving the idea of a
man with a special genius for a subject and much absorbed in
it. As far as my own experience goes, our business talks,
though having for end and object the conduct of a political
and business newspaper, always travelled much wider than the
record. Not to speak of his interest in literature and philo-
sophy, he had the keenest interest, for instance, in the essential
differences of system between English and Scotch law and
English and Scotch forms of local and judicial administration, a
subject which grew out of some business topics in the begin-
ning of our acquaintance; in the art of money-making, as
distinguished from mere knowledge and skill in economics and
the methods and subjects of business ; in the working of
personal motives of revenge and the like, as they affected the
great game which was constantly playing before us in the
City ; similarly in politics, in the personal element, the personal
and family relationships of our public men, which he believed
to have far more effect on the course of politics and parties,
and the making or marring of careers, than the outside world
supposes. I only mention a fragment of the things about
which he was intellectually curious, and which were yet far
enough away from the special subjects before us. Nothing
of this will seem surprising to the editors and contributors of
1 " Bagehot as an Economist."
"ECONOMIC STUDIES" 451
our leading journals, who know how necessary it is that the
mind should play freely about many subjects to be able to
choose properly a line upon any one subject ; but Bagehot
undoubtedly possessed the ^«<2«-omniscience so necessary in
the highest journalism as well as the best literature in an
unusual degree, and as such he could not be primarily an
economist as the world understood him. He was something
very much greater — a thinker of some new ideas of great value
in the science, and a describer of the modern world of business,
which is so different from the world of business that existed only
one or two generations ago, and which alone could be in the
minds of earlier writers on political economy ; and he was all
this in part because the study of political economy formed
only a portion of his intellectual interests. I can only echo
what he [Mr. Hutton] has said in protest against the common
idea of Bagehot as being primarily an economist instead of
his being primarily a man of letters of strong genius and ima-
gination, who happened, amongst other things, and subordinate
to other things, viewing his literary life as a whole, to take up
with ' Political Economy'."
Francis Galton writes : " I value it \Economic Studies} very
highly, as I value all of your late husband's work, and it gives
me peculiar pleasure to learn by it that some of my facts and
speculations have been of interest and service to him. In
reading the book, both the subtlety and accuracy of the
thoughts and the clearness and cleanness from extraneous
matter with which they are conveyed, make one realise afresh
how great has been the loss to political science through his
death. How completely he stood alone as a writer, able to
raise political economy from a collection of confused and heavy
facts into the status of an exact and attractive science ! "
Lord Granville writes to my sister of the volume of Economic
Studies : " I cannot tell you the intellectual pleasure it has
given me, partly from its own merits and partly from the re-
minder it has given me of all the instruction and enjoyment
I derived for so many years from your husband's writings ".
The winter of 1876-7 was spent in the new house in
London, Walter paying the usual fortnightly visits to Herd's
29 *
452 LIFE OF WALTER B AGE HOT
Hill, and the usual entertaining at dinner, dining out, and
political evening parties taking place. From the middle of
February my husband and I, our boy and his governess, were
staying there. I remember one Sunday morning in March
going to his study, which was high up on the third floor of the
Queen's Gate Place house, because so, he said, it was " out of
the fuss of the front door," to discuss with him the request
Watts, the artist, had made that I should help him in his
work. Every subject of interest was always talked over with
Walter, and in painting and art generally I had from a
child found an engrossing pleasure. He was lying on his sofa,
" inventing his books " or otherwise " playing with his mind ".
He never showed signs of objecting to being interrupted, and
was always an excellent listener. It was then, I think, that
he said: "You must take me to see Watts, I should like
to see the outside of the person who does these things ". He
had caught a chill, the precursor of his last illness. I also had
a cold, but Watts had asked me to go that morning to see his
work and talk over matters, and I remember Walter, with
his usual thoughtfulness, insisting that I should have the
carriage to go in.
Walter Bagehot never saw those curtains that William
Morris was " composing ". The last time I saw him alive was
at Waterloo Station, when he and my sister were starting on his
last journey to Herd's Hill. I had driven there with them en
route to Queen's Square, in order to implore the poet to weave
the threads into curtains, as the March winds were blowing
cold through the thin lace draperies, the only protection over
the windows against them. I remember well the last evening
he spent " in the new toy " as he called the house. He
was lying full length on a sofa under these unsheltered
windows and I was sitting over the fire. I thought he was
asleep, but suddenly he came out with a few very kind
words, the last which I definitely remember.
During those last days he appears to have thought seriously
of his state of health, though he certainly took no precautions
against increasing his cold. His old college friend, Mr. Fowler,
wrote to Mr. Hutton in the following April : "It seems that
" ECONOMIC STUDIES " 453
Bagehot felt very poorly, for he told one of the men of the staff
of the Economist that he did not think he should get over his
cold".
Another sign that he thought his life precarious showed
itself in the fact that one night, during the last week he was
in London, he left his bed and, going up to his study, made his
will.
He and my sister were to have left London on Tuesday
morning, 2Oth March, but the journey was postponed till the
afternoon, in order that Walter should vote for Mr. George
Trevelyan at the Athenaeum.1
I still clearly see that departing scene outside 8 Queen's
Gate Place. When he started he was ill. My sister and I
were in the carriage and my husband was on the pavement
to see us off. Before Walter got into the carriage he turned
to him to say good-bye. But there was no accustomed quaint
word of fun, no life. The lamp was already burning low.
For the first time the boyish spirit seemed extinguished. The
journey, the long wait at Yeovil Station in the night air, made
matters worse. On arriving at Herd's Hill he saw his father,
who was confined to his bed, for the last time. The doctor
was sent for, and found the right lung congested. Each day
he became more ill. On the Friday the local doctor tele-
graphed for Liddon from Taunton, who found him dangerously
ill ; all the same, that day Walter played a game of cribbage
with his Aunt Emma, Mrs. Michell, who was nursing him.
On the Saturday the bronchitis was supposed to be better, and
my sister lay by his side all the morning, cutting open the leaves
of a new copy of Rob Roy, which he read. He spoke often
of feeling extreme weakness, increasing as the day advanced.
In the afternoon he exerted himself, moving his pillows, and
when my sister tried to help him, he said " Let me have my
1 Ten years after this fatal journey was taken, Mr. George Trevelyan
wrote, when complying with a request of my sister's to vote for a friend of
hers at the Athenaeum : " I do not know whether you are aware how
closely the voting in the Athenaeum is and always will be in my memory
connected with a most honoured name. Your husband, I believe, actually
altered his hour of leaving London to vote for me there in that last week."
454 LIFE OF WALTER BAGEHOT
own fidgets/' but called her to him, then fell asleep, breathing
loud and hard. Gradually the sound quieted, till, as the sun
was setting, the end came peacefully — painlessly.
Since the Tuesday we had been staying at Park Lodge,
and on that evening as the sky shone gold and crimson behind
the silver birches on the common, my husband, who had been
waiting outside the house in Cheyne Walk the previous night
to hear what news he could of our dying friend Janie Nassau
Senior, came in and told us the end had come. We had had no
alarming accounts from Herd's Hill, and our minds turned
solely to this trouble. Rumours appeared in Sunday papers
which the servants saw, but we were not told of them. It was
supposed that some mistake had been made, and that it was
Walter's father, not himself, who was dead. On the Monday
morning, letters, telegrams and newspapers all announced the
truth. On the Wednesday my sister, Mrs. Greg, my husband
and myself went to Herd's Hill. The funeral took place on
Thursday. A photograph exists of the simple procession as
it passed through the street of the little ancient Langport town,
the gig of the undertaker leading the way, which was the local
fashion in those days. Langport Church was closed, being
under repair, the funeral service was therefore at Huish Epis-
copi Church, but we returned to the spot in Langport Church-
yard where his mother and brother were buried. There,
looking down on the river winding along the moors to
Muchelney Abbey, and away over the wide-reaching landscape,
grey and chilly on that March day, we stood by the grave as
he was buried. On Easter Sunday the funeral sermon was
preached by the Vicar, Mr. Henslowe, the corporation of the
town attending in their robes, Walter Bagehot having been
their Deputy Recorder.
It seemed right that he should have returned to the old
home to die. Though his life had expanded beyond its early
associations, he had never lost touch in any sense with those
things he had most loved and revered in his youth. Whether
the rash act of taking that last journey — having regard to his
health no act could have been more rash — was committed in
order to reach the old home before the end, it is impossible to
"ECONOMIC STUDIES" 455
say. He never spoke to us of his belief that the end was
near.
In death as in life, the sense of reality hovered over every-
thing that happened in connection with Walter during those
days. Nothing seemed unnatural. As I sat by his bedside
trying to make a drawing of his face, which looked tired but
younger than in life, solemn as death must always be, there
was no sense that he was divided from us, or that his life was
ended ; — it was only being continued in a different way. In
his nature the spiritual and the natural had ever had equally
full play. They had been interwoven from earliest childhood.
He had lived to the full every moment of his life, in mind and
in spirit. " All things are yours, whether the world, or life,
or death, or things present, or things to come."
His own words come to mind.
" The nature of man is not two things, but one thing. We
have not one set of affections, hopes, sensibilities to be affected
by the present world, and another and a different to be affected
by the invisible world : we are moved by grandeur, or we are
not ; we are stirred by sublimity, or we are not ; we hunger
after righteousness, or we do not ; we hate vice, or we do not ;
we are passionate or not passionate ; loving or not loving ;
cold or not cold ; our heart is dull, or it is wakeful ; our soul
is alive or it is dead. Deep under the surface of the intellect
lies the stratum of the passions of the intense, peculiar, simple
impulses which constitute the heart of man ; there is the eager
essence, the primitive desiring being. What stirs this latent
being we know. In general it is stirred by everything.
Sluggish natures are stirred little, wild natures are stirred
much ; but all are stirred somewhat. It is not important
whether the object be in the visible or invisible world ; whoso
loves what he has seen, will love what he has not seen ; whoso
hates what he has seen, will hate what he has not seen.
Creation is, as it were, but the garment of the Creator ; who-
ever is blind to the beauty on its surface, will be insensible to
the beauty beneath ; whoso is dead to the sublimity before his
senses, will be dull to that which he imagines ; whoso is un-
touched by the visible man, will be unmoved by the invisible
456 LIFE OF WALTER B AGE HOT
God. These are no new ideas ; and the conspicuous evidence of
history confirms them. Everywhere the deep religious organ-
isation has been deeply sensitive to this world. If we compare
what are called sacred and profane literatures, the depth of
human affection is deeper in the sacred. A warmth as of life
is on the Hebrew, a chill as of marble is on the Greek. In
Jewish history the most tenderly religious character is the most
sensitive to earth. Along every lyric of the Psalmist thrills a
deep spirit of human enjoyment ; he was alive as a child to
the simple aspects of the world ; the very errors of his mingled
career are but those to which the open, enjoying character is
most prone ; its principle, so to speak, was a tremulous
passion for that which he had seen, as well as that which he
had not seen."
CHAPTER XVII.
TRIBUTES FROM CONTEMPORARIES.
IT was on reading letters of sympathy and articles in the
newspapers at the time of Walter's death, that Mr. Bagehot
first awoke to the knowledge of the high estimation in which
his " greatest treasure " was held by his contemporaries. " I
should never have known," he said, " how great a man Walter
was, had I not survived him."
Mr. Bagehot had become deaf, and had for some years
led somewhat the life of a recluse. Walter had entered into
the intimacy of that life without allowing his father to draw
any contrast between its limitations and his own more ex-
tended field of thought and action. Never in intercourse with
any one did Walter assume superiority. No one ever left off
talking with him feeling " how clever he is, how stupid I am ".
His discernment of character was as if inspired. He measured
the nature and capacities of his companion to a nicety, and
poised the quality of his intercourse accordingly. He left
many with the idea that he was a good fellow, yet with no
idea that he was a great man. So it is that the amplest ap-
preciation bestowed on Walter Bagehot during his life and on
the occasion of his death was expressed by those of distin-
guished attainments, and such tributes came somewhat as a
surprise to his father.
Mr. Gladstone wrote to my sister: "Permit me also to
take this opportunity of recording my admiration of his
[Walter Bagehot's] great powers and unvaried industry, and
my respect and high regard for his character.
" During the time when I was Chancellor of the Exchequer
I had the advantage of frequent and free communication with
him on all matters of finance and currency. Nor have I in
457
458 LIFE OF WALTER BAGEHOT
all my experience known any one from whom in this impor-
tant province more was to be desired, or who was more free
and genial in the communication of his large knowledge and
matured reflection.
" But he seemed to be not less at home in deeper questions
of political philosophy, and of human character, and in respect
to these also we have sustained a loss not easily to be repaired.
" I do not presume to enter upon the more inward aspects
of your great bereavement ; and I beg you on no account to
take the trouble of acknowledging a letter, in writing which I
pay a tribute of truth and give relief to feeling. . . ."
Later Mr. Gladstone wrote : " I have to thank you for
kindly presenting me the Economic Studies of your dis-
tinguished husband. No one, I believe, more highly appreci-
ated than myself the satisfaction and profit which were to be
derived, during his lifetime, alike from his conversation and
his writings ; and every posthumous memorial of him, and
new proof of his extraordinary gifts, is to me, as to many
more, a matter of cordial interest.
" I am grateful to you for thinking me worthy to receive
such a memorial from yourself. ..."
After reading Mr. Hutton's Memoir of Walter Bagehot,
Lord Bryce wrote : —
" MY DEAR HUTTON,
" Let me, as a friend and a warm admirer of Walter
Bagehot, thank you for your most interesting memorials of
him in this month's Fortnightly, It was with no small sur-
prise that those who knew him perceived how little the world
seemed to know the loss it sustained, when his keen, bright,
fertile intellect left us ; and I was looking month after month
for some such worthy tribute to his greatness. Is it going
too far to say that he was the most interesting man in London
to talk to ? The man who was most ingenious in suggestion,
most penetrating in complexities, most sure to give a novel
form to commonplace questions, and, in a certain sense, in
spite of the occasional love of paradox, most fair in judg-
ment ? "
TRIBUTES FROM CONTEMPORARIES 459
After re-reading a volume of these Biographical Studies,
Lord Bryce again writes : —
" This I have done with an ever-increasing admiration for
the wonderful acuteness, ingenuity and fertility of mind which
appears in all the essays. There seems to me to be nothing
at all comparable to them in the literature of this generation ;
and the acuteness is so entirely without bitterness, the tone
throughout is so elevated, that one feels better as well as
wiser every time one peruses them again. I do trust you will
continue to publish what still remains, believing that every-
thing he wrote on topics not purely temporary, is of per-
manent value to the world."
Lord Thring wrote to my sister : —
" I know no man whose loss will be more keenly felt not
only by his friends, but by the business world in general. He
had the rare faculty, to my mind the best test of ability — of
making abstruse subjects clear to ordinary understandings. I
always think that a man is a master of his art in proportion as
he can dispense with its jargon, and no writer with whom I
am acquainted has dealt so much as your husband with
technical details with so little technical phraseology."
Mr. Bonamy Price, Professor of Political Economy,
Oxford, writes : —
" The public loss is heavy indeed, for writers of his power
and the acquaintance with the realities of human life are most
rare. You have the consolation of knowing that many grieve
along with you."
Henry Fawcett wrote : —
" There was scarcely any one whose friendship I 'more
valued, and I am sure there is hardly any one who could be
so ill spared. I shall always look back to the hours I spent
with him when we were examiners together at the London
University as one of the most pleasing remembrances of my
life."
Sir Robert Giffen writes : —
" It is a great shock to me after all the debt I owe to him
both for instruction and for taking me up, and I am quite sure
I can never have such another friend. I am most sorry for
460 LIFE OF WALTER B AGE HOT
you indeed, although it must be a consolation to think that
few men's lives have been so full of noble labour, and in all
respects so worthily filled up. It seems so. poor a thing in such
a calamity to write expressions of condolence, but as I per-
haps knew more of Mr. Bagehot's work than any one outside
his own family, I feel as if I ought to convey to you a sense of
the great impression he made on all in contact with him in his
work.
" I have had intimate relations since 1 877 with not a few
of our prominent public men but never one with quite the
gifts and brightness of your husband or so likeable in every
way. The pleasantest time of my own life was the period of
my association with him, and there has really been nothing
else to compare with it."
Lord Avebury wrote : —
" I have long admired and respected him, but I had not
realised how much affection I had for him ".
Lord Carnarvon writes of the Economic Studies as the last
work and the latest instruction of one whose loss both from a
public and private point of view he will not cease to deplore.
Bernard Cracroft wrote to my sister, Mrs. Greg': —
" I had such a genuine and unfeigned admiration for his
genius and talent, it is quite a painful blank to me to think I
shall never again hear his peculiar humour and his subtle
disquisition. I was — unlike as we were — quite fond of him —
and would have gone a great distance out of my way for the
mere pleasure of being ' quizzed ' by him — which he always
did with a singular absence of all that could give the least
pain, and yet it was always, however trifling, worth attending
to. Poor Janie Senior in the morning — and Bagehot the
same evening, two of the most marked individualities in the
country — both in the prime of life — both as sterling as fine
gold — it is very saddening for those around them."
Mr. Kelligrew Wait wrote : —
" For myself I can truly say I have felt my friend's loss
very acutely. His was the only real schoolboy friendship that
ever endured, and I believe his feeling towards me — as mine
to him — was very warm and sincere.
TRIBUTES FROM CONTEMPORARIES 461
" Besides the tie of friendship, which neither time, distance,
nor difference of life or occupation affected, I somehow felt a
strong personal pride in the distinguished position he had ob-
tained, and I was ever looking forward to what the future
might have in store for him. I have constantly felt humiliated
that I, content to live a life of mediocrity, was able to step
into Parliament without difficulty, while he, by a strange per-
versity, could not obtain a position for which he was so re-
markably adapted, but also where his talents would have been
so eminently useful to his country."
Sir Mountstuart Grant Duff wrote : —
" It is a great public as well as a private calamity. I
do not remember any moment on record in English history
when we could so ill spare a man of such high and exceptional
ability." After referring to "the production of his mature and
exquisite genius " Sir Mountstuart Grant Duff adds : " He has
his niche in the Temple of Fame amidst the best and wisest
of his age and country ".
These are but a few of the tributes tendered by Walter
Bagehot's appreciators at the time and after his death.
In worthy fame, there is assuredly a lustrous, abiding
glory. A monument it is that earns praise for those who
raise it no less than for those to whom it is raised. Though
thirty-seven years have passed since that March, 1877, there
is still no lack of living witnesses — witnesses who count —
to testify to Walter Bagehot's genius. To his work and to
his wisdom is accorded its reward. The world has pro-
nounced.
Some there are, however, to whom this fame which the
world can accord, seems but a cold, inanimate memorial when
compared to the warmth of feeling treasured by those who
loved him as a friend. The exact nature of the talisman
which inspired so rare an affection, it is scarcely possible to
put into words. Cite all the virtues in the world, you could
not carry home to those who did not know him the choice
quality of Walter Bagehot's influence over those closest to him.
The grace of that day which is gone cannot be passed on.
There always must remain, say what we may,
462 LIFE OF WALTER B AGE HOT
. . . one grace, one wonder, at the least,
Which into words no Virtue can digest.
Letters from two life-long friends written at the time of
his death may reflect somewhat of the depth of feeling which
Walter Bagehot could inspire.
T. Smith Osier wrote : —
" One man does not often say he loves another, I can say
it of very few, but I can of Walter Bagehot. And besides
that, of all the men I have known with anything like intimacy
he was the single one of whom I could say with certainty
that his individual mark was left upon the thought of his time.
His talk — when one had him alone — was the purest intellectual
pleasure I ever had. He went so straight to the heart of the
question — you were so sure of fresh light — and he was so
matchless in discussion as contrasted with dispute. The mere
love of truth was always sufficient to sustain his animation
without any thought of display or victory. The last long
tete-a-tete I remember was some six years ago in a walk
over Wimbledon Common. But the sense of such talks is a
hundred times fresher in my mind than the talk of the scores
of ordinary men of whom the world is so full. And I know
too his sound, warm heart and sterling integrity from his
youth up, and am proud to think that I too may claim in a
humble fashion to have been his friend. It is true that I did
love Walter besides admiring his genius and holding his
character in the highest esteem. I daresay there may not
be very many who knew how much warmth there was with
all that clear light — how much of the truest tenderness with
all that unerring perspicuity of glance and brilliancy of expres-
sion. But those who have felt its charm can never forget the
impression he made. I have known the touch of his affection-
ateness more than once in my life — both in joy and in sorrow,
and on the intellectual side, I repeat deliberately, that converse
with him in the days when we were thrown together and when
talk was preceding life, was the highest intellectual pleasure
I ever reached. Every remark of his was so clear and
pertinent and yet came from such a depth below the
surface — the whole bearing and relation of every thought was
TRIBUTES FROM CONTEMPORARIES 463
so completely and rapidly seized, that you advanced miles with
him where another man would only have taken you yards.
Nor was that all. The first thing I knew about him when
he was not long emerged from boyhood was an act of great
moral courage — and he carried his integrity with him to the
quiet end. What a comfort it must be to look back upon a
peaceful falling asleep without a struggle or a pang — only
it came too soon, and when we might have looked for many
years of ripened wisdom and beneficent life."
Richard Hutton, who of all his men friends loved him the
best, wrote : —
" This blow seems almost more than one can bear, my
dear Mrs. Bagehot. I don't know why I was so stupidly
confident he was getting better. ... I can hardly see for the
heaviness of my head and heart at this crushing blow, though
I know I ought to be thinking chiefly of you, and indeed am
thinking of you very much, and very, very painfully. It is
the snapping of a hundred threads all together — I hardly
know where I am or what it all means. The world changes
so, I don't feel equal to life in it. ... I must try and write
something about him in my own paper,1 which will be a very
painful effort. God help me ! Did Bagehot tell you that
this day week I told him he was looking so young and well,
I could hardly believe he was my contemporary at all. I was
feeling old and haggard, and I was wonderfully struck by his
bright, fresh look. Tell his father from me, how very much
he was to me. The dreariness of this day is terrible to me —
I am afraid I am hardly myself. Yours was a much closer
tie, but mine was an older one. — Well, he is in better keeping
than ours. — God bless you, and help us to bear all we may
have to bear."
The next day Mr. Hutton wrote : —
" I was sure his death must have been due to a failure of
the heart. But it is very little use our trying to find these
artificial consolations. The pain is all the same. I shall
never see him again here, and I hardly know how to bear it,
I am still quite stunned."
1 The Spectator.
464 LIFE OF WALTER B AGE HOT
Very few of us are now left who picture him thus, more
as the intimate friend than as the wise author of books.
Happily for some of these few, albeit their sun is nearing the
horizon, his home is still their home, the Herd's Hill, so
beloved by his parents and by him from his childhood. There
it is, ever recalling to memory that vivid life associated with
them. There are the walks, the lawns from which his father
opened vistas through the branches of the elm trees to " further
beauties beyond " ; to a sight of that little river Parret — a
blue ribbon winding amidst the damp of green moorland
meadows ; — to the view of the church towers, aged, noble
sentinels, rising steadfast amidst a vaporous landscape. There
still is the steep pathway, the short cut that Walter would
shoot down in all haste to catch his train, a lovely pathway
branched over by the big arbutus tree, brilliant in winter with
crimson strawberries and white bell-flowers, and by the wide
spreading lime-tree, bright yellow-green, and the copper beech,
cornelian scarlet in the spring, purple crimson in the summer,
their trunks buttressed against a steep bank of primroses and
moss ; the views over the moors to the Quantock and Mendip
Hills ; to the mound in the moors marking the place where
Alfred the Great burnt the famous cakes. All these things
still are there as we wander on those lawns ; and round us
still hover living associations with those three to whom they
were so dear.
Places themselves become monuments through the force of
the memories attached to them.
In my spirit will I dwell,
And dream my dream, and hold it true ;
For tho' my lips may breathe adieu
I cannot think the thing farewell.
APPENDIX.
A TRIBUTE BY LORD BRYCE.
On the same day of the week and at the same hour,
thirty-nine years after Walter Bagehot died, Viscount Bryce
delivered the following tribute to his memory on the occasion
of the unveiling of the tablet placed on the house in which
Walter Bagehot was born : —
Even at a time like this, when our thoughts are particu-
larly fixed upon the events of the terrible crisis through which
the world is passing, and chiefly upon the omens which we
are glad to discover of the approach of what we trust may be
a complete victory (cheers), even at a time like this it is fitting
we should remember those illustrious men whose genius has
been an honour to our country, and who have conferred upon
us benefits by their thoughts and writings, the fruits of which
we are still enjoying. And it is eminently fitting that such
illustrious men should be commemorated by some visible sign
or token in the town or county where they lived, that there
should be something to remind those who reside in the place
of famous men who went before and stir them to emulate
notable predecessors. Such a man deserving well to be com-
memorated was Walter Bagehot, to whose fame and memory
we are met to pay a tribute to-day. His was certainly one
of the finest minds of his generation. It was a great and
remarkable generation. It was a generation that included
Charles Darwin, Tennyson, Lord Kelvin, Clerk Maxwell, and
Huxley ; a generation which included John Stuart Mill and
many another thinker we remember ; a generation which on
the continent of Europe included such men as Helmholtz,
Ranke, and Mommsen, and in France, Pasteur, Taine, and
Fustel de Coulanges, to name only men belonging to the
sphere of science and letters. If I named men famous in
[465]
[466] LIFE OF WALTER B AGE HOT
politics and discovery I should enlarge the list too much. It
is not too much to say that he stands in the front rank of a
generation which included such men. (Cheers.) He had an
eminently original mind. He was a man who never left a
subject where he found it. He had always something new
to add to that which his predecessors had accumulated. His
was a mind of considerable delicacy and subtlety. It used
to remind me, in listening to his talk, of a steel blade, keen,
polished, strong, and flexible. It was also an exceptionally
fertile mind, shooting out ideas with perfect ease, so that you
always felt — you felt it in reading his books and in listening
to his conversation — that there was plenty more where that
came from. There was no appearance of his exerting himself
to be original and brilliant. Originality and brilliance came
upon him as easily as the soil throws up flowers in spring.
It was also an extraordinarily active mind ; it never seemed at
rest. There was a characteristic phrase in which he said he
liked " to play with his mind ". It gave him pleasure to pro-
duce and give forth ideas, letting them flow out in the most
natural and informal way. And his mind was also — and this,
I think, is a point with which I ought to deal a little because
it is somewhat special to him and somewhat unusual in the
work of literary men — it was a singularly scientific mind. I
mean he applied the methods which are applied by the scien-
tific investigator with the same exactness and critical dis-
crimination. The same care in observation and logic in
deducing results from what he observed, which belongs to the
province of a great scientific discoverer. This was due, I
think, to his having an extremely keen observation, an ability
to note small facts of which other people had not realised the
significance. He was scientific also in this sense, that in
handling subjects on which many of his predecessors had gone
on repeating old terms and formularies, he sought for actu-
alities. He looked right down into the thing itself, and saw
what it essentially and really was. He saw the human
phenomenon, moreover, in motion as well as at rest People
have often forgotten that they were not dealing with mere
figures of human beings, and that the way of getting at human
A TRIBUTE BY LORD BRYCE [467]
society is to get at the individual man and see what are the
motives and influences that move and sway him and direct
his course. Human society was to him not a set of figures in
a wax- work, but a moving group, everybody influencing every-
body else. He was much aided, no doubt, in reaching this
essentially new and instructive point of view by the effect of
the scientific discoveries going on in his time. He was not,
as far as I know, a systematic student of science or history,
but he was one of the first to apply scientific principles to
the study of economic questions. His remarkable book on
Physics and Politics, like his famous work on the British
Constitution, may be said to mark the beginning of an era in
our way of handling political subjects. Everybody who has
written about the British Constitution since is under an obliga-
tion for much that has become so familiar that perhaps the
writer does not know it was due to Walter Bagehot. I might
illustrate that by his book called Lombard Street, and by
the miniature studies which occasionally appeared in the peri-
odical press. In that way he was the author of a new de-
parture in studies that belong to political science. You may
compare him with such an illustrious Frenchman as Tocqueville
was eighty years ago, and perhaps even with the great name
of Montesquieu. Bagehot was a practical man, as the Chair-
man has reminded you. He was engaged in banking when
living here, and in London was in constant touch with the
financial community in what we hope will remain, in spite of
the War, the financial centre of the world. (Cheers.) The
practical experience was of incomparable value to him. He
would have been a great and a pioneer mind in any case, but
I am sure he would not have made such valuable contributions
if he had not studied the phenomena in his daily business.
His was a mind which was always bent on finding the prin-
ciples underlying the daily facts in the operation of banking
and finance, and it was because he had grasped the practical
things and had the logical power to discover principles that
his contributions to economic science are so valuable. I do
wish most earnestly we had more minds at this moment like
his to deal with those extraordinarily difficult economic prob-
468] LIFE OF WALTER PAGE HOT
lems with which we are now confronted. If he were alive to
help us it would be worth hundreds of millions to this country.
Men with a discernment like his, who see how financial diffi-
culties of an unprecedented kind can be dealt with by getting
at once to the principle underlying the whole machine, can
render that service, although unfortunately they are not always
available at the moment It is very rarely you have a mind
at once great in the spheres of theory and practice — to find
anyone who has the wide vision and the power to correlate
principles and at the same time the practical good sense and
judgment which enables him to be a successful business man.
Plato sighed in vain for a time when kings should be
philosophers or philosophers should be kings. (Laughter.)
That time had never come, and no one sets such an example
as Walter Bagehot set He was the inventor of Treasury
Bills, in full operation at this moment, and by means of which,
I believe, a very large part of the National Debt has been
recently raised. There was an old system of Exchequer Bills ;
it was inconvenient and rather puzzling to the ordinary man.
Bagehot saw there was a much simpler method that would
appeal more to the ordinary man, because it was not like the
bills with which he was familiar. He brought this to the
notice of the Treasury, and the result was this new system was
adopted, but never was it worked on so vast a scale as during
last year. The same gifts I have endeavoured to delineate
will be found also in his purely literary and biographical work.
Although much has been written since of famous men, what
he wrote was so fresh and original that it still can be read
with pleasure and advantage. He enjoyed the study of men
in the same way as the botanist enjoys the study of trees and
plants. He had not only a keen observation, but a very
active imagination, and it was by his imagination and sym-
pathy he was able to find his way into the human character
and give a more lively and pleasant interpretation than had
been given before. There was one other gift I must mention
— a gift very rare amongst scientific men. He had a great
deal of humour and an exceedingly brilliant wit It was per-
fectly spontaneous, and this enabled him to see things in re-
A TRIBUTE BY LORD BRYCE [469]
lations which had struck nobody else. It is this that makes
his books so readable. People used to pour ridicule on the
dreary subject of political economy. Thomas Carlyle called
it the "dismal science". Nobody can call economics in
Bagehot's hands a " dismal science ". It is instinct with the
life of the time. It was the sparkling display of wit that gave
his conversation such a charm. In his time he was one of the
three or four best talkers in London, although London then
contained a remarkable number of interesting men. His con-
versation had a quality of its own. He was always ready to
receive as well as to give, although he had far more to give
than nine hundred and ninety-nine men had to give back to
him. He had the gift of stimulating others to be at their
best. That made conversation go pleasantly. And he was
never malicious. He would scorch a fallacy but spare its
author. I never discovered in him any sign of literary ambi-
tion. He wrote because he was interested and liked to give
out his thoughts. He was perfectly natural and simple, and
was found to be one of the truest and most affectionate friends.
His extraordinary powers were recognised in his lifetime
by comparatively few — those who studied with him at college,
a few bankers and financiers who knew him personally, and
a few who used to meet him at the Quarter Sessions in Somer-
set, old Mr. Dickinson among the number. The historian,
Mr. E. A. Freeman, constantly used to talk about Walter
Bagehot, and stated that one of the things that took him to
the Quarter Sessions was the chance of meeting him there.
Now his fame has spread over English-speaking lands and in
France and Germany and Italy. In all, the leading spirits
have recognised the service he rendered to science and learning.
Nowhere has that recognition been warmer and more general
than in the United States, and one of the most just and warm
tributes paid to his services was paid in an essay published
some time ago by the President of the United States.
(Cheers.) I have often heard him speak *of Walter Bagehot.
In all the literature on political and economic subjects which
has appeared in the United States — a literature which is
larger than amongst us — there is no single book that does not
[470] LIFE OF WALTER BAGEHOT
bear some trace of Bagehot's influence. Students of political
science there look upon him as having inaugurated a new era
in the study of the subject. I should like to acknowledge my
own indebtedness. All the admirers of his writings and those
friends who still remain who recollect his personal charm,
which they cannot forget — all these will rejoice to think that
this memorial of him is set up here in the county of Somerset,
among whose worthies he will always hold a leading place.
(Cheers.)
The company, leaving the Town Hall, adjourned to the
Bank House, opposite, where Viscount Bryce unveiled the
tablet, saying: "I now unveil this memorial tablet to an
illustrious citizen and commend it to the tender care of the
inhabitants of Langport ".
The handsome tablet, which is of Ham Stone, was designed
by Mrs. Russell Barrington. It bears the following inscrip-
tion in red lettering, surrounded by a border of bay leaves in
relief: —
WALTER BAGEHOT
WAS BORN IN THIS HOUSE-
FEBRUARY 3RD, 1826.
HE DIED AT HERDS HILL
MARCH 24™, 1877.
INDEX.
ABERDEEN, Lord, 214, 220.
Adams, 178.
Albert, Prince Consort, 92, 178 ; article
in Economist on death of, 352-3.
Avebury, Lord (Sir John Lubbock), 389
and w. ; letter from, 460.
BACON, Lord, essays of, 144 ; estimate
ERRATA FOR INDEX.
Page 469, col. 2, line 2 from foot, for Dickenson, Robin read Dickin-
son, Robert.
.» 47J> ,. i, line 6, for Enquirer read Inquirer.
>» 472, „ 2, „ 2, delete Howell, Lord, 160.
„ 476, „ 2, after Stevenson insert Stowell, Lord, 160.
„ 470, „ 2, line 3 from foot, /or Taylor read Tayler.
/IHIWCIU, IXUUtllO Lsi\.lM*t»vj >.., -jj •» ,
Cathedral, 135.
Arbuthnot, G., quoted, 270 ; letters from,
on Wilson, 340-1.
Arches, The, 252, 256, 260, 349.
Aristocracy —
Influence of, 27.
Natural, Carlyle on, 123.
Popular attitude to, 26-7.
Arnold, Dr., 131, 162; his theory of
government, 124 ; his teaching, 183,
355 ; cited, 160 ; review of his life
in the Record, 131.
Arnold, Matthew, 276, 407 ; Bagehot's
estimate of poems of, 215 ; letter
from, to Hutton, 247-8 ; article on,
in Fortnightly Review, 406.
Art, influence of, on nations, 24.
Ashburton, Lord, cited, 143, 164.
" Ashford Owen," 263, 264 and n.
Ashley, Lord, 161.
Athenaeum Club, 443, 453 and n.
Austen, Jane, 265.
Austria — war with France and Italy
(1859), 280 ; Prussian victory of
1866, 421.
standing business and on his faults,
145-7-
Bagehot, Walter —
Appearance of, 62, 84-5, 231.
Career, sequence of —
Birth and baptism, 58 ; education
and boyhood, 77 ; early religious
influence, 78 ; his mother's in-
sanity and his attitude thereto,
31-3, 46, 266 ; his life at home
and its effects on the develop-
ment of his genius, 69, 71, 76,
83-4 ; effect on him of his
mother's insanity, 172-5, 222 ;
visits to Oxford, 79 ; at Bristol
College, 84-100 ; scientific in-
terests outside college, 97 ; at
University College, London, 65,
80, 101 ; a " sort of demigod "
among his fellow- students, 114;
his first trial, 25, 102-3 I friend-
ships with Hutton, Roscoe, and
Smith Osier, 104 ff. ; forms a
debating society, 108 ; in the
first class, 114 ; takes classical
465
3°
INDEX.
ABERDEEN, Lord, 214, 220.
Adams, 178.
Albert, Prince Consort, 92, 178 ; article
in Economist on death of, 352-3.
Allen, Ralph, 234 and n,
Alpine horn, the, at sunset, 141.
Althorp, Lord, essay on, in Fortnightly
Review, 448.
Amazon, The, 197.
America —
Appreciation of Bagehot in, 21.
Constitution of, article on, in National
Review, 351, 363.
Secession War, 429; distress in Ire-
land and Lancashire consequent
on, 400; article on, in Economist,
351-
Slave States in, 120.
Anne, Queen, 87.
Anstey, 391.
Anthropomorphism, 170.
Anti-Corn Law League, 118, 275, 424.
Antwerp, Rubens' pictures in, 133-4 >
Cathedral, 135.
Arbuthnot, G., quoted, 270 ; letters from,
on Wilson, 340-1.
Arches, The, 252, 256, 260, 349.
Aristocracy —
Influence of, 27.
Natural, Carlyle on, 123.
Popular attitude to, 26-7.
Arnold, Dr., 131, 162 ; his theory of
government, 124 ; his teaching, 183,
355 ; cited, 160 ; review of his life
in the Record, 131.
Arnold, Matthew, 276, 407 ; Bagehot's
estimate of poems of, 215 ; letter
from, to Hutton, 247-8 ; article on,
in Fortnightly Review, 406.
Art, influence of, on nations, 24.
Ashburton, Lord, cited, 143, 164.
" Ashford Owen," 263, 264 and n.
Ashley, Lord, 161.
Athenaeum Club, 443, 453 and n.
Austen, Jane, 265.
Austria — war with France and Italy
(1859), 280 ; Prussian victory of
1866, 421.
Avebury, Lord (Sir John Lubbock), 389
and n. ; letter from, 460.
BACON, Lord, essays of, 144 ; estimate
of, 144-5 ; quoted, 135.
Bagehot, Guillaume, 63.
Bagehot, Thomas, 49 n.
Bagehot, Capt. Thomas, 49 n.
Bagehot, Thomas Watson (father of
Walter), 78, 210, 266 ; his connec-
tion with Stuckey's Bank, 50-7 ;
letters to his son quoted, 80, 85-7,
96-7 ; on Free Trade movement,
89-91 ; on Corn Laws, 94-5 ; on
Wilson's death, 325-6.
Bagehot, Edith (Mrs. Thomas Watson,
mother of Walter), 63, 267; in-
sanity of, 66, 71, 75, 265-6, 393 ;
visit of, to Paris, 189 ; death of,
411 ; character of, 72 ; influence on
her son, 65-6 ; " Senior Wrangler "
of the family, 149 ; letters to her
son, 72-5, 88-9, 92 ; on his under-
standing business and on his faults,
I45-7-
Bagehot, Walter —
Appearance of, 62, 84-5, 231.
Career, sequence of —
Birth and baptism, 58 ; education
and boyhood, 77 ; early religious
influence, 78 ; his mother's in-
sanity and his attitude thereto,
31-3, 46, 266 ; his life at home
and its effects on the develop-
ment of his genius, 69, 71, 76,
83-4 ; effect on him of his
mother's insanity, 172-5, 222;
visits to Oxford, 79 ; at Bristol
College, 84-100; scientific in-
terests outside college, 97 ; at
University College, London, 65,
80, 101 ; a " sort of demigod "
among his fellow-students, 114;
his first trial, 25, 102-3 I friend-
ships with Hutton, Roscoe, and
Smith Osier, 104 ff. ; forms a
debating society, 108 ; in the
first class, 114 ; takes classical
465
466
LIFE OF IV ALTER B AGE HOT
Bagehot, Walter — Career, sequence of
— cont. —
honours with Hutton, 116; ill-
health, 116; visits the Continent,
117; at Anti-Corn Law League
and Repeal meetings, 118-23 '•
studies etymology, 130 ; visits
the Rhine, etc., 132-42; again
ill, 145 ; works for his degree,
159 ; takes scholarship, 164 ; sub-
sequent studies, 165 ; authorship
begun, 176 ; takes gold medal in
intellectual and moral philosophy
and master's degree (1848), 180;
work for University Hall, Lon-
don, 180; ill-health, 181 ; reads
law, 181, 184 ; visit to Paris
(1851), 189 ; letters on Coup
d'etat, 15, 189, 198-9 ; return to
London, 65, 205 ; called to the
Bar (1852), and abandons the
law, 69, 205 ; joins the business
at Langport, 10, 69, 205 ; work
at Stuckey's Bank, 53, 55-6 ;
articles in the Prospective Re-
view, 205-18 ; in the National
Review, 218-19, 222, 225 ; in the
Saturday Review, 225 ; makes
the Wilsons' acquaintance, 229 ;
series of letters in the Economist,
231-2 ; engaged to Eliza Wilson,
238 ; married, 256 ; in the Lon-
don world, 261 ; his life a rush
since his marriage, 10 ; at Herd's
Hill and Claverton, 265-8 ; work
for the Saturday Review, 272 ;
in London, 279 ; visit to Paris
(1860), 290 ; strain of work
(1859-61), 288-9 ; chosen as Par-
liamentary candidate for London
University, 291 ; articles on Glad-
stone in the National Review,
292 ff. ; Indian affairs, 299 ff. ;
on the death of Mr. Wilson
offered post of Finance Minister
in the Supreme Council of India,
31, 344 ; takes direction of the
Economist and identifies himself
with Free Trade principles,
13-14, 349 ; sworn as Justice
of the Peace for County of
Somerset, 348 ; removal to Lon-
don, 349 ; articles on " The
American Constitution " and on
the Civil War, 351 ; social life,
360 ; sole editor of the National
Review, 366; in France, 366;
at Great Marlow, 371 ; in Paris,
384 ; stands for Manchester, 384 ;
in Switzerland, 386 ; narrowly
Bagehot, Walter — Career, sequence of
— cont. —
loses election at Bridgwater, 390 ;
his evidence to the Bribery Com-
mission, 391 ; the financial crisis
of 1866, 396 ; again proposed as
M.P. for London University,
393 ; in North Devon, Cornwall,
and the Pyrenees, 401 ; declines
to stand for Mid-Somerset, 396,
402 ; seriously ill (1868), 404 ;
again ill (1869), 410 ; removal
to Wimbledon, 411 ; life at
Wimbledon, 414 ; Lombard
Street published, 415 ; work
on Physics and Politics, 425 ;
articles on France and French
affairs, 431 ; visits to the Conti-
nent, 432, 439 ; in London and
Wimbledon, 432, 441, 442 ;
elected to Athenaeum Club, 443 ;
gives evidence before the Com-
mittee on Banks of Issue, 444 ;
last tour in Devonshire, 445 ;
work on Economic Studies,
449 ; financial service to the
Government (1877) in devising
Treasury Bills, 23-4, 449 ; pub-
lication of Student's Edition of
Economic Studies (The Pos-
tulates of English Political
Economy), 449 ; new house in
Queen's Gate Place, 452 ; death
at Herd's Hill and burial in
Langport Churchyard, 454.
Characteristics of —
Affection and devotion to his
parents, 66-7, 69 ; to family and
friends, 28, 31.
Aristocratic atmosphere, 27.
Artistic appreciation and love of
nature, 8, 9, 10, 114, 132.
Buoyant spirits, 28, 29, 30, 274 ;
his juvenile pranks, 43, 64-5, 81 ;
his dancing, 192 ; his nonsense,
358 ; the donkey story, 363.
Conservative disposition, 17.
Conversational powers, 112.
Dignity, 30.
Experiencing nature, 10, 299.
Genius, qualities of, 18-19 5 its sen-
sitiveness, 30.
Imaginative faculties, 7, too, 175-6.
Inherited qualities, from his father,
66 ; from his mother, 66, 75 ;
his cavalier strain, 113-14, 216.
Judgment, soundness of, 7, 34.
Modesty, 19.
Originality of thought — " full of
ideas," 32, 34.
INDEX
467
Bagehot, Walter— Characteristics of—
cont. —
Personal qualities apart from lit-
erary, ii.
Proportionate values, powers of as-
sessing, 24-5.
Reality, sense of, 5.
Refinement and taste, 28.
Self-delineation, powers of, 208-9.
Tolerance, 28, 355.
Wit, 34.
Work, love of (intellectual effort
a tonic), 118.
Estimates of —
As an essayist, 207 ; his " concern
for the simple truth," 300, 407 ;
no " padding " in his intellectual
life, 422 ; his ill-spelling, 148-9 ;
his sums and book-keeping, 212,
213 ; literature his play, 263 ;
as literary lion in the political
world, 272 ; his genius never
fully developed in literature, u ;
a devourer of history, 245 ; popu-
lar attitude to, 359 ; to his at-
tempts to enter Parliament, 385-6.
Estimates of, by —
Lord Avebury, 460 ; A. Birrell, 2,
21, 32, 206 ; Lord Bryce, 2, 19,
458 ; Lord Carnarvon, 460 ; F.
Gallon, 451 ; W. E. Gladstone,
457-8 ; Sir M. Grant Duff, 461 ;
Prof. H. Fawcett, 459 ; Sir
R. Giffen, 6, 17, 22, 31, 426,
450-1, 459 ; R. H. Hutton, 6-7,
463 ; Forest Morgan, 21 ; Lord
Morley, 6 ; T. Smith Osier, 462-
3 ; Prof. Bonamy Price, 459 ;
Lord Thring, 459 ; K. Wait, 460-
i ; President Wilson (" A Wit
and A Seer "), 2-4, 358.
Estimates of his writings, 3, 4, 5, 21.
See also titles of his articles,
works, etc.
Influence of, 22 ; financial, 300-1,
399 ; political — consulted both by
Liberals and Conservatives, n.
Letters of —
To his father, 82-3, 87 ; on Free
Trade movement (1841), 90-1,
94-5, 101-2 ; on Anti-corn
League and Repeal meetings
(1844), "8-23, 130 ; on his Clas-
sical studies, 148 ; on Political
Economy, 153, 159-61 ; from
Paris on Revolution (1851), 193-6 ;
on abandonment of the Law, 204.
To his mother, 81-3, 89, 92, 114,
123, 131, 137, 142, 147, 161, 162,
178, 179, 190-2, 196, 197, 257.
Bagehot, Walter — Letters of — cont. —
To his wife, 20, 75, no-n, 239-46,
248-54, 281.
To his Aunt Reynolds, set. 6, 77-8,
"4.
To Sir E. Fry, on progress in
English civilisation, n, 25, 29,
92-3, 144-5 ; on poetry and
metaphysics, 151-3, 179.
To Gladstone, on the American
Constitution, 363 ; on Sir G. C.
Lewis, 370 ; on the Bank Notes
Issue Bill, 374-6 ; on the Finan-
cial Crisis (1866), 397-9.
To W. Halsey, on Wilson's death,
328.
To Hutton, 166-9, 172, 213, 215,
219, 220, 225, 226.
To Roscoe, 168, 185, 187, 189,
215.
To K. Wait, 211, 274.
To Sir C. Wood, on Sir C. Tre-
velyan's appointment as Finance
Minister of India, 346.
Memoirs of, 2-8.
Pastimes of, 253, 264, 443.
Quoted — on Wilson, 353 ; on Shelley,
355-
Speeches of —
On Government's duties regarding
blasphemy or sedition, 124-9.
On " Does Income of Absentees
Spent in a Foreign Country
Diminish the Wealth of the
Country from which they Emi-
grate ?" 155-9.
Verses of — " Orithyia," 243-4 ; others,
171.
Views on and attitude to —
Franchise (1866), the, 13.
Monastic life, the, 147.
Music, 9, 413-14.
Party and political changes, n, 13,
IS-
Poetry, 25.
Religious education. 30, 76, 162.
Stage, the, 279.
Theology, 80.
Unitarianism, 109-11, 219.
Voluntary Church system, the, 132.
Works of —
Articles, etc., in —
Economist, The. See that title.
Enquirer, The. See that title.
Fortnightly Review. See that
title.
National Review. See that title.
Prospective Review. See that
title.
Saturday Review. See that title.
468
LIFE OF WALTER B AGE HOT
Bagehot, Walter — Works of— cont. —
Articles —
Unpublished : " Proofs of Re-
ligion," 264.
Complete —
Biographical and Literary Studies,
33-
Count Your Enemies and Econo-
mise Your Expenditure, pamph-
let, 364, 368.
Depreciation of Silver, 448.
English Constitution, The, 4, 22,
34-5, 344. 377, 382 ; estimate
of, by A. V. Dicey, 378 ; second
edition of, 430; translation and
publication of, in Germany, 430.
Estimates of some Englishmen and
Scotchmen, early essays, 6, 246 ;
other early essays mentioned,
83, 92, 161.
Lombard Street, 4, 22, 344 ; ad-
vertisement of, quoted, 415 ; esti-
mates of — by Gladstone, 416 ; by
Lord Grey, 416-18; by W. S.
Jevons, 418 ; by Sir William
Hunter, 418 ; by President Wil-
son, 419; by Sir R. Giffen, 449.
Physics and Politics (The Prelim-
inary Age), 4, 8, 22, 34, 344,
382 and n. ; cited, 100 ; estimates
of, by Sir H. Maine, 382 ; by
President Wilson, 383.
Unfinished —
Economic Studies, 7, 344, 446,
449 ; students' edition of the two
completed chapters published
1885 (The Postulates of English
Political Economy), 445, 449;
estimates of, by Lord Granville,
451 ; F. Gallon, 451 ; Sir R.
Giffen, 449.
Work on Political Economy
commenced, 444, 446, 450.
Bagehot, Mrs. Walter (Miss Eliza
Wilson), 230, 238 ; diary of, 239,
256-8, 261, 265, 281, 325, 362, 364-5,
370, 377-9, 38i, 385, 389, 402,
404, 405, 410, 442.
Bagehot family —
Battle Abbey Roll, in, 49 n.
Characteristics of, 60-1.
Civil wars, in, 49 «.
Langport and its trade, connection
with, 48-9, 58 ff.
Stuckey family, relations with, 58,
60 ff.
Bank Act, suspension of, 239, 397.
Bank notes, hoarding of, 399.
Bank Notes Issue Bill, 373-6 ; article
in Economist, 373.
Bankers' reserves, 417.
Banking, letters on, article in Economist,
231-2.
Banks of Issue, committee on, 443-4.
Bar, the, objections to, 184 and ».
Barchester Towers, 251.
Barrington, Russell, 406.
Batten, Colonel, 50.
Bazaine, Marshal, article on, in Eco-
nomist, 431.
Beedall, Thomas, diary of, 58-9.
Bein, M., 197.
Benares, 313.
Bethel, Sir Richard (Lord Westbury),
271.
Bible, the, 220, 221 ; Book of Proverbs,
355 ; Gospel histories, 226-8.
Biographical and Literary Studies, 33.
Biography, art of, 273.
Birrell, A., 206 ; Lecture of, on Bagehot,
2, 21 ; his estimate of Bagehot, 206.
Blasphemy, 125-6.
Board of Trade, 281.
Bombay Gazette quoted, 315.
Booth, 90, 91.
Bossuet, 135.
Bouverie, Edward, 271.
Braddon, Miss, 414.
Brady, 155.
Bribery, articles on, in Economist, 391.
Brides, " sitting up " of, 261.
Bridgwater election (1866), 390 ; Bribery
Commission at, 391-3.
Bright, John, 13, 419 ; article on, in
Economist, 424-5.
Bristol, Stuckey's Bank at, 50-6.
Bristol College, 84.
Bristol and Somersetshire Bank, 50.
Britannia, Blome's, quoted, 49.
British Association at Oxford, 178.
British constitution, the, 25-6.
Bromley, Rev. E., 84.
Brougham, Lord, 160.
Brown, Dr., 161.
Bruges, 132.
Budget (1860), 292-3.
Bunsen, 178 ; Hippolytus by, 213-14.
Burke, E., 359 ; eloquence of, 143-4,
295 ; quoted, 15, 208.
Burns, 12.
Burton Pynsent, 28, 44-5 ; the Monu-
ment at, 43.
Business, 24.
Bute, Lord, 144.
Butler, Bishop, 19 ; article on, in Pro-
spective Review, no, 218, 356.
Browning, 219.
Bryce, Lord, 441 ; quoted, 19 ; letters —
to the author, 33-6 ; to Hutton,
358, 45^-
INDEX
469
Byron — his Childe Harold scenery, 138 ;
estimate of, 152.
C^ESARISM, articles on, in Economist,
384, 420-1.
Cairnes, Professor, article on death of,
in Economist, 444.
Calcutta. See India.
Campbell (poet), 152.
Campbell, John Lord, 186.
Canning, Lord, 337 ; welcomes Wilson
to India, 302-7 ; approves his Note
plan, 311 ; letter from, on his death,
330 ; Wilson's estimate of, 321.
Cardwell, Lord, 271.
Carlyle cited, on education, 162 ; on
armies, 383 ; imagination of, 359 ;
estimate of, 123.
Carnarvon, Lord, 366-7, 444 ; resigna-
tion of (1867), 390; return to
Colonial Office, 432; speech on
Irish Church, 406-8 ; estimate of,
407 ; his estimate of Bagehot, 460.
Carol, The, 148.
Carpenter, Dr., 84.
" Causation," 161.
Cawnpore, 313.
Celibacy, 167-8.
Chatham, Lord, property of, at Burton
Pynsent, 43-4, 143 n. 1 ; relations
with Stuckey's Bank, 56; Mac-
aulay's essay on, 143 ; eloquence
of, 295 ; quoted on taxation of
America, 144.
Childe Harold, 152 ; scene of, 138.
Chimes, The, 147.
Christabel, 224.
Christ's nature, 226-8.
Church-rate law, 185-7.
Churchwarden, anecdote of a, 135.
Clarendon, Lord, death of, 419 ; article
on, in the Economist, 422-4.
Claverton, 259, 260, 285 and n.
Claverton Manor, 229, 234.
Clevedon, 96, 252, 256.
Clifton, 97.
Clough, Arthur, Principal of University
Hall, London, 180; resigns, 183;
death of, 353 ; influence of, on
Bagehot, 181-3, 2?8; estimate of,
181-3 ! article in the National Re-
view on poems of, 182, 354, 368.
Clyde, Lord, 310, 314.
Cobden, Richard, cited, on Mr. Wilson,
275 ; on political economy, 446 ;
attitude of, to Sir Robert Peel, 380 ;
Bagehot's worship of, n, 379 ; his
estimate of, 116-17 ; article on, in
Economist, 379-81.
Coblenz, 139.
Coinage, International, article on, in
Economist, 406.
Colenso, Bishop, 437.
Coleridge, Hartley, influence of, 224 ;
estimate of, 207-8 ; review of his
Biographia Borealis, 206-9 ; article
on, in Prospective Review, 74, 172,
206-9.
Coles, Rev. Stuckey, 79.
Cologne Cathedral, 135-6.
Compromise, 15.
Connor, Mr., 121.
Conservative Government (1874),
articles on, in Economist, 433, 437.
Contemporary Review, Bagehot's article
in, on the "Emotion of Conviction,"
421 ; Metaphysical Society's papers
in, 422.
Count Your Enemies pamphlet. See
under Bagehot — Works.
Court, the, 353.
Cowper, Wm., article on, in National
Review, 71, 218, 222.
Cracroft, Bernard, 413 ; letter of, on
Bagehot's death, 460.
Cranbourne, Lord, 390.
Craik, Georgina M., 272.
Crimean War, 26.
Crises, 203.
Crisis, financial, of 1858, 239, 241, 251 ;
article on, in National Review,
251 n. ; of 1866, 396-9 ; article on,
in Economist, 396-7.
Cromwell cited, 383.
Crossley, Mrs., 44.
Curate, story of a poor, 218.
Currency, article on, by Bagehot in
Prospective Review, 176.
Cynicism, 31.
D'AUMALE, Due and Duchesse, 362.
Dalhousie, Lord, 305.
Defoe, 227.
De Girardin, Emile, 191.
De Girardin, Madame, 196.
De Montalembert, M., 113.
De Morgan, Prof., 118, 159 ; story of,
124.
De Morgan, Wm., 412 and n.
Denman, Lord, 186, 187.
" Depreciation of Silver," 448.
Derby, Lord, 214 ; Reform Bill of 1859,
268-9 ; Ministry of 1866, 390 ;
death of, 409 ; article on, in Eco-
nomist, 409.
Dicey, Prof. A. V., letter of, to Hutton
on The English Constitution, 378.
Dickens, Charles, 147.
Dickenson, Robin, 49.
Discretion, 353.
470
LIFE OF WALTER B AGE HOT
Disraeli, B. (Lord Beaconsfield), 432 ;
speech of, on reciprocity, 153 ;
Ministry of 1874, 437 ? cited, 276 ;
article on, in Economist, 403.
Dissenters, 160.
Dolomite Mountains, 432.
" Don Juan," 152.
Drachenfels, the, 137-40.
Dudley, 384.
Durand, 310.
Dutch language, the, 134.
ECONOMIC STUDIES. See ^tnder
Bagehot — Works.
Economist, The, founded, 13 ; edited
and managed by Bagehot, 10, 13-
14, 348-9 ; Sir R. Giffen assistant
editor, 6, 405.
Bagehot's articles and letters in
(1859 to 1877), estimate of, 368.
American civil war, the, 351.
Bank Note Issue Bill, 373.
Banking, 231-2.
Bazaine, Marshal, condemnation
of, 431.
Bribery debate in House of Com-
mons, 391 ; " The True Way to
Prevent Bribery," 391.
Bright, John, retirement of, 424.
Caesarism, 384 ; " Collapse of
Caesarism," 420.
Cairnes, Prof., death of, 444.
Clarendon, the late Lord (1870),
422-4.
Cobden, 379-81.
Coinage, International, 406.
Conservative Government of 1874,
structure of, 437.
Conservative majority (1874), 433.
Derby, Lord, death of (1869), 409.
Disraeli's resignation (1868), 403.
Financial crisis and panic (1866),
396-7.
Forster, Mr., and educational com-
pulsion, 427.
France and French affairs (1873),
431. See also subheading Napo-
leon III.
France, events of 1871 in, 426.
France, general conditions of (1871),
[9 articles], 427.
Franchise (1866), [15 articles], 13.
Gladstone's Budget (1860), 292 ; his
Chapter of an Autobiography,
403 ; his speech on Home Rule for
Ireland, 427 ; his resignation on
Irish University Bill (1873), 431 ;
his resignation of Liberal Party
leadership (1875), 437.
Guizot's resignation, 439-40.
Economist, the — Bagehot's articles and
letters in — cont. —
Herbert of Lea, Lord, 351-2.
Income Tax in England and India,
3*7-
Indian Finance. See subheadings
Temple, Trevelyan, and Wilson.
Indian Viceroyalty, the, 370.
Ireland. See subheading Gladstone.
Irish Church disestablishment, Lord
Carnarvon's speech on, 407-8.
Lewis, Sir G. C., 369, 388.
Lowe, Robert, [3 articles], 427.
M.P., advantages and disadvantages
of becoming, 396.
Napoleon III., [2 articles], 368, 419 ;
death of, 430.
" Ought the Tories to touch a Reform
Bill ? " 390.
Overend, Gurney & Co., 396-7.
Palmerston, 388.
Poor Law Bill, the, 399.
Prince Consort, death of, 352-3.
Russell, Lord John, Ministry of
(1865), 388.
Sinking Fund, the, 258.
Statesmen, value of, 409.
Temple, Sir Richard, Indian Budget
of (1869), 408-9.
Trevelyan, Sir C., minute of, on Wil-
son's Budget, 319-20 ; his appoint-
ment as Finance Minister in India,
344 ; his Indian Budget (1863), 347.
Wilson, Rt. Hon. J., memoir of,
323, 341-2.
Wilson's Indian Budget (1860), [2
articles], 315-16 ; his speech on
gold currency for India, 317 ; his
plan for a paper currency in India,
317, 335 ; Sir Bartle Frere's minute
on Wilson's Indian taxes, 338-40.
Eden, Miss, 272.
Edinburgh Review articles — on Lord
Chatham, by Macaulay, 142-3 ;
on absenteeism, by McCullock, 155.
Edinburgh Reviewers, The First, article
on, in National Review, 24, 175,
222-4.
Education Bill (1870), article on, in
Economist, 419.
Education, religious. See that heading.
Ehrenberg, 176.
Eldon, Lord, 160.
Elgin, Lord, 370.
" Eliot, George," 9-10, 361, 377.
Ellenborough, Lord, 348 ; quoted,
318-19.
Elliott, Ebenezer, 12.
Eloquence, 357.
Elton, Sir Arthur, 252, 256, 268.
INDEX
Encyclopedia Britannica, Sir R. Gif-
fen's article on Bagehot in, 6-17.
English Constitution, The. See under
Bagehot — Works.
English Joint Stock Bank, the, 397.
Enquirer, The, Bagehot's letters in, on
Coup d'etat (1851), 15, 189, 198-9 ;
President Wilson's estimate of,
199, 203.
Erskine, 279.
Estimates of some Englishmen, etc. See
under Bagehot — Works.
Estlin, 146.
Exchange, bills of, 157-8.
Exchequer bills, 23, 24, 449.
FALSTAFF, 119.
Faraday, Dr., 178.
Fawcett, Professor H., 459.
Feudal strongholds, 137.
Financial crisis. See Crisis.
Floating debt, the, 23.
Foreign Office, reception at (1874), 441.
Foster's Life, 159.
Forster, W. E., 419 ; article on his
Educational compulsion in Econo-
mist, 427.
Fortnightly Review, the, 377-8.
Bagehot's articles in —
Althorp, Lord, and the Reform Act
of 1832, 448.
Lawyers, bad and good, 421.
London University, Matthew Ar-
nold on, 406.
Physics and politics, 382.
Political economy, postulates of
English (ist Chapter of The Eng-
lish Constitution), 377, 445.
Senior's journals, 425.
Smith, Adam, as a Person, 446.
Giffen's article in, on Bagehot, 426,
450-1.
FOX, IlS-ig, 122.
France : —
African Generals, the, 196.
Constitution and President of, 196-7.
Coup d'Etat (1851), in, 193-6; letters
on, in Enquirer, 15, 189, 198-9,
203.
Red Party, the, 191, 197.
Republic of, 191.
France, articles on, in Economist. See
that heading.
Franchise (1866), articles on, in Econo-
mist, 13.
Free trade, Economist's advocacy of,
I3-
Freeman, E. A., 430; Norman Con-
quest by, estimate of, 367.
French character, 202.
Frere, Sir H. Bartle, estimate of, 322 ;
article in Economist on his minute
on Indian taxation, 338-40 ; tribute
by, to Wilson, 322-3.
Friend of India, 348 ; quoted, 315.
Fry, Sir Edward, 84 ; quoted on physi-
cal problems, 93-4.
" Fudge Family," quoted, 126.
Funded debt, the, 23.
GALTON, Francis, 451.
" George Eliot." See Eliot.
Germans, character of, 167 ; ideas of,
212.
Germany, 400.
Ghent, 133.
Gibbon, Edward, article on, in National
Review, 225.
Giffen, Sir R., assistant editor of the
Economist, 6, 405 and «., 425-6;
articles by, on Bagehot — in En-
cyclopedia Britannica, 6-8, 17, 22,
31 ; in Fortnightly Review, 426,
450-1 ; letter from, on Bagehot's
death, 459-60.
Gladstone, W. E., 269, 396; cited,
425 ; on Bagehot's Reform Pam-
phlet, 271; Budget speech (1860),
292 ; suspends Bank Charter Act,
397 ; Home Rule speech, 427 ;
resigns (1873), 431 ; reconstructs
his Ministry, 432; resigns leader-
ship of Liberal Party, 437 ; Govern-
ment of 1868-74 compared with
Governments of 1832 and 1841,
435-6; letters of, on Manchester
election, 385 ; on Somerset elec-
tion, 401-2 ; on Bank Notes Issue
Bill, 374 ; on " Mr. Gladstone,"
298 ; on " The American Constitu-
tion," 363 ; on Lombard Street,
415-16 ; on Economic Studies,
and Bagehot's death, 457-8 ; Bage-
hot's articles on, in the National
Review, 277, 292-8 ; in the
Economist, 292, 427-9 ; Bagehot's
eulogy of, 396 ; contrasted with
Sir R. Peel, 436 ; unique qualities
of, 437-8 ; oratory of, 293-5.
Gladstone, Miss Helen, story of Bage-
hot by, 359.
Goschen, Lord — early days with Bage-
hot, 14; consults him on proposed
Consolidated Bank, 376 ; letter
from, 378.
Gospel histories, the, 226-8.
Government : —
Cabinet, when possible, 26.
Conduct of, qualities necessary for,
201-2.
472
LIFE OF WALTER B AGE HOT
Government — cent. —
Duties of, regarding blasphemy anc
sedition, 124-9.
Foundation of, 15.
Opinion, influence on, 125.
Party system of, 15.
Graham, Sir G., 214.
Grant Duff, Sir M. 29; cited on
Bagehot's estimate of Gladstone
298 ; on Bagehot, 301, 461 ; address
by, on " Walter Bagehot," 16.
Granville, Lord, 271 ; letter from, 400
estimate by, of Economic Studies
451.
Grag, quoted, 207.
Great Marlow, 371-3.
Greg, W. R., 228, 233, 235, 249; inci-
dent at marriage of, 441 ; paper by,
on " Revelation," 437 ; letter from,
on Wilson's death, 327 ; inter
course with Bagehot, 360 ; estimate
of, 10.
Grey, Lord, 271; Government of 1832
contrasted with that of 1868-74,
435-6; letter from, on Wilson's
death, 341 ; estimate by, of Lom-
bard Street, 416-18.
Grey, Sir G., 221.
Grote, G., 163.
Guizot, article on resignation of, in the
Economist, 439-40.
Gurney's Bank, 398.
Guy Mannering, 255.
HALICARNASSUS, statues from, 239, 240.
Hall, Vice- Chancellor Sir Charles, 181,
184.
Hallam, Arthur, 145 ; grave of, at Cleve-
don, 256.
Halsey, W. S., 287, 328.
Ham-Hill Stone, 41.
Hampton Court, 148.
Hayward, 262.
Hazlitt, 382.
Heart of Midlothian cited, 195.
Heidelberg, 140.
Herbert of Lea, Lord, Bagehot's memoir
of, in the Economist, 351-2.
Herd's Hill, Bagehot's love for, 9, 38
and «., 61, 64, 413, 464.
High spirits, 113.
Hill, Miss Octavia, 412 and n.
Hill House, 39.
Hippolytus, 213-14.
Hirschel, Sir J., 178.
" Hobbes, John Oliver," 167.
Home Rulers in Parliament, 433-4.
Hood's Poems, Bagehot's estimate of,
152-
Hoppus, Dr., 65, 101-3, X6o.
Homer, Francis, 119, 160, 164.
Howell, Lord, 160.
Huish Episcopi Church, 41, 454.
Human nature, 33.
Hume, 167.
Huskisson, 160.
Hutton, R. H., first meets Bagehot, 80 ;
their friendship, 104-8, 109 ; at
Manchester New College, 165 ;
Principal of University Hall, Lon-
don, 213; marriage of, 213; death of
his wife, 215 ; offered editorship of
Economist, 225 ; co-proprietor and
co-editor of the Spectator, 348 ;
resigns editing National Review,
365 ; Unitarianism and ultimate
beliefs of, 109, in ; relations with
Bagehot, 68, 180 ; letters to, 18,
106-7, 169, 172 ; on his friends and
interests, 67-8 ; on politics and
politicians, 116-17 5 on Wilson's
death, 326 ; tract by, on the Incar-
nation, 364-5 ; memoir of Bagehot,
6, 7, 180 ; sonnet on, 108 ; non-
sense verse by, 250 ; quoted, 39,
107, 109, 112, 175-7 ; on " Hartley
Coleridge " Essay, 206-7 ; on
Clough, 181, 353 ; on Roscoe, 279 ;
on the Bridgwater election, 391-3 ;
on Bagehot's death, 463 ; estimate
of, 105-6 ; mentioned, 21, 22, 42,
114, 118, 147, 159, 219, 228, 233,
252.
INCOME Tax, 340 ; article on, in Econo-
mist, 317 ; in India. See India.
India : —
Articles on, in Economist. See that
heading.
British Indian (Zemindars) Associa-
tion, 309, 315, 338.
Calcutta and, difference between,
302, 306 ; trade of Calcutta, 316.
England, prestige of, in, 314, 316.
Finance, 302, 304, 308, 309, 318, 320.
Budgets (1860), 315-16 ; (1863), 347 ;
(1869) 408-9.
Deficit (1860), 315, 320; extin-
guished, 347.
Income Tax, 309, 310, 311, 315,
324, 408-9.
Paper currency, 306, 311, 325.
Taxes, new (1860), 310, 315, 320,
325-
Military affairs, 310-11.
Mutiny Bill (1859), 280.
inglis, Sir R., 178.
Ireland : —
Distress in, during American War,
400.
INDEX
473
Ireland — cont. —
Gladstone's speech on Home Rule
427-9.
Protestantism in, 162.
Irish Church disestablishment, 161.
Article on, in Economist. See that
heading.
Bagehot's address on, to graduates ol
London University, 393, 406.
Lord Carnarvon's speech on, 407.
Gladstone's change of attitude to-
wards, 403.
Irish land tenure, 419.
Iron in the soul, 32.
JEFFREY, Lord, 24; contrasted with
Wordsworth, 222-4.
Jerrard, Dr., 114, 116.
Joachim, 413-14.
Jones, Miss, 77.
Jowett, B., 220, 221.
KANT, 176 ; estimate of, 153, 179-80.
Keats, 206; quoted, 172.
Key, 130.
King, the, sentimental deification of,
25, 26.
Kinglake, 391.
Kingsley, Rev. Charles, 169.
Kneller, 148.
Knowles, Sir James, 421, 437.
LAING, Mrs., 344.
Lamartine, M., 191.
Langport : — •
Church, 40, 41.
Corporation, abolition of, 48 ».
Description and surroundings of, 37-9,
46-8 and «., 49.
Floods at, 39.
Grammar School, 81.
Old town of, 38.
Parliamentary representation of, in
early days, 39.
Stuckey's Bank at, 50-7.
Trade of, 49 n.
Latham, Dr., 178.
Laverrier, M., 178.
Lawrence, Sir John, 370-1.
Lawyers, 160-1 ; article on, in Fort-
nightly Review, 421.
Leibnitz quoted, 32, 119.
Lewes, Mr. and Mrs. (see also Eliot,
George), 377.
Lewis, Sir G. C., 271; cited, 29; on
article in the National Review on
Financial Crisis (1858), 251 and n. ;
career contrasted with Lord Pal-
merston's, 388 ; intimacy with Wil-
son, 283-4; death, 369; article on,
in Economist, 369, 388.
Liberal Party, the, 439.
Lind, Jenny, 414.
Literature, 24.
Liverpool election (1873), 431.
Locke, portrait of, 148.
Lombard Street. See under Bagehot —
Works.
Lombard Street in crisis of 1866, 396.
London : —
Bagehot's dislike of, 164.
O'Connell, enthusiasm for, in, 122.
University College, 25, 101 ff., 289.
History and work of, 393.
" Matthew Arnold on the London
University," article on, in Port-
nightly Review, 406.
Parliamentary representation of —
Bagehot's candidatures (1860),
291-2; (1868), 393-6.
University Hall, 180.
Lords, House of— the Pro-Corn Law
League, 122.
Lorna Doone country, 45.
Lost and Won, 272.
Lost Love, A, 263-4; noticed in article
in-National Review — " A Novel or
Two," 263.
Lowe, Robert (Lord Sherbrook), 271,
396; quoted on Cattle Plague
Report, 397 ; on Indian Budget
(1860), 319; letter to Bagehot on
" Parliamentary Reform," 269-70 ;
story of, 241 ; articles on, in Eco-
nomist, 427.
Lowe's Bill, 418.
Lucerne, 141.
Lyndhurst, Lord, 160.
Lynmouth, 8.
Lyrical Ballads, 224.
MACAULAY, Lord, 127 ; death of, 289 ;
essay on Lord Chatham quoted,
143 ; estimate of essays of, 145 ;
article on, in National Review,
69, 70, 113, 174, 222, 289-90 ; cited
on Westminster Abbey, 388.
Macintosh cited, 145.
Macrae, Dr. A., 336-7.
Madras. See India.
Maine, Sir H., letter of, on Physics and
Politics, 382.
Man, ignorance of, article on, in Na-
tional Review, no, 132, 268.
Manchester, Bagehot's candidature for,
384-5.
Manchester New College, 165.
Wanning, Card., 167.
474
LIFE OF WALTER BAGEHOT
Mansfield, Sir WM 310.
Marriage, 168.
Marshall, Prof. A., 449.
Martineau, Dr., 169, 180, 218, 219, 220 ;
introduces Bagehot to Wilson,
228 ; lectures on Moral Philosophy,
165-6.
Maurice, 221.
McCullock, 155.
Mechlin, 134, 135.
Meerut camp, 314.
Merit, scale of, 12.
Metaphysical Society, 8, 421-2.
Meuse river, 138.
Meynieux, Mons. and Madame, 190,
196.
Michael Angelo, statue by, 133.
Michell, Mrs., 81, 453.
Michell family, 48 n., 58.
Mill, J. S., 155 ; article by, on Tithe
Commutation Act, 153 ; article on
Political Economy of, in Prospec-
tive Review, 176.
Milton quoted, 128 ; article on, in
National Review, 272-3.
MofTatt, 241.
Mohl, Mons. and Madame, 192, 235,
290-1, 351, 426.
Monastic life, the, 147.
Money, 157-8.
Montacute, 41.
Montagu, Charles, 24.
Montagu, Lady Mary Wortley, article
on, in National Review, 368.
Montaguards, the, 194, 195, 197.
Montesquieu, 35.
Montgomery, Sir R., 310.
Moral evil, 180.
Moral temperature, 24.
Morgan, Forest, 21.
Morier, Sir Robert, 378 and n.
Morley, Lord, 6, 378 ; correspondence
with Bagehot, 444-8.
Morris, Wm., 10, 412, 442-3.
Mount Pleasant, 362-3.
Muchelney Abbey, 46.
Mutiny Bill (1859), 280.
NAPOLEON III., surrender of, at Sedan,
419 ; death of, 430 ; foreign policy
of, 214-15 ; Bagehot's justification
of, 199-200 ; his estimate of, 368,
420 ; articles on, in the Economist,
368, 419, 430.
Nations, great, 24.
National character, 15.
National Debt, the, 23.
National Provincial Bank of England,
398.
National Review, the, 289 ; started and
edited by Hutton and Bagehot,
218-19 ; Hutton's resignation of,
365-6 ; death of, 366.
Articles, etc., in, by Bagehot (and
see Prospective Review) : —
American Constitution, the, 351, 363.
Clough's Poems, 182, 354, 368.
Cowper, William, 71, 218, 222.
Financial crisis (1858), 251 n.
First Edinburgh Reviewers, The, 24,
175, 222-4.
Gibbon, Edward, 225.
Gladstone, Mr., 277, 292-8.
Macaulay, Lord, 69, 70, 113, 174,
222, 289-90.
Man, ignorance of, no, 132, 368.
Milton, John, 272-3.
Montagu, Lady Mary Wortley, 368.
Novel or Two, A, 263.
Parliamentary Reform, 269-70 ; the
unreformed Parliament, 288.
Peel, Sir Robert, 225.
Pitt, William, 276, 349.
Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 169, 225,
371 ; Matthew Arnold's estimate
of, 247.
Waverley Novels, the, 254, 255.
Wordsworth, Tennyson and Brown-
ing, 219.
National wealth, 155-7.
Navigation Laws, the, 282.
Needles, the, 287-8.
Nerves, sensitive, 30.
Newman, Cardinal, 168, 437 ; gossip
concerning, 147 ; estimate of, 166 ;
of his book on the Jews, 170; in-
fluence of, on Bagehot, 5, 6, 179,
1 80.
Newman, Francis W., 166, 177, 180.
Newton, 149 ; portrait of, 148.
Nonnenwerth, 136, 137, 139-40.
North Briton, The (No. 45), 144.
Northcote, Sir Stafford, 23 ; letter of,
on Committee on Banks of Issue,
443-
Novel or Two, A, article on, in National
Review, 263.
O'CoNNELL, 130; speech at a Repeal
meeting, 118, 120-2.
Oratory, 297.
" Orithyia " (Bagehot's poem), 243-4.
Osier family, 112.
Osier, T. Smith, 25 n. ; quoted, 104 ;
estimate of Bagehot by, 112; on
his death, 462-3.
Outram, Sir James, 321.
Overend, Gurney & Co., article on, in
Economist, 396-7.
INDEX
475
Oxford, 178 ; article on, in the Pro-
spective Review, 205.
PALEY, cited, 296.
Pal grave, Sir Francis, 366, 367.
Palmerston, Lord, 117, 192, 193,220;
relations with Lord John Rus-
sell, 117, 268; forms Ministry of
1859, 269,; death of, 387; con-
trasted with Sir G. C. Lewis, 388 ;
quoted on Corn Laws, 95 ; influ-
ence of, 388 ; article on, in Econ-
omist, 387.
Panizzi, 240.
Paris : —
Commune in, 426.
Life in, during Revolution (1851),
198.
Parisian society, 384.
Parliament of 1832, work of, 393.
Parliamentary candidates, 386.
Parliament, member of, article on, in
Economist, advantages, etc., of be-
coming, 396.
Parliamentary Reform, article on, in
National Review, and pamphlet, by
Bagehot, 269-70; on the unre-
formed Parliament, 288.
Parliamentary representation of North
and South contrasted, 395.
Paper currency, 417; in India, 306.
Parret river, 37 and n. 2, 40, 49 n.
Parr's Bank, 52, 56.
Patriarchs, the, 170.
Pearson, C. H., 365-6.
Peel, Sir R., 81, 89, 283; Lord John
Russell's relations with, 117, 268;
Government of 1841 contrasted
with that of 1868, 435-6; charges
against Cobden and the Anti-Corn
Law League, 380 ; Income Tax
revised by, 340 ; Irish Church policy,
161 ; quoted on the Irish Church,
395; article on, in National Re-
view, 225.
" Peter Bell," 224.
Phelps' Optics, 148.
Physics and Politics. See under Bage-
hot— Works.
Pitt, William, 295, 350; articles on, in
National Review, 276, 349; con-
trasted with Bagehot, 10, 276 ;
sense of fun and wit of, 349-50.
Plato, 206.
Poland, 221.
Political economy, letter on, by Bage-
hot to Morley, 446-8 ; unfinished
work on, 444, 446, 450.
Political Economy Club, the, 422.
Political economists' theories, 155-6.
Politics " a piece of business," 15, 201.
Poor Law Bill, article on, in Economist,
399-
Press, the, 252.
Prestbury, 60.
Price, Professor Bonamy, 459.
Prichard, C.,79, 95, 393.
Prichard, Dr., 178, 180 ; influence of,
on Bagehot, 97-100.
Pride and Prejudice, 265, 268.
Primitive man, 26.
Profane literature, 456.
Prospective Review, the, renamed Na-
tional Review, 218.
Articles in, by Bagehot (and see Na-
tional Review) : —
Butler, Bishop, no, 218, 356.
Currency, the, 176.
Coleridge, Hartley, 74, 172, 206-9.
Oxford, 205.
Political economy of J. S. Mill,
176.
Shakespeare — the Man, 12, 216-17.
Protestantism : —
Ireland, in, 162.
Peaceful nature of, 166-7.
Proverbs, Book of, 355.
Public Worship Regulation Bill, 14 n.
Pynsent, Sir William, legacy from, to
Lord Chatham (Pitt), 143 n. 1.
QUAIN, Mr. Justice, 184.
Quantock Hills, the, 42 ff.
Quekett, 81.
Quiet men, 423.
RADICAL Aberdeen Professor, story of,
62.
Radnor, Lord, 13, 232-3.
Record, The, 79, 361 ; Bagehot's esti-
mate of review of Dr. Arnold's life
in, 131.
Reform : —
Act of 1832, article on Lord Althorp
and, in Fortnightly Review, 448.
Bills of 1859, 268-9; article in Na-
tional Review on Parliamentary
Reform, 269-70.
Bill of 1866, 390 ; article in Economist,
" Ought the Tories to touch a
Reform Bill ? " 390.
Religion, political force of, 383.
Religious education, 30, 76, 162-3.
Repealers, the, 130.
Reynolds, J. S., 65, 101 ; career of,
78-9; quoted on Bagehot's faults,
146 ; Memoir of, quoted, 29.
Reynolds, Mrs. (aunt), Bagehot's letters
to (aged 6), 77-8, 115-16.
476
LIFE OF WALTER B AGE HOT
Reynolds, Sir Joshua, picture of" Puck"
by, 234.
Rhine scenery, 37, 40.
Ricardo, 155.
Robinson, Crabb, 19, 364 ; cited on
Clough, 278.
Roger's "Pleasures of Memory " quoted,
89.
Rolandseck hermitage, 137, 139.
Romilly, Sir John, 291, 292.
Romilly, Sir S., 160.
Roscoe, Miss Mary (Mrs. Hutton), 213,
215.
Roscoe, W. C., 108, 109, 114, 180, 222;
estimates of, 112, 279-80; editor of
Prospective Review, 176 ; death of,
279 ; letter of, to Hutton on re-
linquishing the Bar, 184-5 ; tragedy
Violenzia by, 187 ; article by, on
the " Humorous," 220.
Rosebery, Lord — Life of Lord Chat-
ham, quoted, 43.
Ross, Rev. D. M., 48 »., 150.
Rouher, Mon-5., 384.
Routine, 16.
Rubens, Bagehot's estimate of pictures
by, 133-4-
Ruskin, 361 and «., 412 and n.
Russell, Lord John, 275 ; attitude of,
to Sir R. Peel, 117; turns out Pal-
merston, 193 ; resolution of, on
Lord Derby's Reform Bill (1859),
268 ; Foreign Minister, 269 ; beaten
and resigns on Reform Bill (1866),
390 ; Free Trade policy of, 89 ;
Irish Church policy, 161 ; article in
Economist on ministry of (1865),
388.
SACRED literature compared with pro-
fane, 456.
St. John's Gospel, 226.
St. Luke's Gospel, 227.
St. Matthew's Gospel, 227.
St. Paul, 167 ; estimate of, 220.
Saint's Tragedy, estimate of, 167, 169.
Sanford, J. L., 189, 199, 430 and n.
San Sebastian, 401.
Saturday Review, The, sceptical influ-
ence of, 276-7; Bagehot s work
for, 225, 272.
Saving Bank balances, 416.
Sawtell, Rev. G. H. — reminiscences of
Bagehot, 62-4, 358.
Schiller, 138.
Scott, Sir Walter, 255.
Sedgmoor, 42.
Seditious publications, 126-8.
Self-sacrifice, 142.
Semi-Detached House, 272.
Senior, article in Fortnightly Review
on journals of, 425.
Sense and Sensibility, 265.
Sewell, 179.
Shakespeare, 28 ; article on, in Prospec-
tive Review, 12, 216-17.
Shelley quoted, 176 ; estimate of, 152,
355 ; illegality of works of, in Eng-
land, 129 ; article on, in National
Review, 169, 225, 247, 371-2.
Shipley, Rev. Orby, 404, 405.
" Simple democracy," 12.
Sinking Fund, the, article on, in Econo-
mist, 258.
Slavery, 214.
Smith, Adam, 255 ; article on " Adam
Smith as a Person," 446.
Smith, Goldwin, 35.
Snipe in Belgravia, 49 n.
Social relations, 26.
Society, first duty of, 200-1.
Socrates quoted, 201.
Somerset, Collinson's, 43.
Somerset election (1868), 396, 401-2.
Somersetshire clown, anecdote of, 26.
Sonning on the Thames, 406.
Special pleading, 211.
Spectator, the, 252, 358 ; acquired by
Hutton and Townsend, 349 ; letter
to, from Bagehot on charm of the
" Golden Light," 401.
Stanhope, Earl, 349 ; estimate of, 272.
Stanley, Dean, 177, 178, 220.
Stanley, Lord, 280.
State, functions of the, 394.
Statesmen, value of, article on, in
Economist, 409.
Stephen, Sir Fitzjames, 249, 437 ;
Cambridge Essays by, 220.
Stephen, Leslie, 25, 26.
Stevenson, R. L., quoted, 210.
Stuckey, Vincent, Pitt's private secre-
tary and clerk to the Treasury, 44 ;
starts Stuckey's Bank, 50 ; death
and estimate of, 150.
Stuckey families, connection of, with
Langport and its trade, 48 and n.,
49 ; relations with Bagehot family,
58 ; characteristics of, 60.
Stuckey's Bank : —
Chatham's financial relations with
and patronage of, 56.
History of, 50-7.
Notes issued by, 52.
Parr's Bank, amalgamation with, 52,
56-7-
TAYLOR, 218, 219.
Temple, Sir R., quoted on Wilson's
work in India, 333-8, 342-4 ; article
INDEX
477
in Economist on Indian Budget
of (1869), 408-9.
Tennyson, 219.
Thackeray, 270-1.
" Theatrical Show of Society," 25, 27.
" Theory of Numbers," 159.
Thiers, M., 196, 197.
Thinking, art of, 32, 119.
Three Clerks, The, 251.
Thring, Lord, 459.
Thun, 114.
" Thyrsis," 353.
Ticknor, G., 235.
Times, The, Disraeli's memorandum in,
404 ; quoted on Wilson's death,
329-30 ; Calcutta correspondent of,
quoted, 328; Bagehot's advice on
reading of, 364.
Tithe commutation, 154.
Tocqueville, 35, 235 ; cited, 201.
Tories and Reform, article on, in Econo-
mist, 390.
Townsend, M., 348-9; cited, 358.
Traditions, 226-7.
Travellers1 Insurance Company, The,
Hartford, Conn., 21.
Treason, 128.
Treasury, The, 283.
Treasury Bills, 23-4, 449.
Trevelyan, Geo., 453 and n.
Trevelyan, Sir C., opposition of, to
Wilson's Budget, 319-20, 334 ;
recall of, 323, 335, 345 ; letter
from, on his relations with Wilson,
347 ; appointed Finance Minister
of India, 344 ; his Indian Budget
(1863), 347 ; Bagehot's estimate
of, 345 ; Sir C. Wood's, 345-6 ;
articles on, in Economist, 319-20,
344. 347-
Trinitarians, 221.
UNITARIANISM, 114, 199.
VATICAN DECREES, 437.
Victoria, Queen, 81, 193.
Villiers, Charles, quoted on notice in
Economist of Poor Law Bill, and
on the distress in Ireland and Lan-
cashire during American War,
400.
Vincent, 123.
Virgil quoted, 43.
" Voices of the Night," 25.
Von Holtzandorf, Baron, 430.
WAIT, K., 84 ; letters of, to Bagehot,
16; on his death, 460-1.
Waterloo, field of, 138.
Watson, Bagehot's foster-brother, 72,
86.
Watts, artist, 9, 261 and «., 452 ;
quoted, 27.
Waverley Novels, essay on, in Na-
tional Review, 254, 255.
Welby, Lord, quoted, 22-44 ! letter of,
to the author, 283-4.
Wellington, Duke of, 92 ; anecdote of,
282 ; quoted, 282.
Wellington Monument, the, 45.
West countryman's mind, the, 39.
Westminster Abbey, 388.
Westminster Review, Mill's article in,
against the Corn Laws, 154.
Weston-super-Mare, 408.
Wick, 9.
Wilberforce, 349.
Wilberforce, Bishop of Oxford, 35 ;
sermons at St. Mary's, Oxford,
178 ; at Sonning, 406.
Wilson, J., founds the Economist, 13 ;
work at the Treasury, 236, 283-4,
340-1; Vice- President of the Board
of Trade, 269 ; Secretary to the
Indian Board of Control, 275 ;
Financial Member of the Supreme
Council in India, 281 ; Budget
speech of, 333-4 ; Currency Bill of,
335 ; new Indian taxes imposed by,
338-40; death of, 325, 3312;
funeral, 337; memoir of, in the
Economist, 236-7, 285, 341-2; Sir
R. Temple's account of his work in
India, 333 ; estimates of, 273-5,
277, 282 ; by Disraeli, 275 ; by
Duke of Wellington, 282 ; by Lord
Grey, 341 ; Bagehot's relations
with, 229-30, 233-4, 235-8, 273-5,
278, 344 ; letters from, to Bagehot,
271,301, 311, 315-16, 320-22, 324 ;
to Sir C. Wood, 307, 309-10 ; to Sir
C. Trevelyan, 308-9; to Sir W.
Mansfield, 311 ; to his family on
unofficial life in India, 312; fruit
of his Indian policy, 347 ; articles on,
in Economist, 315-17, 335, 338-40-
Wilson, Eliza. See Bagehot, Mrs. Wal-
ter.
Wilson, W., President U.S.A., quoted
on Bagehot, 3, 4, 20-1, 358, 359;
estimate by, of Physics and Politics,
383-
Wiltshire natives' attitude to blacks,
313 «•
Wimbledon, 411, 414.
Withers, Hartley, 415.
Women : —
Fascinating, 71.
Spiritual experience of, in.
478
LIFE OF WALTER BAGEHOT
Wood, Sir Charles, 281 ; support of
Wilson by, 334-5 ; letters from, on
Sir C. Trevelyan's appointment
as Finance Minister of India,
345-6-
Wood, Vincent, 212.
Wordsworth, 24, 109, 114 ; quoted, 175 ;
influence of, 224 ; contrasted with
Lord Jeffrey, 222-4.
Wordsworth, Tennyson and Browning,
article on, in National Review,
219.
YOUNG, Professor, 93 ; letter of, to
Bagehot, 94.
ZEMINDARS. See India.
ABERDEEN : THE UNIVERSITY PRESS
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