Bagehot took the mathematical scholarship with his Bachelor’s degree in the University of London in 1846, and the gold medal in Intellectual and Moral Philosophy with his Master’s degree in 1848, in reading for which he mastered for the first time those principles of political economy which were to receive so much illustration from his genius in later years. But at this time philosophy, poetry, and theology had, I think, a much greater share of his attention than any narrow and more sharply defined science. Shakespeare, Keats, Shelley and Wordsworth, Coleridge, Martineau and John Henry Newman, all in their way exerted a great influence over his mind, and divided, not unequally, with the authors whom he was bound to study—that is, the Greek philosophers, together with Hume, Kant, J. S. Mill, and Sir William Hamilton—the time at his disposal. I have no doubt that for seven or eight years of his life the Roman Catholic Church had a great fascination for his imagination, though I do not think that he was ever at all near conversion. He was intimate with all Dr. Newman’s writings. And of these the Oxford sermons, and the poems in the _Lyra Apostolica_ afterwards separately published—partly, I believe, on account of the high estimate of them which Bagehot had himself expressed—were always his special favourites. The little poetry he wrote—and it is evident that he never had the kind of instinct for, or command of, language which is the first condition of genuine poetic genius—seems to me to have been obviously written under the spell which Dr. Newman’s own few but finely-chiselled poems had cast upon him. If I give one specimen of Bagehot’s poems, it is not that I think it in any way an adequate expression of his powers, but for a very different reason, because it will show those who have inferred from his other writings that his mind never deeply concerned itself with religion, how great is their mistake. Nor is there any real poverty of resource in these lines, except perhaps in the awkward mechanism of some of them. They were probably written when he was twenty-three or twenty-four. ‘TO THE ROMAN CATHOLIC CHURCH. ‘“Casta inceste.”—_Lucretius._ ‘Thy lamp of faith is brightly trimmed, Thy eager eye is not yet dimmed, Thy stalwart step is yet unstayed, Thy words are well obeyed. ‘Thy proud voice vaunts of strength from heaven, Thy proud foes carp, “By hell’s art given:” No Titan thou of earth-born bands, Strange Church of hundred hands. ‘Nursed without knowledge, born of night, With hand of power and thoughts of light, As Britain seas, far reachingly O’er-rul’st thou history. ‘Wild as La Pucelle in her hour, O’er prostrate realms with awe-girt power Thou marchest stedfast on thy path Through wonder, love, and wrath.