IV. SHAKESPEARE—THE MAN (1853) 126 V. JOHN MILTON (1859) 173 VI. LADY MARY WORTLEY MONTAGU (1862) 221 VII. WILLIAM COWPER (1855) 255 _APPENDIX._ I. LETTERS ON THE FRENCH COUP D’ÉTAT OF 1851 (1852) 309 II. CÆSARISM AS IT EXISTED IN 1865 361 III. MEMOIR OF THE RIGHT HON. JAMES WILSON (1860) 367 MEMOIR BY THE EDITOR.[1] It is inevitable, I suppose, that the world should judge of a man chiefly by what it has gained in him, and lost by his death, even though a very little reflection might sometimes show that the special qualities which made him so useful to the world implied others of a yet higher order, in which, to those who knew him well, these more conspicuous characteristics must have been well-nigh merged. And while, of course, it has given me great pleasure, as it must have given pleasure to all Bagehot’s friends, to hear the Chancellor of the Exchequer’s evidently genuine tribute to his financial sagacity in the Budget speech of 1877, and Lord Granville’s eloquent acknowledgments of the value of Bagehot’s political counsels as Editor of the _Economist_, in the speech delivered at the London University on May 9, 1877, I have sometimes felt somewhat unreasonably vexed that those who appreciated so well what I may almost call the smallest part of him, appeared to know so little of the essence of him,—of the high-spirited, buoyant, subtle, speculative nature in which the imaginative qualities were even more remarkable than the judgment, and were, indeed, at the root of all that was strongest in the judgment,—of the gay and dashing humour which was the life of every conversation in which he joined,—and of the visionary nature to which the commonest things often seemed the most marvellous, and the marvellous things the most intrinsically probable. To those who hear of Bagehot only as an original political economist and a lucid political thinker, a curiously false image of him must be suggested. If they are among the multitude misled by Carlyle, who regard all political economists as ‘the dreary professors of a dismal science,’ they will probably conjure up an arid disquisitionist on value and cost of production; and even if assured of Bagehot’s imaginative power, they may perhaps only understand by the expression, that capacity for feverish preoccupation which makes the mention of ‘Peel’s Act’ summon up to the faces of certain fanatics a hectic glow, or the rumour of paper currencies blanch others with the pallor of true passion. The truth, however, is that the best qualities which Bagehot had, both as economist and as politician, were of a kind which the majority of economists and politicians do not specially possess. I do not mean that it was in any way an accident that he was