Of course the style of these familiar private letters conveys a gross caricature not only of Bagehot’s maturer mind, but even of the judgment of the published letters, and I quote them only to show that at the time when he composed these letters on the _coup d’état_, Bagehot’s mood was that transient mood of reckless youthful cynicism through which so many men of genius pass. I do not think he had at any time any keen sympathy with the multitude, _i.e._, with masses of unknown men. And that he ever felt what has since then been termed ‘the enthusiasm of humanity,’ the sympathy with ‘the toiling millions of men sunk in labour and pain,’ he himself would strenuously have denied. Such sympathy, even when men really desire to feel it, is, indeed, very much oftener coveted than actually felt by men as a living motive; and I am not quite sure that Bagehot would have even wished to feel it. Nevertheless, he had not the faintest trace of real hardness about him towards people whom he knew and understood. He could not bear to give pain; and when, in rare cases by youthful inadvertence, he gave it needlessly, I have seen how much and what lasting vexation it caused him. Indeed, he was capable of great sacrifices to spare his friends but a little suffering. It was, I think, during his stay in Paris that Bagehot finally decided to give up the notion of practising at the Bar, and to join his father in the Somersetshire Bank and in his other business as a merchant and ship-owner. This involved frequent visits to London and Liverpool, and Bagehot soon began to take a genuine interest in the larger issues of commerce, and maintained to the end that ‘business is much more amusing than pleasure.’ Nevertheless, he could not live without the intellectual life of London, and never stayed more than six weeks at a time in the country without finding some excuse for going to town; and long before his death he made his home there. Hunting was the only sport he really cared for. He was a dashing rider, and a fresh wind was felt blowing through his earlier literary efforts, as though he had been thinking in the saddle, an effect wanting in his later essays, where you see chiefly the calm analysis of a lucid observer. But most of the ordinary amusements of young people he detested. He used to say that he wished he could think balls _wicked_, being so stupid as they were, and all ‘the little blue and pink girls, so like each other,’—a sentiment partly due, perhaps, to his extreme shortness of sight.