may, I hope, contain those essays on statesmen and politicians which are for the present omitted from these,—it is perhaps only fair to say that Bagehot in later life used to speak ill, much too ill, of his own early style. He used to declare that his early style affected him like the ‘jogging of a cart without springs over a very rough road,’ and no doubt in his earliest essays something abrupt and spasmodic may easily be detected. Still, this was all so inextricably mingled with flashes of insight and humour which could ill be spared, that I always protested against any notion of so revising the essays as to pare down their excrescences. I have never understood the comparative failure of this volume of Bagehot’s early essays; and a comparative failure it was, though I do not deny that, even at the time, it attracted much attention among the most accomplished writers of the day, and that I have been urged to republish it, as I am now doing, by many of the ablest men of my acquaintance. Obviously, as I have admitted, there are many faults of workmanship in it. Now and then the banter is forced. Often enough the style is embarrassed. Occasionally, perhaps, the criticism misses its mark, or is over-refined. But taken as a whole, I hardly know any book that is such good reading, that has so much lucid vision in it, so much shrewd and curious knowledge of the world, so sober a judgment and so dashing a humour combined. Take this, for instance, out of the paper on ‘The First Edinburgh Reviewers,’ concerning the judgment passed by Lord Jeffrey on the poetry of Bagehot’s favourite poet, Wordsworth:—