only to ask his father, to obtain it. His uncle, Mr. Vincent Stuckey, too, was a man of the world, and his house in Langport was a focus of many interests during Bagehot’s boyhood. Mr. Stuckey had begun life at the Treasury, and was at one time private secretary to Mr. Huskisson; and when he gave up that career to take a leading share in the Somersetshire Bank, he kept up for a long time his house in London, and his relations with political society there. He was fond of his nephew, as was Bagehot of him; and there was always a large field of interests, and often there were men of eminence, to be found in his house. Thus Bagehot had been early prepared for the wider field of political and financial thought, to which he gave up so much of his time after his marriage. I need not say nearly as much on this later aspect of Bagehot’s life as I have done on its early and more purely literary aspects, because his services in this direction are already well appreciated by the public. But this I should like to point out, that he could never have written as he did on the English Constitution without having acutely studied living statesmen and their ways of acting on each other; that his book was essentially the book of a most realistic, because a most vividly imaginative, observer of the actual world of politics—the book of a man who was not blinded by habit and use to the enormous difficulties in the way of ‘government by public meeting,’ and to the secret of the various means by which in practice those difficulties had been attenuated or surmounted. It is the book of a meditative man who had mused much on the strange workings of human instincts, no less than of a quick observer who had seen much of external life. Had he not studied the men before he studied the institutions, had he not concerned himself with individual statesmen before he turned his attention to the mechanism of our Parliamentary system, he could never have written his book on ‘the English Constitution.’