‘42,023. Can you remember the names of any who told you that?—No, I cannot, but I daresay I was told by as many as twenty people, and we went upon that entire consideration.’ To leave my subject without giving some idea of Bagehot’s racy conversation would be a sin. He inherited this gift, I believe, in great measure from his mother, to whose stimulating teaching in early life he probably owed also a great deal of his rapidity of thought. A lady who knew him well, says that one seldom asked him a question without his answer making you either think or laugh, or both think and laugh together. And this is the exact truth. His habitual phraseology was always vivid. He used to speak, for instance, of the minor people, the youths or admirers who collect round a considerable man, as his ‘fringe.’ It was he who invented the phrase ‘padding,’ to denote the secondary kind of article, not quite of the first merit, but with interest and value of its own, with which a judicious editor will fill up perhaps three-quarters of his review. If you asked him what he thought on a subject on which he did not happen to have read or thought at all, he would open his large eyes and say, ‘My mind is “to let” on that subject, pray tell me what to think;’ though you soon found that this might be easier attempted than done. He used to say banteringly to his mother, by way of putting her off at a time when she was anxious for him to marry, ‘A man’s mother is his misfortune, but his wife is his fault.’ He told me once, at a time when the _Spectator_ had perhaps been somewhat more eager or sanguine on political matters than he approved, that he always got his wife to ‘break’ it to him on the Saturday morning, as he found it too much for his nerves to encounter its views without preparation. Then his familiar antitheses not unfrequently reminded me of Dickens’s best touches in that line. He writes to a friend, ‘Tell —— that his policies went down in the _Colombo_, but were fished up again. _They are dirty, but valid._’ I remember asking him if he had enjoyed a particular dinner which he had rather expected to enjoy, but he replied, ‘No, the sherry was bad; tasted as if L—— had dropped his h’s into it.’ His practical illustrations, too, were full of wit. In his address to the Bridgewater constituency, on the occasion when he was defeated by eight votes, he criticised most happily the sort of bribery which ultimately resulted in the disfranchisement of the place. ‘I can make allowance,’ he said, ‘for the poor voter; he is most likely ill-educated, certainly ill-off, and a little money is a nice treat to him. What he does is wrong, but it is intelligible. What I do not understand is the position of the rich, respectable, virtuous members of a party which countenances these things. They are like the man who stole stinking fish; they commit a crime, and they get no benefit.’