But perhaps the best illustration I can give of his more sardonic humour was his remark to a friend who had a church in the grounds near his house:—‘Ah, you’ve got the church in the grounds! I like that. It’s well the tenants shouldn’t be _quite_ sure that the landlord’s power stops with this world.’ And his more humorous exaggerations were very happy. I remember his saying of a man who was excessively fastidious in rejecting under-done meat, that he once sent away a cinder ‘because it was red;’ and he confided gravely to an early friend that when he was in low spirits, it cheered him to go down to the bank, and dabble his hand in a heap of sovereigns. But his talk had finer qualities than any of these. One of his most intimate friends—both in early life, and later in Lincoln’s Inn—Mr. T. Smith Osler, writes to me of it thus:— ‘As an instrument for arriving at truth, I never knew anything like a talk with Bagehot. It had just the quality which the farmers desiderated in the claret, of which they complained that though it was very nice, it brought them “no forrader;” for Bagehot’s conversation did get you forward, and at a most amazing pace. Several ingredients went to this; the foremost was his power of getting to the heart of the subject, taking you miles beyond your starting point in a sentence, generally by dint of sinking to a deeper stratum. The next was his instantaneous appreciation of the bearing of everything you yourself said, making talk with him, as Roscoe once remarked, “like riding a horse with a perfect mouth.” But most unique of all was his power of keeping up animation without combat. I never knew a power of discussion, of co operative investigation of truth, to approach to it. It was all stimulus, and yet no contest.’