In those early days Bagehot’s manner was often supercilious. We used to attack him for his intellectual arrogance—his ὕβρις we called it, in our college slang—a quality which I believe was not really in him, though he had then much of its external appearance. Nevertheless his genuine contempt for what was intellectually feeble was not accompanied by an even adequate appreciation of his own powers. At college, however, his satirical ‘Hear, hear,’ was a formidable sound in the debating society, and one which took the heart out of many a younger speaker; and the ironical ‘How much?’ with which in conversation he would meet an over-eloquent expression, was always of a nature to reduce a man, as the mathematical phrase goes, to his ‘lowest terms.’ In maturer life he became much gentler and mellower, and often even delicately considerate for others; but his inner scorn for ineffectual thought remained, in some degree, though it was very reticently expressed, to the last. For instance, I remember his attacking me for my mildness in criticising a book which, though it professed to rest on a basis of clear thought, really missed all its points. ‘There is a pale, whitey-brown substance,’ he wrote to me, ‘in the man’s books, which people who don’t think take for thought, but it isn’t;’ and he upbraided me much for not saying plainly that the man was a muff. In his youth this scorn for anything like the vain beating of the wings in the attempt to think, was at its maximum. It was increased, I think, by that which was one of his greatest qualities, his remarkable ‘detachment’ of mind—in other words, his comparative inaccessibility to the contagion of blind sympathy. Most men, more or less unconsciously, shrink from even _thinking_ what they feel to be out of sympathy with the feelings of their neighbours, unless under some strong incentive to do so; and in this way the sources of much true and important criticism are dried up, through the mere diffusion and ascendancy of conventional but sincere habits of social judgment. And no doubt for the greater number of us this is much the best. We are worth more for the purpose of constituting and strengthening the cohesive power of the social bond, than we should ever be worth for the purpose of criticising feebly—and with little effect, perhaps, except the disorganising effect of seeming ill-nature—the various incompetences and miscarriages of our neighbours’ intelligence. But Bagehot’s intellect was always far too powerful and original to render him available for the function of mere social cement; and full as he was of genuine kindness and hearty personal affections, he certainly had not in any high degree that sensitive instinct as to what others would feel, which so often shapes even the thoughts of men, and still oftener their speech, into mild and complaisant, but unmeaning and unfruitful, forms.