of capital, a freeholder, a gentleman to be respected, and over whom even a burgess could not affect the least superiority. The great pleasure in life is doing what people say you can't do. Why did Mr. Disraeli take the duties of chancellor of the exchequer with so much relish? Because people said he was a novelist, an ad cartandum man … who could not add up. No doubt it pleased his inmost soul to do the work of the red-tape people better than those who could do nothing else. And so with Shakespeare, - it pleased him to be respected by those whom he had respected with boyish reverence - but who had rejected the imaginative man - on their own ground and in their own subject, by the only title which they would regard, in a word, as a moneyed man. We seem to see him eyeing the burgesses with good-humored fellowship, and genial though suppressed and half-conscious contempt, drawing out their old stories, acquiescing in their foolish notions, with everything in his head and easy sayings upon his tongue, a full mind and a deep dark eye that played upon an easy scene - now in fanciful solitude, now in cheerful society, now occupied with deep thoughts, now and equally so with trivial recreations, forgetting the dramatist in the man of substance, and the poet in the happy companion; beloved and even respected, with a hope for every one and a smile for all." Mr. Bagehot's own success as a banker and economist certainly pleased him not a little, and for the same reason. As a boy he was thought a metaphysical dreamer by those who did not know him well. And he was always laughing at himself because he could not make figures "add up." Nevertheless, after a year or two's study of law, and after being called to the Bar, he exchanged the law for the counting-house, with some tinge probably of the same motive which he here attributes to Shakespeare. Certainly much of the pleasure of his great success - and a great success it was; for the leading men of both Liberal and Conservative governments consulted him eagerly on financial questions, and often followed his advice - consisted in the thought that he had attained that success in the most practical and apparently the least dreamy of all pursuits, in spite of an imagination that ranged into the highest subjects, and at one time gained him the reputation of incapacity for practical life.
Again, what vividness is there in this description of the historian Gibbon! - "Grave, tranquil, decorous pageantry is a part, as it were, of the essence of the last age. There is nothing more characteristic of Gibbon. A kind of pomp pervades him. He is never out of livery. He ever selects for narration the themes which look most like a levée. Grave chamberlains seem to stand throughout; life is a vast ceremony, the historian at once the dignitary and the scribe … [Nevertheless] the manner of the 'Decline and Fall' is almost the last which should be recommended for strict imitation. It is not a style in which you can tell the truth. … The petty order of sublunary matters, the common gross existence of ordinary people, the necessary littlenesses of necessary life, are little suited to his sublime narrative." And again, "The truth clearly is, that Gibbon had arrived at the conclusion that he was the sort of person a populace kill. People wonder a great deal why very many of the victims of the French Revolution were particularly selected; the Marquis de Custine especially cannot divine why they executed his father. The historians cannot show that they committed any particular crime. The marquises and marchionesses seem very inoffensive. The fact is, they were killed for being polite. The world felt itself unworthy of it. There were so many bows, such regular smiles, such calm, supreme condescension, - could a mob be asked to stand it? Have we not all known a precise, formal, patronizing old gentleman, - bland, imposing, something like Gibbon? Have we not suffered from his dignified attentions? If we had been on the Committee of Public Safety, can we doubt what would have been the fate of that man? Just so, wrath and envy destroyed in France an upper-class world." This was taken partly from his own observation. Mr. Bagehot was in France at the time of the coup d'état of 1851, and very vividly he described the impression which the revolutionary passion of the Reds made upon him. "Of late," he wrote to a friend, "I have been devoting my entire attention to the science of barricades, which I found amusing. They have systematized it in a way which is pleasing to the cultivated intellect. We had only one good day's fighting, and I naturally kept out of cannon-shot. But I took a quiet walk over the barricades in the morning, and superintended the construction of three with as much keenness as if I had been clerk of the works. You've seen lots, of course, at Berlin, but I should not
