doctrine. Bagehot, on one side, had strong affinities with the old-fashioned Liberalism in which he had been educated. Macaulay showed its merits as well as its defects. He represents that kind of 'stupidity' which Bagehot so thoroughly appreciated—the stupidity which is a safeguard against abstract theories. Macaulay, as Emerson observes, praised Baconian philosophy precisely because it meant by 'good,' good to eat or good to wear; and thought that its merit was 'to avoid ideas and avoid morals.' Bagehot could agree with Macaulay that 'ideas' were dangerous things. He shows in one essay how Bolingbroke was too clever by half. He complains in another that Lowe 'cannot help being brilliant.' He cannot talk 'the monotonous humdrum' which sends men to sleep, and which they suppose must be 'all right.' He has not the 'invaluable faculty' of diffusing the 'oppressive atmosphere of business-like dulness' which is 'invaluable to a Parliamentary statesman.' Lord Althorp was the ideal leader of the Reform Bill time because he was so intellectually clumsy. His mind 'had not an epigram in the whole of it; everything was solid and ordinary.' So Bagehot criticised Gladstone in a very interesting article (1860), complaining of
