creed, could draw most admirable portraits because there was a Diogenes behind the enthusiast; and an underlying shrewdness was always asserting itself behind the didactic panegyric. In Bagehot's case, again, this quality appears in the curious attractiveness for him of the more prosaic type of intellect. His article, for example, upon Macaulay shows the struggle in his mind. He accepts the contemporary estimate of that 'marvellous' book—the History—as was natural to a man whose youth coincided with Macaulay's culmination. He especially esteems a writer who can describe a commercial panic as accurately as M'Culloch, the 'driest of political economists,' and yet make his account as picturesque as a Waverley Novel. He feels keenly the limitations of Macaulay's mind: the incapacity ever to develop his early opinions; the 'bookishness' which made him the slave of accepted Whig formulæ; the 'chill nature' (perhaps the word is hardly fair) which made him prefer the prosaic and respectable to the 'passionate eras of our history.' Yet he also recognised what is perhaps too much overlooked, Macaulay's solid common-sense, obscured as it may be by the defects which give so antiquated and wooden an aspect to his political
