ugh it does
not look so," he says in substance,--but as an artist loves a
picturesque situation or a journalist a murder; it pleased his literary
sense as material for analysis and composition. He had in a high degree
that union of the practical and the musing faculties which in its (as
yet) highest degree made Shakespeare; but even Shakespeare did not write
dramas on how to make theatres pay, or sonnets on real-estate
speculation.

Bagehot's career was determined, as usual, partly by character and
partly by circumstances. He graduated at London University in 1848, and
studied for and was called to the bar; but his father owned an interest
in a rich old provincial bank and a good shipping-business, and instead
of the law he joined in their conduct. He had just before, however,
passed a few months in France, including the time of Louis Napoleon's
_coup d'etat_ in December, 1851; and from Paris he wrote to the London
Inquirer (a Unitarian weekly) a remarkable series of letters on that
event and its immediate sequents, defending the usurpation vigorously
and outlining his political creed, from whose main lines he swerved but
little in after life. Waiving the question whether the defense was
valid,--and like all first-rate minds, Bagehot is even more instructive
when he is wrong than when he is right, because the wrong is sure to be
almost right and the truth on its side neglected,--the letters are full
of fresh, acute, and even profound ideas, sharp exposition of those
primary objects of government which demagogues and buncombe legislators
ignore, racy wit, sarcasm, and description (in one passage he rises for
a moment into really blood-stirring rhetoric), and proofs of his
capacity thus early for reducing the confused cross-currents of daily
life to the operation of great embracing laws. No other writing of a
youth of twenty-five on such subjects--or almost none--is worth
remembering at all for its matter; while this is perennially wholesome
and educative, as well as capital reading.

From this on he devoted most of his spare time to literature: that he
found so much spare time, and produced so much of a high grade while
winning respect as a business manager, proves the excellent quality of
his business brain. He was one of the editors of the National Review, a
very able and readable English quarterly, from its foundation in 1854 to
its death in 1863, and wrote for it twenty literary, biographical, and
theological paper