about which time he
married a daughter of the first editor, the Right Hon. James Wilson, at
that time secretary of the treasury, and afterwards secretary of finance in
India. Partly through this [v.03 p.0199] connexion he was brought into the
inside of the political life of the time. He was an intimate friend of Sir
George Cornewall Lewis, and was afterwards in constant communication with
many of the political chiefs, especially with Gladstone, Robert Lowe and
Grant Duff, and with the permanent heads of the great departments of state.
In the city in the same way he was intimate with the governor and directors
of the Bank of England, and with leading magnates in the banking and
commercial world; while his connexion with the Political Economy Club
brought him into contact in another way with both city and politics. His
active life in business and politics, however, was not of so absorbing a
kind as to prevent his real devotion to literature, but the literature
largely grew out of his activities, and of no one can it be said more truly
than of Bagehot that the atmosphere in which he lived gave tone and colour
and direction to his studies, one thing of course acting and reacting on
another. The special note of his books, apart from his remarkable gift of
conversational epigrammatic style, which gives a peculiar zest to the
writing, is the quality of scientific dispassionate description of matters
which were hardly thought of previously as subjects of scientific study.
This is specially the case with the two books which perhaps brought him the
most reputation, _The English Constitution_ (1867) and _Lombard Street_
(1873). They are both books of observation and description. The English
constitution is described, not from law books and as a lawyer would
describe it, but from the actual working, as Bagehot himself had witnessed
it, in his contact with ministers and the heads of government departments,
and with the life of the society in which the politicians moved. The true
springs and method of action are consequently described with a vivid
freshness which gives the book a wonderful charm, and makes it really a new
departure in the study of politics. It is the same with _Lombard Street_.
The money market is there pictured as it really was in 1850-1870, and as
Bagehot saw it with philosophic eyes. Beginning with the sentence, "The
objects which you see in Lombard Street are the Bank of England, the joint
stock banks, the private b