and Walter Bagehot. Among the statesmen of the last generation,
few who will fill so small a space in history are so often or so
reverently quoted by those who remember Lord Palmerston's Government,
the Crimean War, and the Indian Mutiny, as Sir George Cornewall Lewis.
Most men under forty will hear with surprise that in the City, at least,
he was deemed a sounder and safer financier than Mr. Gladstone; honoured
as the Chancellor of the Exchequer who first redeemed the financial
reputation of the Whigs from the discredit that had clung to the party
of retrenchment and reform for a whole generation. Of the small minority
who know him as the founder of the English school of historical
sceptics, how many have heard of his multifarious literary and political
works, or his shrewd, genial, two-edged, criticisms on public and social
life? It seems too probable that our grandchildren will retain nothing
of his save the characteristic saying, that 'life would be very
tolerable but for its pleasures;' and _that_, probably, will be assigned
to some more famous and far less wise _causeur_ or phrasemaker, losing
half its force in the transfer. Even Mill is known to the passing and
the rising generation by different works and diverse characteristics. To
the one he is little more than the greatest, most original, and most
heretical of English economists; a standard author on logic and
metaphysics. The other prefers to remember him by his later and lesser
writings; those sexagenarian and posthumous Essays, in which the riper
wisdom of a mind, very slow to learn the lessons of practical life, was
gathered, and the wilder errors of his earlier theories modified or
corrected. Much of that which is really best in his thought and
teaching, set forth in these last writings, bears a close analogy to the
views of Tocqueville Senior, and Bagehot, and shows that a tardy,
hardly-acquired, unwillingly accepted, knowledge of men and women, of
the real and ineradicable tendencies of human nature, brought the giant
of the closet into nearer accord with the practical philosophy of a man
like Sir George Cornewall Lewis, wise, calm, and judicial, by natural
temper, wiser yet by the closet-study which had analysed the experiences
of the literary, business, and political, world, of administration,
Parliament, and the Cabinet.

One common and very striking feature characterizes the political
thought of all these men--all of them Liberals in more than mere n