l judgment against anybody who is
not either too stupid or too fatuously complacent to recognise facts
when he sees them. But the mood passes. Time, happily, is merciful,
and men's memories are benignly short.

More painful is the recollection of those earlier contributors of ours
who have vanished from the world. Periodical literature is like the
manna in the wilderness; it quickly loses its freshness, and to turn
over thirty volumes of old Reviews can hardly be exhilarating at the
best: least of all so, when it recalls friends and coadjutors who
can give their help no more. George Henry Lewes, the founder of the
Review, and always cordially interested in its fortunes, has not
survived to see the end of the reign of his successor, His vivacious
intelligence had probably done as much as he was competent to do for
his generation, but there were other important contributors, now gone,
of whom this could not be said. In the region of political theory, the
loss of J.E. Cairnes was truly lamentable and untimely. He had, as
Mill said of him, "that rare qualification among writers on political
and social subjects--a genuine scientific intellect." Not a month
passes in which one does not feel how great an advantage it would have
been to be able to go down to Blackheath, and discuss the perplexities
of the time in that genial and manly companionship, where facts were
weighed with so much care, where conclusions were measured with such
breadth and comprehension, and where even the great stolid idols of
the Cave and the Market Place were never too rudely buffeted. Of
a very different order of mind from Cairnes, but not less to be
permanently regretted by all of us who knew him, was Mr. Bagehot,
whose books on the English Constitution, on Physics and Politics,
and the fragment on the Postulates of Political Economy, were all
published in these pages. He wrote, in fact, the first article in
the first number. Though himself extremely cool and sceptical about
political improvement of every sort, he took abundant interest in more
ardent friends. Perhaps it was that they amused him; in return his
good-natured ironies put them wholesomely on their mettle. As has been
well said of him, he had a unique power of animation without combat;
it was all stimulus and yet no contest; his talk was full of youth,
yet had all the wisdom of mature judgment _(R.H. Hutton)_. Those who
were least willing to assent to Bagehot's practical maxims in judging