by repetition; few authors so abound in tenaciously quotable phrases and passages of humorous intellectuality.  What is rarely found in connection with much humor, he had a sensitive dreaminess of nature, strongly poetic in feeling, whence resulted a large appreciation of the subtler classes of poetry; of which he was an acute and sympathizing critic.  As part of this temperament, he had a strong bent toward mysticism,—­in one essay he says flatly that “mysticism is true,”—­which gave him a rare insight into the religious nature and some obscure problems of religious history; though he was too cool, scientific, and humorous to be a great theologian.

Above all, he had that instinct of selective art, in felicity of words and salience of ideas, which elevates writing into literature; which long after a thought has merged its being and use in those of wider scope, keeps it in separate remembrance and retains for its creator his due of credit through the artistic charm of the shape he gave it.

The result of a mixture of traits popularly thought incompatible, and usually so in reality,—­a great relish for the driest business facts and a creative literary gift,—­was absolutely unique.  Bagehot explains the general sterility of literature as a guide to life by the fact that “so few people who can write know anything;” and began a reform in his own person, by applying all his highest faculties—­the best not only of his thought but of his imagination and his literary skill—­to the theme of his daily work, banking and business affairs and political economy.  There have been many men of letters who were excellent business men and hard bargainers, sometimes indeed merchants or bankers, but they have held their literature as far as possible off the plane of their bread-winning; they have not used it to explain and decorate the latter and made that the motive of art.  Bagehot loved business not alone as the born trader loves it, for its profit and its gratification of innate likings,—­“business is really pleasanter than pleasure, though 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