Walter Bagehot: “It is the dull traditional habit of mankind that guides most men's actions, and is the steady frame in which each new…”

These anomalies, in a hundred instances, mark the old boundaries of a constitutional struggle.

At last it strikes you that they grew up, house by house, on the devious tracks of the old green lanes; and if you follow on to the existing fields, you may often find the change half complete.

I own that I do not entirely sympathise with the horror of these anomalies which haunts some of our best critics.

The lessons are good where its primitive assumptions hold, but may be false where those assumptions fail.