Walter Bagehot: “What are the counterweights which overpower these merits?”

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

I cannot, therefore, join in the full cry against anomalies; in my judgment it may quickly overrun the scent, and so miss what we should be glad to find.

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

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