Walter Bagehot: “From thence the king learned, or had the means to learn, what the nation would endure, and what it would not…”

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

Our law very often reminds one of those outskirts of cities where you cannot for a long time tell how the streets come to wind about in so capricious and serpent-like a manner.

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.

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