Walter Bagehot: “As the picturesqueness, the featureliness, of society diminishes, aristocracy loses the single instrument of its…”

But it is natural also that persons used to analyse political institutions should look at these anomalies with a little tenderness and a little interest.

Subject to this saving remark, however, I not only admit, but maintain, that our Constitution is full of curious oddities, which are impeding and mischievous, and ought to be struck out.

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

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