Walter Bagehot: “Such kings are among God's greatest gifts, but they are also among His rarest.”

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.

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.

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

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