Walter Bagehot: “But, above all things, they were frightened of 'the world;' the spectacle of nature filled them with awe and dread.”

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.

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.

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