Walter Bagehot: “The first and cardinal consideration is the definition of a Cabinet.”

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

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.