Walter Bagehot: “A perfectly inexperienced man, so far as Indian affairs go, rules all our Indian Empire.”

It is natural that those who by special and admirable culture have come to look at all things upon the artistic side, should start back from these queer peculiarities.

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.

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