The faculties which fit a man to be a great ruler are not those of society; some great rulers have been unintelligible like Cromwell, or brusque like Napoleon, or coarse and barbarous like Sir Robert Walpole.
Bagehot reflects on the qualities that make a great ruler, which may not align with social skills.
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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.
I own that I do not entirely sympathise with the horror of these anomalies which haunts some of our best critics.
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.
These anomalies, in a hundred instances, mark the old boundaries of a constitutional struggle.
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