Walter Bagehot: “There is no royal road to political affairs: their detail is vast, disagreeable, complicated, and miscellaneous.”

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

The casual line was traced according to the strength of deceased combatants; succeeding generations fought elsewhere; and the hesitating line of a half-drawn battle was left to stand for a perpetual limit.

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

I cannot, therefore, join in the full cry against anomalies; in my judgment it may quickly overrun the scent, and so miss what we should be glad to find.