Since the beginning of man, stream has been a thousand times poured into stream--quick into sluggish, dark into pale--and eddies and waters have taken new shapes and new colours, affected by what went before, but not resembling it.
Bagehot poetically illustrates the mixing of human traits throughout history.
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Our law very often reminds one of those outskirts of cities where you cannot for a long time tell how the streets come to wind about in so capricious and serpent-like a manner.
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.
The lessons are good where its primitive assumptions hold, but may be false where those assumptions fail.
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