Walter Bagehot: “This is almost as hopeless as asking why Milton was a genius and why Bacon was a philosopher.”

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.

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.

These anomalies, in a hundred instances, mark the old boundaries of a constitutional struggle.