Walter Bagehot

It was not Addison who began the essay-writing of Queen Anne's time, but Steele; it was the vigorous forward man who struck out the rough notion, though it was the wise and meditative man who improved upon it and elaborated it, and whom…

This writer is very often not the one whom posterity remembers--not the one who carries the style of the age farthest towards its ideal type, and gives it its charm and its perfection.

We overlook and half forget the constant while we see and watch the variable.

The English character was much the same in many great respects in Chaucer's time as it was in Elizabeth's time or Anne's time, or as it is now; But some qualities were added to this common element in one era and some in another; some…

We throw aside too much, in making up our images of eras, that which is common to all eras.

We cannot yet explain--I am sure, at least, I cannot attempt to explain--all the singular phenomena of national character: how completely and perfectly they seem to be at first framed; how slowly, how gradually they can alone be altered…

They not only 'bound up' men in groups, not only impressed on men a certain set of common usages, but often, at least in an indirect way, suggested, if I may use the expression, national character.

The ages of monotony had their use, for they trained men for ages when they need not be monotonous.

On their very physical organisation the hereditary mark of old times was fixed; their brains were hardened and their nerves were steadied by the transmitted results of tedious usages.

In 1789, when the great men of the Constituent Assembly looked on the long past, they hardly saw anything in it which could be praised, or admired, or imitated: all seemed a blunder--a complex error to be got rid of as soon as might be.

The net of custom caught men in distinct spots, and kept each where he stood.

Everybody was born to a place in the community: in that place he had to stay: in that place he found certain duties which he had to fulfil, and which were all he needed to think of.

But in early times that choice determined scarcely anything.

In modern days, in civilised days, men's choice determines nearly all they do.

But the Jews who adhered to their law became the Jews of the day, a nation of a firm set if ever there was one.

He began to break up the binding polity which was what men wanted in that age, though eager and inventive minds always dislike it.

Jeroboam has been called the 'first Liberal;' and, religion apart, there is a meaning in the phrase.

The Jews were in the beginning the most unstable of nations; they were submitted to their law, and they came out the most stable of nations.

She was the great 'free failure' of the ancient world.

Athens was indeed of another and higher order; at least to us instructed moderns who know her and have been taught by her.

Rome and Sparta were drilling aristocracies, and succeeded because they were such.

Hence, in the time of Homer, in the first times of Rome, in the first times of ancient Germany, the king is the most visible part of the polity, because for momentary welfare he is the most useful.

That this regime forbids free thought is not an evil; or rather, though an evil, it is the necessary basis for the greatest good; it is necessary for making the mould of civilisation, and hardening the soft fibre of early man.

All the actions of life are to be submitted to a single rule for a single object; that gradually created the 'hereditary drill' which science teaches to be essential, and which the early instinct of men saw to be essential too.

No division of power is then endurable without danger--probably without destruction; the priest must not teach one thing and the king another; king must be priest, and prophet king: the two must say the same, because they are the same.