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Introductory Note
Introductory Note
Walter Bagehot, economist, journalist, and critic, was born at Langport,
Somersetshire, February 3, 1826. He was the son of a banker, and after
graduating at University College, London, and being called to the bar, he
joined his father in business. In 1851 he went to Paris, and was there during
the coup d`etat of Louis Napoleon, of which he gave a vivacious account in
letters to an English journal. Soon after his return he began to contribute
his first series of biographical studies to the Prospective Review and the
National Review, of which latter he was for some time joint-editor. From
1860 to 1877 he was editor of the Economist, and during this period he
published his notable work on The English Constitution, his Physics and
Politics, and his Lombard Street: a Description of the Money Market. He died
March 24, 1877.
It is chiefly as one of the most brilliant and original of recent writers
on political philosophy that Bagehot is known, but he holds also a distinct
place as a critic of literature. He did not write criticism like a
professional man of letters, and his production in this field is at times less
fine in workmanship than that of some men of much less ability. But, in
compensation, he was free from the tendency to the use of a technical literary
dialect and to the excessive self-consciousness in style which mars so much
modern work in this department. He wrote as a man of affairs with a vigorous
mind and a gift of picturesque speech, a robust taste and a genuine love of
letters. He always had something definite to say, and no one can read his
discussion of such a man as Milton without feeling braced and stimulated by
contact with an intellect of uncommon strength and incisiveness.
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