exhibited a large capacity for finance and commerce, but he never gave up his fondness for literature and was an industrious contributor to the reviews. His articles cover such topics as Hartley Coleridge, Shelley, Beranger, Clough's poems, Wordsworth, Tennyson and Browning, Shakespeare, Milton, Cowper, Gibbon, Macaulay, Sterne and Thackeray, Dickens, the Waverley novels and many others. These were in a measure his recreations, and they form a series of essays charming in style and full of vigorous thought and acute criticism. Meantime he married and became the editor of the great financial paper of London, the Economist, the opinions of which carried weight not only in the financial world but in parliament. On several occasions Mr. Bagehot was summoned before parliamentary commissions to give his opinion on financial measures pending before parliament. He has been called "a sort of supplementary chancellor of the exchequer," both parties resorting to him with equal confidence.

He was, in fact, a statesman without office, a politician without a party, a legislator out of parliament. He tried for parliament once or twice, but failed of election because he was too honest to resort to the arts of the politician. He did

not practise the Italian proverb, "If you would be successful you must not be too good." So he remained out of parliament, but stayed in the business world and the literary world and made a high mark in both. His works on "The English Constitution," on "Lombard Street," on "Politics and Physics," on " Economist Studies" are now almost classics, and some of them are text-books in English and American universities. In addition to the essays already mentioned he wrote on Bolingbroke, Pitt, Peel, Gladstone, Disraeli, Cornewall Lewis and other great English statesmen in a style and with a grasp of the subject that rival Macaulay.

Some of his sentences are epigrammatic in their form and weighted with thought.

You may talk of the tyranny of Nero and Tiberius, but the real tyranny is the tyranny of your next-door neighbor. What law is so cruel as the law of doing what he does ? What yoke so galling as the necessity of being like him? What espionage of despotism comes to your door so effectually as the eye of the man who lives at your door?

I can make allowance for the poor voter; he is most likely ill educated, certainly ill off, and a little money is a nice treat to him. What he does is wrong, but it is intelligible. What I do not understand is the position of the rich, respectable, virtuous members of a party which countenances these things. They are like the man who stole stinking fish; they commit a crime and they get no benefit.

He was often sententious and witty in his replies to questions. If asked what he thought on some subject not familiar to him he would say: "My mind is to let on that subject-pray tell me what to think."

Before his marriage, which was a very happy one, his mother used to urge him to marry, to which he would banteringly say: “A man's mother is his misfortune, but his wife is his fault.”

Asked if he had enjoyed a particular dinner, he answered: "No, the sherry was bad; it tasted as if L- had dropped his h's into it.'

He was a great writer and a profound thinker, the ideal business man in literature.

HENRY CRABB ROBINSON.

(1775-1867.)

Ir length of days, freedom from pecuniary care, the companionship and friendship of the most noted men and women of his time and the general respect of society constitute earthly happiness and success, Henry Crabb Robinson ought to have been, and, so far as we can discern from his diary and letters, actually was, one of the happiest and most successful of men. He was born in 1775 and died in 1867 in his ninety-second year, a period of life exceeding by a dozen years the longest accorded by the Psalmist to humanity, nor can it be said that at any time was "their strength labor and sorrow." His enjoyment of life seemed to continue up to the very end. The last entry in his diary was made only five days before his death. When he was several years past eighty he made this entry in a friend's album:

Were this my last hour (and that of an octogenarian cannot be far off) I would thank God for permitting me to behold so much of the excellence conferred on individuals, Of woman I saw the type of her heroic greatness in the person of Mrs. Siddons; of her fascinations in Mrs. Jordan and Mlle. Mars; I listened with rapture to the dreamy monologues of Coleridge--that "old man eloquent;" I traveled with Wordsworth, the greatest of our lyric-philosophical poets; I relished the wit and pathos of Charles Lamb; I conversed freely with Goethe at his own table, beyond all competition the supreme genius of his age and country. He acknowledged his obligations only to Shakespeare, Spinoza and Linnaeus, as Wordsworth feared competition only with Chaucer, Spencer, Shakespeare and Milton. Compared with Goethe, the memory of Schiller, Wieland, Herder, Tieck, the Schlegels and Schelling has become faint.

He might have gone on and enumerated a hundred others of eminence, the most brilliant persons known to the nineteenth century, whose names gleam in the pages of his diaries and reminiscences.

Diaries, such as Pepys', Evelyn's, Greville's, Moore's, and Crabb Robinson's are not literature, but there is no question as to their human interest and as to their abiding value as records of the period they cover and of the men and women they describe. This is particularly true of Crabb Robinson's diaries, for he was a cool and unimpassioned observer, fond of society, excellent in conversation and proud of being the companion