s, which are among his best titles to enduring
remembrance, and are full of his choicest flavors, his wealth of
thought, fun, poetic sensitiveness, and deep religious feeling of the
needs of human nature. Previous to this, he had written some good
articles for the Prospective Review, and he wrote some afterwards for
the Fortnightly Review (including the series afterwards gathered into
'Physics and Politics'), and other periodicals.

But his chief industry and most peculiar work was determined by his
marriage in 1858 to the daughter of James Wilson, an ex-merchant who had
founded the Economist as a journal of trade, banking, and investment,
and made it prosperous and rather influential. Mr. Wilson was engaging
in politics, where he rose to high office and would probably have ended
in the Cabinet; but being sent to India to regulate its finances, died
there in 1860. Bagehot thereupon took control of the paper, and _was_
the paper until his death in 1877; and the position he gave it was as
unique as his own. On banking, finance, taxation, and political economy
in general his utterances had such weight that Chancellors of the
Exchequer consulted him as to the revenues, and the London business
world eagerly studied the paper for guidance. But he went far beyond
this, and made it an unexampled force in politics and governmental
science, personal to himself. For the first time a great political
thinker applied his mind week by week to discussing the problems
presented by passing politics, and expounding the drift and meaning of
current events in his nation and the others which bore closest on it, as
France and America. That he gained such a hearing was due not alone to
his immense ability, and to a style carefully modeled on the
conversation of business men with each other, but to his cool moderation
and evident aloofness from party as party. He dissected each like a man
of science: party was to him a tool and not a religion. He gibed at the
Tories; but the Tories forgave him because he was half a Tory at
heart,--he utterly distrusted popular instincts and was afraid of
popular ignorance. He was rarely warm for the actual measures of the
Liberals; but the Liberals knew that he intensely despised the
pig-headed obstructiveness of the typical Tory, and had no kinship with
the blind worshipers of the _status quo_. To natives and foreigners
alike for many years the paper was single and invaluable: in it one
could find set forth ac