PREFACE. 6 THE INTEREST with which Mr. Bagehot's 'Literary Studies' appear to have been received by the public, encourages me to collect and republish his Studies in Political Biography, most of them from the National Review,' and two-that on Adam Smith and that on Lord Althorp-from the 'Fortnightly Review,' which I do with the permission of the proprietors. These essays are, I think, valuable, not only as acute criticisms on the statesmen reviewed, but also, in no small degree, as expressing in some detail and with a good deal of vivacity the political mind of one of the shrewdest and most separate of the politicians of this generation. It will be seen, I think, that the late Sir George Cornewall Lewis comes very near to being, in Mr. Bagehot's mind, the ideal English statesman-indeed, that Sir George Lewis, with a little political ozone infused into him, would have been quite that ideal. I have, of course, altered and omitted nothing, even where the particular opinion expressed has not been verified but rather discredited by the course of subsequent eventsfor example, in relation to the general adhesion given by Mr. Bagehot (p. 333) to Sir George Lewis's scornful |