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After Bagehot took full control of the Economist in 1861 and Hutton ceased to be its literary editor and became instead in June of that year the literary editor and co-proprietor of the Spectator, the two men not only remained staunch friends but also from time to time in the 1860's and 1870's helped one another with contributions. It has been known for long that Bagehot contributed to the Spectator such articles as a review of Thackeray's Adventures of Philip (1862), an article on Boscastle in Cornwall (1866), a travel letter on Spain (1868), and an obituary of George Grote (1871). In the Times Literary Supplement (August 11, 1961, p. 515), I supplied evidence to show that Bagehot had written the subleader, "French Religiousness and M. Renan" (1863), which Dr. St. John-Stevas has subsequently included in his collected edition of Bagehot. Now I should like to suggest Bagehot's authorship of an earlier subleader.

"The Trash of the Day," Spectator, September 7, 1861, pp. 976-977.

The allusions to Gibbon, Lord Eldon, Palmerston, and Sir John Herschel are all characteristic of Bagehot. The phrase, "intellectual voluptuary," used of the unnamed statesman who avoided reading the last of the Waverley novels, appears in Bagehot's essay, "Sir George Cornewall Lewis," National Review, XVII (October, 1863), 500. The image which I now italicize in the statement, "A great deal of fine thought . . . lies, so to say, in solution in the literature of the time," can be found, somewhat apologetically, in Bagehot's "Tennyson's Idylls," National Review, IX (October, 1859), 389: "The amount of thought which is held in solution, — if we may be pardoned so scientific a metaphor, — in Mr. Tennyson's poetry is very great." The adjective, "floating" ("the floating 'trash' of the literary world") is a favourite of Bagehot's: it appears, for instance, in the essays mentioned above on Peel, Tennyson, Renan, and on pure, ornate, and grotesque art, and in Bagehot's. well-known essays on Clough, and Sterne and Thackeray. Finally, two quotations may be paralleled in

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Bagehot's identified writings. The Spectator writer says, "The young readers of every generation have had an instinctive feeling that the row of standard authors in the library were somehow 'papa's books;' that they concerned other ideas, other feelings, another life than their own." This is close to what Bagehot had remarked in "The Waverley Novels," National Review, VI (April, 1858), 444: "Even standard authors exercise but slender influence on the susceptible minds of a rising generation; they are become 'papa's books;' the walls of the library are adorned with their regular volumes; but no hand touches them." And near the end of the subleader the Spectator author writes: "Talleyrand used to say that there was some one cleverer than Napoleon, cleverer than Voltaire — c'est tout le monde." In his essay on Sir George Cornewall Lewis (National Review, XVII [October, 1863], 517), Bagehot wrote: "'There is some one,' said a great man of the world, 'wiser than Voltaire, and wiser than Napoleon, c'est tout le monde.'"

I have deliberately presented the evidence for attribution in full, because it is only when the evidence is heavily marshalled that the skeptic may be kept at bay. Moreover, the appearance of parallels in article after article not only highlights Bagehot's favourite anecdotes, insights, and beliefs, but also reveals Bagehot the literary artist winnowing permanent grain from journalistic chaff. And it further reminds us of one of the main strategies that Bagehot the publicist employed to persuade the readers of his age: repetition. This iteration makes more clear than ever before that Bagehot's dominant concern in the 1850's was Britain's urgent need for great statesmen, a concern which underlies not only these leading articles in the Inquirer, but also the letters on the universities, the review of Empedocles on Etna, and even, though distantly, the Spectator subleader on "The Trash of the Day."