John Quincy Adams, himself a poet of no mean ability, once remarked on Sprague's poem on Art that "in forty lines was comprised an encyclopædia of description." Mr. Loring adds that "in mere execution," this is "the most happy of all Sprague's productions." Farther on, the author adds: "Mr. Sprague's writings have no occasion to derive adventitious distinction from the fact that their author handles bank notes. They have been judged by their merits." And yet it may perhaps be said with truth that the poet brought to his labor of love an experience at the desk which gave him his chief distinction as a versifier. His "rigid power of exclusion," the absence of "confused conceptions, incongruous images, or artificial conceits,”—all together separating him, as Loring puts it, from "the multitudinous progeny of modern misty rhapsodists and verse fanciers, so desperately determined on originality, that if they cannot give it to us in the idea, they will make up for it in outlandishness of phraseology."

Sprague remained in the banking business until he reached the age of seventy-three, when he retired to the comforts and delights of home life. He died in his eighty-fourth year, almost to the last in full enjoyment of "the sweets of leisure, an honored home.'

Ο

XIV

WALTER BAGEHOT

1826-1877

NE of England's great men who haven't yet

come into the full measure of their wellearned fame, is the banker, author and

political economist, Walter Bagehot.

Bagehot was a cynic, and cynics are slow to win appreciation. Leslie Stephen says "he always scorned a fool," and then, with a quiet humor, adds: "In early days his scorn was not yet tempered by the compassion which is the growth of years—when we have come to know how many and what excellent people belong to the class."

Bagehot was in Paris in the revolution of 1848. He superintended the construction of the barricades, but only to amuse himself. He wrote that he was revolted by the "sallow, sincere, sour fanatics behind them."

Bagehot's book on “The British Constitution,’ says Leslie Stephen, "came like a revolution; simply because he had opened his eyes and looked at facts"-a habit of bankers.

This versatile author and man of affairs, at the age of twenty six began to take an active part in his father's banking business. The practical

experience and trained habits of observation and exhaustive analysis obtained in banking gave to his studies of economic questions rare practical value. His articles on "International Coinage,' the "Depreciation of Silver," etc., collected after his death, have permanent value.

The banker's habit of taking nothing for granted-of looking into a situation as though the investigator were the original discoverer, is the distinguishing literary quality of Bagehot. Other writers on the British Constitution had theorized at a distance. Bagehot actually saw the wheels of government go round and scientifically studied their movement. He was the first practical man of affairs who had studied the Constitution as a banker studies a proposition for a loan.

Bagehot's "Lombard Street" is a vivid picture of the London banker in the concrete, "full of hopes and fires and passions"-as Stephen says. "The ordinary treatises had left us in the dull leaden cloud of a London fog, which, in Bagehot's treatment disperses, to let us see distinctly and vividly the human beings previously represented by vague, colourless phantoms."

Bagehot, in his shrewd way, thus sums up in a single sentence the true policy of banks in times of crises: "What is wanted is to diffuse the im