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“This I have done with an ever-increasing admiration for the wonderful acuteness, ingenuity and fertility of mind which appears in all the essays. There seems to me to be nothing at all comparable to them in the literature of this generation; and the acuteness is so entirely without bitterness, the tone throughout is so elevated, that one feels better as well as wiser every time one peruses them again. I do trust you will continue to publish what still remains, believing that everything he wrote on topics not purely temporary, is of permanent value to the world.”

“I know no man whose loss will be more keenly felt not only by his friends, but by the business world in general. He had the rare faculty, to my mind the best test of ability—of making abstruse subjects clear to ordinary understandings. I always think that a man is a master of his art in proportion as he can dispense with its jargon, and no writer with whom I am acquainted has dealt so much as your husband with technical details with so little technical phraseology.”

“The public loss is heavy indeed, for writers of his power and the acquaintance with the realities of human life are most rare. You have the consolation of knowing that many grieve along with you.”

“There was scarcely any one whose friendship I more valued, and I am sure there is hardly any one who could be so ill spared. I shall always look back to the hours I spent with him when we were examiners together at the London University as one of the most pleasing remembrances of my life.”

“It is a great shock to me after all the debt I owe to him both for instruction and for taking me up, and I am quite sure I can never have such another friend. I am most sorry for you indeed, although it must be a consolation to think that few men’s lives have been so full of noble labour, and in all respects so worthily filled up. It seems so poor a thing in such a calamity to write expressions of condolence, but as I perhaps knew more of Mr. Bagehot’s work than any one outside his own family, I feel as if I ought to convey to you a sense of the great impression he made on all in contact with him in his work.

“I have had intimate relations since 1877 with not a few of our prominent public men but never one with quite the gifts and brightness of your husband or so likeable in every way. The pleasantest time of my own life was the period of my association with him, and there has really been nothing else to compare with it.”

“I have long admired and respected him, but I had not realised how much affection I had for him”.

“I had such a genuine and unfeigned admiration for his genius and talent, it is quite a painful blank to me to think I shall never again hear his peculiar humour and his subtle disquisition. I was—unlike as we were—quite fond of him—and would have gone a great distance out of my way for the mere pleasure of being ‘quizzed’ by him—which he always did with a singular absence of all that could give the least pain, and yet it was always, however trifling, worth attending to. Poor Janie Senior in the morning—and Bagehot the same evening, two of the most marked individualities in the country—both in the prime of life—both as sterling as fine gold—it is very saddening for those around them.”

“For myself I can truly say I have felt my friend’s loss very acutely. His was the only real schoolboy friendship that ever endured, and I believe his feeling towards me—as mine to him—was very warm and sincere.

“Besides the tie of friendship, which neither time, distance, nor difference of life or occupation affected, I somehow felt a strong personal pride in the distinguished position he had obtained, and I was ever looking forward to what the future might have in store for him. I have constantly felt humiliated that I, content to live a life of mediocrity, was able to step into Parliament without difficulty, while he, by a strange perversity, could not obtain a position for which he was so remarkably adapted, but also where his talents would have been so eminently useful to his country.”

“It is a great public as well as a private calamity. I do not remember any moment on record in English history when we could so ill spare a man of such high and exceptional ability.” After referring to “the production of his mature and exquisite genius” Sir Mountstuart Grant Duff adds: “He has his niche in the Temple of Fame amidst the best and wisest of his age and country”.

“One man does not often say he loves another, I can say it of very few, but I can of Walter Bagehot. And besides that, of all the men I have known with anything like intimacy he was the single one of whom I could say with certainty that his individual mark was left upon the thought of his time. His talk—when one had him alone—was the purest intellectual pleasure I ever had. He went so straight to the heart of the question—you were so sure of fresh light—and he was so matchless in discussion as contrasted with dispute. The mere love of truth was always sufficient to sustain his animation without any thought of display or victory. The last long tête-à-tête I remember was some six years ago in a walk over Wimbledon Common. But the sense of such talks is a hundred times fresher in my mind than the talk of the scores of ordinary men of whom the world is so full. And I know too his sound, warm heart and sterling integrity from his youth up, and am proud to think that I too may claim in a humble fashion to have been his friend. It is true that I did love Walter besides admiring his genius and holding his character in the highest esteem. I daresay there may not be very many who knew how much warmth there was with all that clear light—how much of the truest tenderness with all that unerring perspicuity of glance and brilliancy of expression. But those who have felt its charm can never forget the impression he made. I have known the touch of his affectionateness more than once in my life—both in joy and in sorrow, and on the intellectual side, I repeat deliberately, that converse with him in the days when we were thrown together and when talk was preceding life, was the highest intellectual pleasure I ever reached. Every remark of his was so clear and pertinent and yet came from such a depth below the surface—the whole bearing and relation of every thought was so completely and rapidly seized, that you advanced miles with him where another man would only have taken you yards. Nor was that all. The first thing I knew about him when he was not long emerged from boyhood was an act of great moral courage—and he carried his integrity with him to the quiet end. What a comfort it must be to look back upon a peaceful falling asleep without a struggle or a pang—only it came too soon, and when we might have looked for many years of ripened wisdom and beneficent life.”

“This blow seems almost more than one can bear, my dear Mrs. Bagehot. I don’t know why I was so stupidly confident he was getting better. . . . I can hardly see for the heaviness of my head and heart at this crushing blow, though I know I ought to be thinking chiefly of you, and indeed am thinking of you very much, and very, very painfully. It is the snapping of a hundred threads all together—I hardly know where I am or what it all means. The world changes so, I don’t feel equal to life in it. . . . I must try and write something about him in my own paper,1 which will be a very painful effort. God help me! Did Bagehot tell you that this day week I told him he was looking so young and well, I could hardly believe he was my contemporary at all. I was feeling old and haggard, and I was wonderfully struck by his bright, fresh look. Tell his father from me, how very much he was to me. The dreariness of this day is terrible to me—I am afraid I am hardly myself. Yours was a much closer tie, but mine was an older one.—Well, he is in better keeping than ours.—God bless you, and help us to bear all we may have to bear.”

“I was sure his death must have been due to a failure of the heart. But it is very little use our trying to find these artificial consolations. The pain is all the same. I shall never see him again here, and I hardly know how to bear it, I am still quite stunned.”