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them. He illustrates Hobbes's famous principle that words are the money of fools and the counters of the wise. The word currency loses all interest if we do not constantly look beyond the sign to the thing signified. Bagehot never forgets that condition of giving interest to his writing. Few readers will quite accept the opinion of his editor, that he has made Lombard Street as entertaining as a novel. But he has been wonderfully successful in tackling so arid a topic; and the statement gives the impression made by the book. It seems as though 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.