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Bagford of eagerness inspired by the doubts of a reflective mind. The eager nations, he held, had had their day. The time for deliberating, hesitating and slowly resolving nations, had arrived.

As an economist Bagehot belonged decidedly to the Ricardo school; but he held that the Ricardo political economy does not apply to any country in which the larger commerce and the system of open competition have not been more or less introduced. He denied altogether, for instance, that in such a country as India it is true that capital flows towards any occupation in which a high rate of profit is to be made, or that the Ricardo theory of rent is true in India. He regarded political economy as a science of tendencies only, these tendencies being approximately true in countries like England, though not more than approximately true even there, while in the older world they are absolutely invisible.

Bagehot was one of the best conversers of his day. He was not only vivid, witty, and always apt to strike a light in conversation, but he helped in every real effort to get at the truth, with a unique and rare power of lucid statement. One of his friends said of him: 'I never knew a power of discussion, of co-operative investigation of truth,' to approach to his. 'It was all stimulus, and yet no contest.'

[The books mentioned above, and the memoir prefixed to the two volumes of Literary Studies.]  BAGFORD, JOHN (1650–1716), 'shoemaker and biblioclast,' was born in St. Anne's parish, Blackfriars, and brought up as a shoemaker. Like many of his craft, he had a turn for literature and general information, and in process of time became a collector of books on commission for booksellers and amateurs. In the exercise of his vocation he formed the two collections for which he is chiefly remembered, the 'Bagford Ballads,' which, by rescuing so many curious broadside ditties from destruction, has entitled him to the gratitude of all antiquaries and lovers of old English verse, and the enormous collection of title-pages and other fragments in sixty-four volumes folio, which has procured him the no less emphatic maledictions of all who object to the mutilation of books. 'He was,' says Dibdin, 'the most hungry and rapacious of all book and print collectors, and in his rage he spared neither the most delicate nor the most costly specimens.' His ravages were perpetrated under the idea that he was amassing materials for the history of printing, proposals for which were published in 1707, but which he would have been quite incompetent to write. He was, however, diligent and honest, and, according to Hearne, possessed a great knowledge of paper and binding. He was one of the revivers of the Society of Antiquaries, and a valuable letter from him on the antiquities of London is printed in the first volume of Leland's Collectanea. He himself exercised printing on a small scale. In his latter days he was admitted into the Charterhouse, and died on 15 May 1716. His collections were purchased after his death by Lord Oxford, and came eventually into the British Museum. 'The Bagford Ballads, illustrating the last years of the Stuarts,' were edited for the Ballad Society by the Rev. J. W. Ebsworth, 2 vols., Hertford, 1878; and other pieces referring to the periods of the Civil War, Commonwealth, and Restoration have appeared in others of Mr. Ebsworth's reprints. Some have been included in Mr. Chappell's editions of the Roxburghe Ballads.

[Dibdin's Bibliomania, pp. 430-37; Blades's Enemies of Books.]  BAGGERLEY, HUMPHREY (fl. 1654), royalist captain, was in the service of James, the seventh earl of Derby. He was employed in the embarkation of that nobleman in the Isle of Man on 12 Aug. 1651. On 13 Oct. in that year the earl applied that Captain Baggerley, who was then a prisoner at Chester, might be allowed to attend him during the few hours he had to live. The request was granted, and it is to Baggerley's pen that we are indebted for a minute and touching narrative of the earl's final hours and execution. This narrative has been printed by Draper in his account of the 'House of Stanley,' 1864. In 1654 Captain Baggerley was imprisoned in London for taking part in what was called Gerard's conspiracy. He subsequently acted as steward to William, ninth earl of Derby.

[Draper's House of Stanley, 99,-217,218, 231.]  BAGGS, CHARLES MICHAEL, D.D. (1806–1845), catholic bishop, controversialist, scholar and antiquary, was born at Belville, in county Meath, Ireland, on 21 May 1806. He was the eldest son of a protestant barrister of Dublin, Charles Baggs, Esq., afterwards judge of the court of vice-admiralty in Demerara, by his wife Eleanor, fourth daughter of John Howard Kyan, Esq., of Mount Howard and Ballymurtagh in the county of Wicklow. Through his mother's family (see Landed Gentry, 4th edition, p. 825) he was directly descended from the O'Cahans, princes