THE ENGLISH CONSTITUTION provides the most lucid and readable account of what has been termed the "Golden Age" of the nineteenth century constitution, before the advent of universal male suffrage and the rise of party as the overriding force in the British policy. Many of Bagehot's insights remain either true, as a statement of basic principle, or even if no longer strictly accurate, fascinating in their partial applicability today. they convey a sharp sense of how the constitution has radically changed since the Victorian era, and yet paradoxically at a more basic level, remained the same.