haps, of that impetus than the middle
classes. Society is too correct and dull to be an occupation, as in
other times and ages it has been. The aristocracy live in the fear of
the middle classes--of the grocer and the merchant. They dare not frame
a society of enjoyment as the French aristocracy once formed it.
Politics are the only occupation a peer has worth the name. He may
pursue them undistractedly. The House of Lords, besides independence to
revise judicially and position to revise effectually, has leisure to
revise intellectually.

These are great merits: and, considering how difficult it is to get a
good second chamber, and how much with our present first chamber we
need a second, we may well be thankful for them. But we must not permit
them to blind our eyes. Those merits of the Lords have faults close
beside them which go far to make them useless. With its wealth, its
place, and its leisure, the House of Lords would, on the very surface
of the matter, rule us far more than it does if it had not secret
defects which hamper and weaken it.

The first of these defects is hardly to be called secret, though, on
the other hand, it is not well known. A severe though not unfriendly
critic of our institutions said that "the cure for admiring the House
of Lords was to go and look at it"--to look at it not on a great party
field-day, or at a time of parade, but in the ordinary transaction of
business. There are perhaps ten peers in the House, possibly only six;
three is the quorum for transacting business. A few more may dawdle in
or not dawdle in: those are the principal speakers, the lawyers (a few
years ago when Lyndhurst, Brougham, and Campbell were in vigour, they
were by far the predominant talkers) and a few statesmen whom every one
knows. But the mass of the House is nothing. This is why orators
trained in the Commons detest to speak in the Lords. Lord Chatham used
to call it the "Tapestry". The House of Commons is a scene of life if
ever there was a scene of life. Every member in the throng, every atom
in the medley, has his own objects (good or bad), his own purposes
(great or petty); his own notions, such as they are, of what is; his
own notions, such as they are, of what ought to be. There is a motley
confluence of vigorous elements, but the result is one and good. There
is a "feeling of the House," a "sense" of the House, and no one who
knows anything of it can despise it. A very shrewd man of the world
wen