t Lords are feeble and forlorn.

These grave defects would have been at once lessened, and in the course
of years nearly effaced, if the House of Lords had not resisted the
proposal of Lord Palmerston's first Government to create peers for
life. The expedient was almost perfect. The difficulty of reforming an
old institution like the House of Lords is necessarily great; its
possibility rests on continuous caste and ancient deference. And if you
begin to agitate about it, to bawl at meetings about it, that deference
is gone, its particular charm lost, its reserved sanctity gone. But, by
an odd fatality, there was in the recesses of the Constitution an old
prerogative which would have rendered agitation needless--which would
have effected, without agitation, all that agitation could have
effected. Lord Palmerston was--now that he is dead, and his memory can
be calmly viewed--as firm a friend to an aristocracy, as thorough an
aristocrat, as any in England; yet he proposed to use that power. If
the House of Lords had still been under the rule of the Duke of
Wellington, perhaps they would have acquiesced. The Duke would not
indeed have reflected on all the considerations which a philosophic
statesman would have set out before him; but he would have been brought
right by one of his peculiarities. He disliked, above all things, to
oppose the Crown. At a great crisis, at the crisis of the Corn Laws,
what he considered was not what other people were thinking of, the
economical issue under discussion, the welfare of the country hanging
in the balance, but the Queen's ease. He thought the Crown so superior
a part in the Constitution, that, even on vital occasions, he looked
solely--or said he looked solely--to the momentary comfort of the
present sovereign. He never was comfortable in opposing a conspicuous
act of the Crown. It is very likely that, if the Duke had still been
the president of the House of Lords, they would have permitted the
Crown to prevail in its well-chosen scheme. But the Duke was dead, and
his authority--or some of it--had fallen to a very different person.
Lord Lyndhurst had many great qualities: he had a splendid
intellect--as great a faculty of finding truth as any one in his
generation; but he had no love of truth. With this great faculty of
finding truth, he was a believer in error--in what his own party now
admit to be error--all his life through. He could have found the truth
as a statesman just as he f