light, except now towards its end, which is at hand.  Under James II. it maintained in the Lower House the proportion of three hundred and forty-six burgesses against ninety-two knights.  The sixteen barons, by courtesy, of the Cinque Ports were more than counterbalanced by the fifty citizens of the twenty-five cities.  Though corrupt and egotistic, that aristocracy was, in some instances, singularly impartial.  It is harshly judged.  History keeps all its compliments for the Commons.  The justice of this is doubtful.  We consider the part played by the Lords a very great one.  Oligarchy is the independence of a barbarous state, but it is an independence.  Take Poland, for instance, nominally a kingdom, really a republic.  The peers of England held the throne in suspicion and guardianship.  Time after time they have made their power more felt than that of the Commons.  They gave check to the king.  Thus, in that remarkable year, 1694, the Triennial Parliament Bill, rejected by the Commons, in consequence of the objections of William III., was passed by the Lords.  William III., in his irritation, deprived the Earl of Bath of the governorship of Pendennis Castle, and Viscount Mordaunt of all his offices.  The House of Lords was the republic of Venice in the heart of the royalty of England.  To reduce the king to a doge was its object; and in proportion as it decreased the power of the crown it increased that of the people.  Royalty knew this, and hated the peerage.  Each endeavoured to lessen the other.  What was thus lost by each was proportionate profit to the people.  Those two blind powers, monarchy and oligarchy, could not see that they were working for the benefit of a third, which was democracy.  What a delight it was to the crown, in the last century, to be able to hang a peer, Lord Ferrers!

However, they hung him with a silken rope.  How polite!

“They would not have hung a peer of France,” the Duke of Richelieu haughtily remarked.  Granted.  They would have beheaded him.  Still more polite!

Montmorency Tancarville signed himself peer of France and England; thus throwing the English peerage into the second rank.  The peers of France were higher and less powerful, holding to rank more than to authority, and to precedence more than to domination.  There was between them and the Lords that shade of difference which separates vanity from pride.  With the peers of France, to take precedence of foreign princes, of Spanish grandees, of Venetian patricians; to see seated on the lower benches the Marshals of France, the Constable and the Admiral of France, were he even Comte de Toulouse and son of Louis XIV.; to draw a distinction between duchies in the male and female line; to maintain the proper distance between a simple comte, like Armagnac or Albret, and a comte pairie, like Evreux; to wear by right, at five-and-twenty, the blue ribbon of the Golden Fleece; to counterbalance the Duke de la Tremoille, the most ancient peer of the court,