If you wish to preserve an old thing, human or divine, a code or a dogma, a nobility or a priesthood, never repair anything about it thoroughly, even its outside cover.  Patch it up, nothing more.  For instance, Jesuitism is a piece added to Catholicism.  Treat edifices as you would treat institutions.  Shadows should dwell in ruins.  Worn-out powers are uneasy in chambers freshly decorated.  Ruined palaces accord best with institutions in rags.  To attempt to describe the House of Lords of other days would be to attempt to describe the unknown.  History is night.  In history there is no second tier.  That which is no longer on the stage immediately fades into obscurity.  The scene is shifted, and all is at once forgotten.  The past has a synonym, the unknown.

The peers of England sat as a court of justice in Westminster Hall, and as the higher legislative chamber in a chamber specially reserved for the purpose, called The House of Lords.

Besides the house of peers of England, which did not assemble as a court unless convoked by the crown, two great English tribunals, inferior to the house of peers, but superior to all other jurisdiction, sat in Westminster Hall.  At the end of that hall they occupied adjoining compartments.  The first was the Court of King’s Bench, in which the king was supposed to preside; the second, the Court of Chancery, in which the Chancellor presided.  The one was a court of justice, the other a court of mercy.  It was the Chancellor who counselled the king to pardon; only rarely, though.

These two courts, which are still in existence, interpreted legislation, and reconstructed it somewhat, for the art of the judge is to carve the code into jurisprudence; a task from which equity results as it best may.  Legislation was worked up and applied in the severity of the great hall of Westminster, the rafters of which were of chestnut wood, over which spiders could not spread their webs.  There are enough of them in all conscience in the laws.

To sit as a court and to sit as a chamber are two distinct things.  This double function constitutes supreme power.  The Long Parliament, which began in November 1640, felt the revolutionary necessity for this two-edged sword.  So it declared that, as House of Lords, it possessed judicial as well as legislative power.

This double power has been, from time immemorial, vested in the House of Peers.  We have just mentioned that as judges they occupied Westminster Hall; as legislators, they had another chamber.  This other chamber, properly called the House of Lords, was oblong and narrow.  All the light in it came from four windows in deep embrasures, which received their light through the roof, and a bull’s-eye, composed of six panes with curtains, over the throne.  At night there was no other light than twelve half candelabra, fastened to the wall.  The chamber of Venice was darker still.  A certain obscurity is pleasing to those owls of supreme power.