In the middle of the space was a large covered table, heaped with bundles of papers, registers, and summonses, with magnificent inkstands of chased silver, and with high candlesticks at the four corners.

The peers took their seats in chronological order, each according to the date of the creation of his peerage.  They ranked according to their titles, and within their grade of nobility according to seniority.  At the bar stood the Usher of the Black Rod, his wand in his hand.  Inside the door was the Deputy-Usher; and outside, the Crier of the Black Rod, whose duty it was to open the sittings of the Courts of Justice with the cry, “Oyez!” in French, uttered thrice, with a solemn accent upon the first syllable.  Near the Crier stood the Serjeant Mace-Bearer of the Chancellor.

In royal ceremonies the temporal peers wore coronets on their heads, and the spiritual peers, mitres.  The archbishops wore mitres, with a ducal coronet; and the bishops, who rank after viscounts, mitres, with a baron’s cap.

It is to be remarked, as a coincidence at once strange and instructive, that this square formed by the throne, the bishops, and the barons, with kneeling magistrates within it, was in form similar to the ancient parliament in France under the two first dynasties.  The aspect of authority was the same in France as in England.  Hincmar, in his treatise, “De Ordinatione Sacri Palatii,” described in 853 the sittings of the House of Lords at Westminster in the eighteenth century.  Strange, indeed! a description given nine hundred years before the existence of the thing described.

But what is history?  An echo of the past in the future; a reflex from the future on the past.

The assembly of Parliament was obligatory only once in every seven years.

The Lords deliberated in secret, with closed doors.  The debates of the Commons were public.  Publicity entails diminution of dignity.

The number of the Lords was unlimited.  To create Lords was the menace of royalty; a means of government.

At the beginning of the eighteenth century the House of Lords already contained a very large number of members.  It has increased still further since that period.  To dilute the aristocracy is politic.  Elizabeth most probably erred in condensing the peerage into sixty-five lords.  The less numerous, the more intense is a peerage.  In assemblies, the more numerous the members, the fewer the heads.  James II. understood this when he increased the Upper House to a hundred and eighty-eight lords; a hundred and eighty-six if we subtract from the peerages the two duchies of royal favourites, Portsmouth and Cleveland.  Under Anne the total number of the lords, including bishops, was two hundred and seven.  Not counting the Duke of Cumberland, husband of the queen, there were twenty-five dukes, of whom the premier, Norfolk, did not take his seat, being a Catholic; and of whom the junior, Cambridge, the Elector of Hanover, did,