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 found it when a judge; but he never did find it.  He never looked for it.  He was a great partisan, and he applied a capacity of argument, and a faculty of intellectual argument rarely equalled, to support the tenets of his party.  The proposal to create life peers was proposed by the antagonistic party—­was at the moment likely to injure his own party.  To him this was a great opportunity.  The speech he delivered on that occasion lives in the memory of those who heard it.  His eyes did not at that time let him read, so he repeated by memory, and quite accurately, all the black-letter authorities, bearing on the question.  So great an intellectual effort has rarely been seen in an English assembly.  But the result was deplorable.  Not by means of his black-letter authorities, but by means of his recognised authority and his vivid impression, he induced the House of Lords to reject the proposition of the Government.  Lord Lyndhurst said the Crown could not now create life peers, and so there are no life peers.  The House of Lords rejected the inestimable, the unprecedented opportunity of being tacitly reformed.  Such a chance does not come twice.  The life peers who would have been then introduced would have been among the first men in the country.  Lord Macaulay was to have been among the first; Lord Wensleydale—­the most learned and not the least logical of our lawyers—­to be the very first.  Thirty or forty such men, added judiciously and sparingly as years went on, would