r of half a century of
public life has produced: and of such a half century! the half century
that waged war with France--triumphed at Waterloo--carried
Reform--repealed the Corn Laws--and saw the birth of railways and the
electric telegraph; a half century of more interest than any preceding
age--the work and the excitement of which wore out our Romillys, Follets,
and Horners, with premature decay. Yet Brougham still lives. Slightly
altering Byron, we may say of him,--

Time writes no wrinkles on his brazen brow,
Such as the _Edinburgh's_ dawn beheld he wriggleth now.

Below the woolsack is a table, at which Lord Campbell generally sits; and
on each side are ranged the orators and partizans of the two great
sections which, under some name or other, always have existed and always
will exist in our national history. The uninitiated call them
Conservatives and Whigs; the wiser simply term them the men who are in
office and the men who are not. The Government for the time being sits
on the right hand of the Lord Chancellor, who acts as Speaker, and who
has a far easier berth of it than Mr. Denison. The Lords are not
long-winded, nor noisy; not passionate, and, like true Britons, always
adjourn to dinner. Hence no post-prandial scenes are visible. In the
small hours no patriots, smelling strongly of whisky-and-water and
cigars, expatiate to a wearied assembly on that ever fertile theme, the
wrongs and woes of the Green Isle. The Lords, like Mr. Wordsworth's
gods--

"Approve the depth but not the tumult of the soul."

We can never fancy the House of Lords to be what you may sometimes take
the House of Commons to be--a bear garden or a menagerie. You miss the
vulgarity of the one, and you also miss its excitement and
earnestness--its cries of "question" and "divide" when some well-known
bore is on his legs, and its long resounding cheers when some favourite
partisan sits down. All is staid, and correct, and proper, with the
exception of a tirade from the Rupert of debate, or some father in God on
the Episcopal Bench. We would fain say a few words about these reverend
gentlemen. One could hardly expect to find the ministers of the
self-denying and lowly Jesus of Nazareth sitting in a gorgeous house with
the proudest and wealthiest of the English peers. You would expect to
find them rather by the bed-side of the sick, in the houses of the poor,
combating with the vice and infidelity of the day; or e