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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
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