The spiritual lords, who, though forming another estate in parliament, have always been so united with the temporality that the suffrages of both upon every question are told indistinctly and numerically, composed in general, before the reformation, a majority of the upper house; though there was far more irregularity in the summonses of the mitred abbots and priors than those of the barons. But by the surrender and dissolution of the monasteries, about thirty-six votes of the clergy on an average were withdrawn from the parliament; a loss ill compensated to them by the creation of five new bishoprics. Thus, the number of the temporal peers being continually augmented, while that of the prelates was confined to twenty-six, the direct influence of the church on the legislature has become comparatively small; and that of the Crown, which, by the pernicious system of translations and other means, is generally powerful with the episcopal bench, has, in this respect at least, undergone some diminution. It is easy to perceive from this view of the case that the destruction of the monasteries, as they then stood, was looked upon as an indispensable preliminary to the reformation; no peaceable efforts towards which could have been effectual without altering the relative proportions of the spiritual and temporal aristocracy. The House of Lords, during this period of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, were not supine in rendering their collective and individual rights independent of the Crown. It became a fundamental principle, according indeed to ancient authority, though not strictly observed in ruder times, that every peer of full age is entitled to his writ of summons at the beginning of a parliament, and that the house will not proceed on business, if any one is denied it.[64] The privilege of voting by proxy, which was originally by special permission of the king, became absolute, though subject to such limitations as the house itself may impose. The writ of summons, which, as I have observed, had in earlier ages (if usage is to determine that which can rest on nothing but usage) given only a right of sitting in the parliament for which it issued, was held, about the end of Elizabeth's reign, by a construction founded on later usage, to convey an inheritable peerage, which was afterwards adjudged to descend upon heirs general, female as well as male; an extension which sometimes raises intricate questions of descent, and though no materially bad consequences have flowed from it, is perhaps one of the blemishes in the constitution of parliament. Doubts whether a peerage could be surrendered to the king, and whether a territorial honour, of which hardly any remain, could be alienated along with the land on which it depended, were determined in the manner most favourable to the dignity of the aristocracy. They obtained also an important privilege; first of recording their dissent in the journals of the