Lord Palmerston, himself an Irish peer, used to say that an Irish peerage was the most convenient of all dignities, as it secured its owner social precedence while it left him free to pursue a Parliamentary career. At the same time, greatly as he enjoyed his position, Palmerston never would take the oaths or comply with the legal formalities necessary to entitle him to vote for the Irish Representative Peers; and the reason for this refusal was characteristic alike of an adroit politician and of the unscrupulous age in which he lived. An Irish peer who has proved his right to vote for the Representative Peers, is eligible for election as a Representative, and Palmerston feared that his political opponents, wishing to get him out of the House of Commons into the comparative obscurity and impotence of the House of Lords, would elect him a Representative Peer in spite of himself, and so effectually terminate his political activities. In the days immediately succeeding Palmerston a conspicuous ornament of the Irish Peerage was the second Marquis of Abercorn. He had no need to trouble himself about Representative arrangements, for he sat in the House of Lords as a peer of Great Britain, but his hereditary connexion with the North of Ireland, his great estates there, and the political influence which they gave him, made him, in a very real sense, an Irish peer. He was Lord-Lieutenant from 1866 to 1868, and during his viceroyalty Disraeli (who subsequently drew his portrait in "Lothair") conferred upon him the rare honour of an Irish dukedom. It was rumoured that he wished, in consideration of his 80,000 acres in Tyrone and Donegal, to become the Duke of Ulster, but was reminded that Ulster was a Royal title, borne already by the Duke of Edinburgh. Be that as it may, he stuck to his Scotch title, and became Duke of Abercorn. Down to that time the Duke of Leinster had been the sole Irish duke, and went by the nickname of "Ireland's Only." To him, as an old friend, the newly created Duke of Abercorn wrote a mock apology for having invaded his monopoly; but the Duke of Leinster was equal to the occasion, and wrote back that he was quite content to be henceforward the Premier Duke of Ireland. When, six months later, Disraeli was driven out of office, he conferred an Irish barony on a faithful supporter, Colonel M'Clintock, who was made Lord Rathdonnell; and it was generally understood that, by arrangement between the leaders on both sides, no more Irish peerages were to be created. This understanding held good till Mr. George Curzon, proceeding to India as Viceroy and contemplating a possible return to Parliament when his term of office expired, persuaded Lord Salisbury to make him Lord Curzon of Kedleston in the Peerage of Ireland.