If it were not for the peril to all that is worth preserving, I should not be sorry for anything that happened to the House of Lords, to whose bigoted and senseless obstinacy (upheld and directed I am sorry to say by the Duke and Lyndhurst) the present miserable condition of affairs is mainly attributable. Their rejection of the Tithe Bill last year was their crowning exploit. After all their blunders and impotent struggles against a stronger power, if they had passed that Bill, or restored Stanley's in committee, and returned it to the House of Commons, I believe everything might have been retrieved. It has been remarked, and certainly with truth, that Peel has never once endeavoured to excuse the House of Lords or to vindicate the peers from the taunts and reproaches which have repeatedly been thrown out against them. In point of fact, I believe that the Lords either did not consult him, or did not care for his opinion. There is no disguising that the Lords liked nothing so well last year as beating the Government, and exhibiting their puny and spiteful power; now they are mightily shocked and disgusted at the majority of the House of Commons taking their revenge, though certainly the latter do it with much more rage and factious violence, but with them it is a system of tactics for a specific and attainable object. The Lords really had no intelligible object but to embarrass a Government they could not demolish, and gratify their own spite. If the most violent Radical had been permitted to chalk out the most suicidal course for the House of Lords to follow, he could have devised nothing more ingenious and well contrived than what they have actually done, taking care to keep up their character in the nation for intolerance, and inculcating a belief in their adherence to the most illiberal maxims of foreign and domestic policy, instead of devoting all their energies to the recovery of the ground they had lost in popular estimation, and strengthening themselves for the contest, which anybody might have seen was not very remote. April 3rd, 1835 {p.240}