(Laughter.)
From these documents of old Collins it seems that a peer conducts
himself in a solemn, good, pious, manly kind of way when he takes
leave of life, and when he has hospitable habits, and is valiant in
his procedure throughout; and that in general a King, with a noble
approximation to what was right, had nominated this man, saying "Come
you to me, sir; come out of the common level of the people, where
you are liable to be trampled upon; come here and take a district of
country and make it into your own image more or less; be a king under
me, and understand that that is your function." I say this is the most
divine thing that a human being can do to other human beings, and no
kind of being whatever has so much of the character of God Almighty's
Divine Government as that thing we see that went all over England, and
that is the grand soul of England's history.
It is historically true that down to the time of Charles I., it was
not understood that any man was made a peer without having a merit in
him to constitute him a proper subject for a peerage.
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