Page:The Irish Parliament; what it was, and what it did.djvu/29

 private right." His Lordship then enumerates some of the difficulties caused by the paucity of law lords in the Upper House, and the contrivances which their absence in his own time rendered necessary. In Ireland the theory of the Constitution and the practice were the same. This was forcibly illustrated after the repeal of the English statute of 6 Geo. I., which affected to deprive the Irish House of Lords of their appellate jurisdiction, and to reduce them, in the words of Mr. Grattan, "to a fashionable insignificance." Viscount Strangford, Dean of Down, was, in 1784, by a special statute, deprived from sitting in Parliament or making any proxy therein, and also from sitting and voting on the trial of any peer. The offence of this nobleman was that he acted criminally and corruptly in writing, during the pendency of an appeal in the House of Lords, to the father of one of the litigants, asking for £200, "to enable him, by daily appearance, to express his gratitude by doing justice when he flattered himself to see success crown the undertaking."