Many of the peers who belong to the higher orders of nobility have baronies in fee inherent in them ; so that if A., one of them, die, leaving a daughter being an only child, and a brother, the brother shall take the superior title, and the barony descend to the daughter and the heirs of her body. An eldest son of a peer enjoying a barony and a superior dignity is sometimes called to the house of' peers in his father's barony. When this done, it is by writ of summons without a patent of creation (it not being in fact a creation of a new dignity, but only in anticipation of the son's posses Eon of it), and this is the case also when a barony is taken out of abeyance.
Thus the English portion of the house of peers, or house of lords, for they are terms used in precisely the same sense, are the lords spiritual, that is, the arch bishops and bishops, and the lords temporal, who are of one of the five orders (though many of the dukes possess dignities of the four inferior kinds also, and their ancestors may have long had seats in that house in those intbrior dignities before the family was raised to the dukedom), and these are either persons who have been created peers by the crown—who have been admitted into the peerage by favour of the crown in virtue of the determination of an abeyance, or who have inherited the dignity from some ancestor on whom it had been conferred.
The fullest information on all points connected with the archeological part of this subject is to be obtained from the Reports of the Committee of the House of Lords before referred to Biographi cal accounts of the more eminent of the persons who have possessed these dig nities, are to be found in that very valuable book, Dugdale's Baronage of England.' In 1708, Arthur Collins, a
London bookseller, published in a single volume, an account of the peers then existing and their ancestors, a work of great merit. The demand for it appears to have been great, as it was followed by other editions in quick succession. It assumed a higher character in 1794, when it appeared in four handsome octavo volumes, great additions having been made to every article. From that time there has been a succession of editions, each professing to be improve ments on the preceding, and each bring ing up the state of the peerage to the time when the work was printed. The best of these, which is in nine bulky octavo volumes, was published under the superintendence of Sir Egerton Brydges. But as titles become extinct, and, con sequently, the families bearing them are left out of the peerage-books, those who wish to possess a complete account of those persons, must procure many of the earlier editions of the work, as well as that which, being the latest, will, for the most part, be called the best.