This year saw the publication of a memorable book, "Adam Bede," for which even its precursor, "Scenes from Clerical Life," had not prepared the world of letters. The novel was much admired in the royal circle. In one of the rooms at Osborne, as a pendant to a picture from the "Faery Queen," there hangs a representation from a very different masterpiece in English literature, of the young Squire watching Hetty in the dairy. In the beginning of winter the Prince suffered from an unusually severe fit of illness. In November the Princess Royal again visited England, accompanied by her husband. There were cheery winter doings at Osborne, when the great household, like one large family, rejoiced in the seasonable snow, in a slide "used by young and old," and in a "splendid snow man." The new year was joyously danced in, though the children who were wont to assemble at the Queen's dressing-room door to call in chorus "_Prosit Neu Jahr_," were beginning to be scattered far and wide. In January, 1860, the Queen opened Parliament in person, when for the first time the Princesses Alice and Helena were present. On the twentieth anniversary of the Queen's wedding-day she wrote to Baron Stockmar, "I wish I could think I had made one as happy as he has made me." In April the Prince of Hohenlohe-Langenberg, the Queen's brother-in- law, who was now an old man, died at Baden, after a long illness. He had been an upright, unlucky German prince, trusted by his contemporaries, a good husband and father--whose loss was severely felt by the widowed Princess. Her sorrow was reflected in the Queen's sympathy for her sister. This year's Academy Exhibition contained Millais's "Black Brunswicker," Landseer's "Flood in the Highlands," and Phillips's "Marriage of the Princess Royal," now in the great corridor at Windsor Castle. "The Idyls of the King," much admired by the Prince, were the poems of the year. Among the guests at Windsor Castle for Ascot week, in addition to King Leopold, who came to look once more on the old scene, were Prince Louis of Hesse and his younger brother. In a letter of the Prince Consort's, written soon afterwards, he alludes to an apparent "liking" between Prince Louis and Princess Alice. Sir Arthur Helps, whose subsequent literary relations with the Queen were so friendly, was sworn in Clerk of the Council on the 23rd of June.