Dr. Williams (Pink Pills for Pale People). Hall Caine. The prize (and this is another odd coincidence) was won by the butler himself, to whom, very generously, the publisher's wife resigned the vellum copy of our hostess's poems. From a literary point of view, it is interesting to note that Mr. Frank Richardson is the only master of _belles lettres_ who is appreciated in the servants' hall! The other names we associate, rightly or wrongly, with something other than literature. The following evening I suggested choosing the greatest English names in the nineteenth century (twentieth-century life being strictly excluded). Every one by this time had caught the _suck-pencil_ fever. By general consent the suffrage was extended to the domestics: the electorate being thus one hundred. And what, you will ask, came of it all? I suggest that readers should guess. Any one interested should fill up, cut out, and send this coupon to my own publisher on April the first. _I think the Ten Greatest Englishmen of the Nineteenth Century were_: 1 . . . . . . . . . . 2 . . . . . . . . . . 3 . . . . . . . . . . 4 . . . . . . . . . . 5 . . . . . . . . . . 6 . . . . . . . . . . 7 . . . . . . . . . . 8 . . . . . . . . . . 9 . . . . . . . . . . 10 . . . . . . . . . . A prize, consisting of a copy of _Books of To-Day and Books of To-Morrow_, will be awarded for the best shot. MR. BENSON'S 'PATER.' In no other country has mediocrity such a chance as in England. The second-rate writer, the second-rate painter meets with an almost universal and immediate recognition. When good mediocrities die, if they do not go straight to heaven (from a country where the existence of Purgatory is denied by Act of Parliament), at least they run a very fair chance of burial in Westminster Abbey. 'De mortuis nil nisi _bonus_,' in the shape of royalties, is the real test by which we estimate the authors who have just passed away. A few of our great writers--Ruskin and Tennyson, for example--have enjoyed the applause accorded to senility by a people usually timid of brilliancy and strength, when it is contemporary. The ruins of mental faculties touch our imagination, owing, perhaps, to that tenderness for antiquity which has preserved for us the remains of Tintern Abbey. Seldom, however, does a great writer live to find himself, in the prime of his literary existence, a component part of English literature. Yet there are happy exceptions, and not the least of these was Walter Pater.