The greatest patroness of Pets in Real Life was Queen Victoria, and her books have secured for these favourites a permanent place. Noble, the collie, will be remembered as long as "Leaves from the Journal of our Life in the Highlands" is read; and I can myself recall the excitement which fluttered the highest circles when a black terrier, called, I think, Sharp, killed a rat which had climbed up the ivy into the window of the Queen's sitting-room at Windsor. There are certain pets, or families of pets, which stand on their own traditional dignity rather than on associations with individuals. All Cheshire knows the Mastiffs of Lyme, tall as donkeys and peaceable as sheep. The Clumber Spaniels and the Gordon Setters are at least as famous as the dukes who own them. Perhaps the most fascinating pet in the canine world is associated with the great victory of Blenheim; and the Willoughby Pug preserves from oblivion a name which has been merged in the Earldom of Ancaster. In the days of my youth one was constantly hearing--and especially in the Whiggish circles where I was reared--two names which may easily puzzle posterior critics. These were "Bear Ellis" and "Poodle Byng." They were pre-eminently unsentimental persons. "Bear" Ellis (1781-1863) was so called because he was Chairman of the Hudson's Bay Company, and "Poodle" Byng (1784-1871) because his hair, while yet he boasted such an appendage, had been crisply curled. But the Dryasdust of the future, pondering over the social and political records of Queen Victoria's earlier reign, will undoubtedly connect these prefixes with pet-keeping tendencies, and will praise the humane influence of an animal-loving Court which induced hardened men of the world to join the ranks of "Our Dumb Friends' League." XXXIX PURPLE AND FINE LINEN Dean _versus_ Bishop--it is an antinomy as old as the history of Cathedral institutions. The Dean, with a good house and a thousand a year, has always murmured against the Bishop, with a better house and five times that income; and, as he is generally master of his Cathedral, he has before now contrived to make his murmurs sensible as well as audible. Of late years these spiritual strifes (which beautifully link the post-Reformation to the pre-Reformation Church) have been voted disedifying, and, if they continue to exist, they operate surreptitiously and out of public view. But, though Deans have ceased from clamouring, they retain their right to criticize, and the Dean of Norwich has just been exercising that right with a good deal of vivacity. I cull the following extract from a secular newspaper:-- SIMPLE LIFE FOR BISHOPS