It is difficult to know where to place =Sir Arthur Helps (1817-1875)=, who wrote plays, novels, histories, and essays. He was an overrated writer in his time. He is perhaps underrated now. Two series of "Friends in Council" appeared, the first in 1847, the second in 1859. They dealt with all manner of abstract subjects, such as "war," "despotism," and so on, and were very popular. Another volume, "Companions of my Solitude," was equally successful. Helps was rash enough to enter into competition with Prescott in treating of the Spanish Conquest of America; but the picturesque books of the earlier writer are still with us while Helps's "Life of Pizarro" (1869) and "Life of Cortes" (1871) are almost forgotten. That also is the fate of his romance, "Realmah" (1868) and of his tragedies, "Catherine Douglas" and "Henry II." Sir Arthur Helps was Clerk to the Privy Council, and he edited the "Principal Speeches and Addresses of the late Prince Consort" (1862). Sir Arthur Helps also edited for =Queen Victoria (1819- )= her "Leaves from a Journal of our Life in the Highlands" (1868). The Queen has also published "The Early Days of His Royal Highness the Prince Consort" (1867), and "More Leaves from the Journal of our Life in the Highlands" (1884). Her Majesty has been credited with a genuine taste for letters, and a love for good poetry and good fiction. With some show of authority it has been stated that her favourite novelists are Sir Walter Scott, Miss Austen, and Miss Brontë; while it is quite evident to the least inquisitive that many literary theologians have had some measure of her regard. Happily the times have long passed when literature needed the patronage of the powerful. To-day it can honourably stand alone. But it is pleasing to remember that the sovereign whose sixty years of rule make so remarkable a record in literature, as in many other aspects of the world's progress, has taken a sympathetic interest in the books and bookmen of the epoch. The Queen will have seen reputations blaze forth and flicker out ignominiously; she will have seen many a writer hailed for immortal to-day and forgotten to-morrow. She will have seen, however, a succession of writers, Browning and Tennyson, Carlyle and Ruskin, most notable of all, who in their impulse towards high ideals of human brotherhood, in their enthusiasm of humanity, have given us a literature without a parallel in history; and she will not be without a sense of gratification that that literature will go down the ages bearing the name of Victorian. FOOTNOTES: [18] "Autobiography" by John Stuart Mill (1869), pp. 232, 233. [19] A contemporary epigram thus expressed the general feeling: