The whole of Her Majesty’s reign has marked a wonderful and brilliant era in civilization. During that period our own nation may be said to have created a literature, an art, and a philosophy of its own. The men of distinction in letters who have been raised in our land during the past half-century are almost numberless, but, amongst the great masters in thought and distinguished moral teachers, Dr. Arnold, Carlyle, Dickens, Thackeray, John Stuart Mill, Herbert Spencer, Huxley, Tyndal, and Darwin may be mentioned. Apart from all these teachers there are two men who have richly gained for themselves a lofty splendid eminence in the purest regions of the world of thought-Tennyson and Browning. By a happy, though very unusual, chance in literary history, these two most eminent British poets of the latter half of the nineteenth century have been contemporaries, and both have had allotted to them more than the threescore years and ten of which the Psalmist sings. They have not been the ephemeral poets of a day, but all their lives long have had an increasing popularity, and in their latter days have commanded veneration and love; and when, one short year ago, the latter was buried by the side of him (Charles Dickens) who wrote of “Little Nell,” in Westminster Abbey, no hero or great man ever more deserved the sweet words of his own beloved wife’s hymn, set to the solemn strains of the organ, “He giveth His beloved sleep!” Unlike the too frequent lot of poets,