The Stourbridge Observer, Cradley Heath, Halesowen & District Chronicle.
Stourbridge, West Midlands, England, 1875-03-13 00:00:00

dislike
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were some-
wilt.. .al .to attract his regard. 3ut to have
this thoughtful and refined pen pleading the sensitive
and personal side in all these questions was a great gain
for times when the wheels of logic and expediency grind
into dust the emotions as things impertinent. A
courtier, he was as democratic in sympathies as educated
and fastidious in taste; a scholar, he loved and felt for
the ignorant; born and bred himself in comfort, he
throbbed with indignant pity for the dumb victims of
man's inhumanity; and constant association with the
proud and famous only taught him to decry pride, and
to deplore the necessities which make bloodshed
glorious.
Few men have left a happier impression on our
literature than Sir Arthur Helps. His manner of
conducting controversy was a novelty, and the spirit
he infused was at once noble and new. He set th
fashion of fairness and his style and tone are now less
remarkable only because he has founded a large school.
To estimate fully the reform established by him, we
should turn back to the magazines and reviews of fifty,
or even forty, years ago. . . . It is in a large measure
due to himself and the honourable stile which he
established, that literature is not now disgraced by the
fashion that mainly flourished before Queen Victoria
ascended the throne. No writer of our time has done
more to conduct public controversy into a new and a
cleaner channel than Sir Arthur Helps.
At Court he will be sorely missed. He was the
personal friend, and in some matters the adviser of
the Queen. He filled an important official post, and
moved much amongst leading men and women -in all
sections of society. His devotion to his Sovereign
had in it a touch of gentle chivalry, without a particle
of the flattery, of the royal poets of other times. We
are quite sure that her 51ajesty never had, and never
will have, a more frank or honest counsellor, while
his large knowledge of men and public affairs gave to
his candour a peculiar value. Through his position
as C:erk to the Privy Council, he enjoyed, of-course,
large official opportunities of studying successive gruops
of all our eminent men. . . . He was incapable of
betraying the express compact of his official allegiance
or the implied cor.fidences of private life{ h is I
not too much to ray without fen. that " whatEiver re:
record leap to light, he never will be Ehamed2' Our I
only consolation is now to think that, though he will
be missed in pleasant books leaping sudden and fresh
from the press, and in the friendly greeting and quiet
, smile that were so welcome in all kinds of gatherings,
;be will live long on our shelves in stories brimful
"of humanity and redolent of happy turns of thought;
'-in poems graceful and quaint ; in historical biographies
- full of life; and in the memories of troops of friends. In
days of victory Byron's corsairs remembered their dead
in the words, "How had the brave who fell lxulted
now i " When in years to come is chronicled some castle
of prejudice overthrown, some good deed wrought for
the poor, some air and light let in on city foulness,
some abatement of the cruelties that fill the dark
places of the earth, men will remember how heartily
the generous nature we have lost would have rejoiced
in the event, and the name of Sir Arthur, good, gal-
lant, and true-hearted, will be mentioned'among those
who "died upon the field of honour."
The Pall Mall Gazette writes of Sir Arthur :
The death of Sir Arthur Helps, though it will be no
'surprise to those who knew him, and who watched
the slow decadence of his vital strength during the last
eight or ten years, will bring much pain to then, and
t
deep regret to thousands who became his f ands
through his books. Few men have more clear y re-
vealed themselves in what they. wrote. His hole
nature appears in his books; and any one familiar
with his style may safely picture to himself the
manner, the demeanour, of Sir Arthur Helps. It
was is finely sympathetic character—so sympathetic
that its real strength, its intellectual force, was
never allowed full play. He well understood the
common brute business of the world, so to speak, knew
that it has to be carried on through a vast deal of in.

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of men in _
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What we the present pain to the individual ;he say
from man,
to work anguish of the boy rejected, or the indi,
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