To readers who require of a book something more than mere amusement, or a passing satisfaction to their curiosity; who have any regard or relish for independent thinking—­for an enlarged observation of human life—­for the results of study and experience—­for practical sense and wisdom, and a general understanding and appreciation of the varied motives, ways, and interests of men and of society—­these volumes cannot fail to prove delightful and profitable reading.

All Mr Helps’s writings have been published anonymously; and it is only within the last two years that he has become known, out of his own circle, to be the author.  His earliest publications were, Essays written in the Intervals of Business, and An Essay on the Duties of the Employers to the Employed, otherwise entitled The Claims of Labour.  He has also published a work in two volumes under the title of The Conquerors of the New World and their Bondsmen; a historical narrative of the principal events which led to negro slavery in the West Indies and America.  But the books from his pen with which we are best acquainted, and which have obtained the largest measure of public attention, are a series of essays intermixed with dialogues, called Friends in Council, and a supplementary volume, somewhat different in plan, which he calls Companions of my Solitude.[1] As the whole of his characteristics as an essayist are displayed with a more perfect effect in these two latter works than in the others, and as they will afford us as much extract as we shall have space for, we propose to confine our remarks to them exclusively.  Matter enough, and even more than enough, will be found in them for illustrating whatever we may find to say respecting the author’s powers and attainments.

The Friends in Council purports to be edited by a clergyman named Dunsford, who was so obliging and laborious as to set down the conversations in which he, Ellesmere (the great lawyer), and Milverton (the author), had engaged on various occasions, when the last read to his companions a number of short essays which he was writing.  We have a page or two of introduction, informing us of this circumstance, and of a few other particulars needful to be mentioned; and then, after a little talk among the friends, an essay is read, followed by the interlocutors’ comments, and a discussion of its merits.  These conversations form a very agreeable portion of the work, and exhibit a fine mastery of dialogue.  They are exactly like the discourse of intelligent and accomplished men, and therefore very much unlike the ordinary run of book-reported talk.  A few sentences may be not unfitly quoted, by way of exhibiting their quality.  We take the following, on so common a matter as friendship; not because it is the best we might select, but because it seems one of the passages which is most readily extractable:—­

’Ellesmere. I suppose all of us have, at one time or other, had a huge longing after friendship.  If one could get it, it would be much safer than that other thing.