Helps, SIR ARTHUR, essayist and historian, was born at Streatham, Surrey, 10th July 1813. From Eton he passed to Trinity College, Cambridge, where he was thirty-first wrangler in 1835; but, what meant more, was admitted a member of the famous Society of the Apostles, among whom were Charles Buller, Maurice, Trench, Monckton Milnes, and Tennyson. On leaving the university he became private secretary to Spring-Rice, then Chancellor of the Exchequer, and next to Lord Morpeth, the Irish secretary. On the fall of the Melbourne ministry he retired to enjoy twenty years of lettered leisure. In 1860 he was appointed Clerk to the Privy-council, and was in consequence much thrown into contact with the Queen, who, it is understood, set a high value upon his character and talents. He was employed to edit the Principal Speeches and Addresses of the late Prince Consort (1862), and the Queen's own Leaves from a Journal of Our Life in the Highlands (1868). He received the degree of D.C.L. from Oxford in 1864, was made C.B. in 1871, and K.C.B. in 1872. He died in London, after a few days' illness, 7th March 1875.
His first work was a series of aphorisms entitled Thoughts in the Cloister and the Crowd, published as early as 1835. The next, a work of more real consequence, was Essays written in the Intervals of Business (1841). Two worthless plays followed, then The Claims of Labour (1844), and Friends in Council (two series, 1847-59), an admirable series of discussions on social questions, thrown into a conversational form. The same familiar speakers (Milverton, Ellesmere, and Dunsford) reappeared in Realmah (1869), Conversations on War and General Culture (1871), and Talk about Animals and their Masters (1873). His strong interest in the question of slavery prompted his Conquerors of the New World and their Bondsmen (1848-52), and the greater work, The Spanish Conquest in America (4 vols. 1855-61). Out of his studies for this work grew his admirable biographies of Las Casas (1868), Columbus (1869), Pizarro (1869), and Cortés (1871). Other works are Companions of my Solitude (1850), Casimir Maremma (1870), Brevia (1871), Thoughts upon Government (1872), Life and Labours of Thomas Brassey (1872), and Social Pressure (1875).
Helps is one of the most suggestive and delightful of our later essayists, revealing everywhere acuteness, humour, a satire which gives no pain, and a quiet depth of moral feeling and sense of man's social responsibilities; while his style possesses in a rare degree the qualities of grace, clearness, and distinction.