Those who have the good fortune to obtain The Story
of a Mid-Victorian Girl, by Evelyn Hopkinson, privately printed at the Cambridge University Press, will agree with us that it is an exquisite little book about many clever and agreeable people. The authoress is the widow of Dr. John Hopkinson, Senior Wrangler and afterwards an eminent electrical engineer, who had much to do with the founding of the great school of engineering at Cambridge. She recalls a conversation, fifty years ago, with Mr. Joseph Chamberlain, who blazed with wrath at the mention of Ruskin, and told her that, in reply to an invitation to lecture in Birmingham, Ruskin had replied " Never will I enter your God-forsaken city," and went on to denounce the Birmingham folk for ruining and defacing God's beautiful country with furnaces and chimneys and abominations of all kinds "--in the true Ruskinian vein.
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