MISS ELLICE HOPICINS' PROTEST.
(TO THE EDITOR OF THE SPECTATOR.") Sin,—Would it not be possible for the Spectator to integrate the authors it reviews a little more than it does, and not reduce them
to the level of a centipede, whose segments, according to Mr. Herbert Spencer, when divided with a clean-cutting knife, set up independent action, and are seen wriggling off in various directions ?
After a brief but favourable notice of my novel, "Rose Turquand," I was next reviewed as the editor of James Hinton's "Life and Letters," a sufficiently well-known book, now in its third edition ; and your valuable columns were occupied for some weeks with an interesting discussion on altruism, drawn
from its pages. In a brief notice of my article in the Contenz- porary on carnivorous plants, last summer, I was amused to find myself figuring as "Mr. Ellice Hopkins, the naturalist." And
this last week, in your flattering notice of my little book, "Work among Working-men," the naturalist reappears as a lady, who in her youth did a remarkable work among the poor, and who holds some eccentric views as to the advisability of all young ladies preaching ; views which, if carried out, would certainly give an increased preciousness to the promise—" whether there be tongues, they shall cease "—but who apparently has never been heard of in other ways.
In the early days of my authorship, my masculine Christian name led to some curious mistakes with regard to my sex and calling. I had the satisfaction of hearing myself designated by
a friendly critic as "a deucedly clever fellow." In a notice of some articles of mine in Macmillan, on Quakerism, I was denounced, in the respectable columns of the Atheneum, as a bigoted Broad-brim ; and Lady Aberdeen wrote to me on busi- ness connected with a pamphlet of mine, beginning, "Reverend Sir."
The confusion of my identity which then set in will certainly be completed in the pages of the Spectator, unless you will
kindly recognise me in future as the daughter of William Hopkins, the well-known mathematician, as the friend and biographer of James Hinton, as the writer of various books, some of which are in their eighteenth and twenty-second
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