J. B. HOPKINS.
According to an oft-told story, a parliamentary reporter being asked if a certain M.P. had not been in the gallery, replied, 'Yes; but he was not up to our mark, so we pitched him into the House!' The said M.P. might have been a clever politician and statesman, though he failed in reporting, which requires a special and natural aptitude. The same remark is applicable to other departments of journalism. The leader-writer, the essayist, and the critic need extensive reading, minute observation, quickness of apprehension, and to wield an ever-ready pen. The journalist must also have the faculty of writing in a style that is both easy and instructive; for the newspaper reader expects to be spared the trouble of thinking, and to be regaled with completely digested thought. The adage that tells us the poet is born and the orator made is a rhetorical error; because the poet needs mental culture, and no man can be an orator unless he has the special talent. So with the journalist, who must be both born and made.
Mr. John Baker Hopkins was born in London, on the 10th of April 1830. He is maternally descended from a Staffordshire family, the Bakers, who have been closely allied with the Jennings family, and he is named after his great grandfather, a Wedgbury worthy, whose physical prowess, was celebrated in local song.
In April 1862, Mr. Henry Hotze, the commercial agent of the Confederate States, called on Mr. Hopkins, and discussed the expediency of buying the 'Atlas,' and making it the Confederate organ in Europe. Mr. Hopkins suggested that it would be better to start a new paper as the avowed organ of the Confederacy; and this was agreed to. In ten days after this interview—that is, on the 1st May 1862—the first number of the 'Index' appeared, under the joint editorship and management of Messrs. Hotze and Hopkins. At the 1862 meeting of the Social Science Congress, at the London Guild-
