Read it through once

Miss Mitford often made complaint of the number of visitors who thronged her cottage, but now that she had none but herself to consider she seems to have found her chief delight in receiving and entertaining, in quiet fashion, the many literary folk who made pilgrimages to her, visits which were always followed by a correspondence which must have fully occupied her time. This year, 1847, brought Ruskin to the cottage through the introduction of Mrs. Cockburn (the Mary Duff of Lord Byron). “John Ruskin, the Oxford Undergraduate, is a very elegant and distinguished-looking young man, tall, fair, and slender—too slender, for there is a consumptive look, and I fear a consumptive tendency.... He must be, I suppose, twenty-six or twenty-seven, but he looks much younger, and has a gentle playfulness—a sort of pretty waywardness, that is quite charming. And now we write to each other, and I hope love each other as you and I do”—Miss Mitford’s note on the visit, written to another friend, Mr. Charles Boner, in America.