WHILE going through something or other recently, my eye was as usual distracted and fell upon something far more interesting in another column.

This is from the Darlington and Stockton Times of mid-October 1885 and as about the opening of the "Book Palace of Darlington" (aka: Darlo library). It is as beautifully written as the building is designed (of course, the library is designed by our hero architect, after whom a pub has just been named, GG Hoskins).

================================== THE FREE LIBRARY October 23rd is the day fixed for the opening of our Free Library. So ornate a building exteriorly, or one so cunningly devised and arranged to fulfil all the objects of its erection does not exist in Darlington. The interior, besides being admirably planned, is most beautifully, and, in some places, symbollically decorated, while there is a symmetrical harmony of form and colour about it which I really believe will be advantageous to users of the reading room. I appeal to any student, nay to any novel reader, whether or not the place and circumstances in which a book is read do not act unconsciously on the mind and make it easier or more difficult as the case may be, to grasp a chain of reasoning or to follow an intricate plot. So that student's eye, as he raises it from his book, will be enabled to contemplate (I hope appreciatively) the refinement, dexterity, skill and beauty which the able architect has brought to bear upon the interior of the Book Palace of Darlington, and his mental faculties will be soothed and elevated by "the things of beauty" around him. Looking over the programme sketched by the Library Committee of what is to be done at the opening I think they show all possible desire to express full appreciation of the noble gift Lady Lymington's father has left to keep his memory green.