Mary Powell Deborahs Diary | Page 2

historians. She does not "play the sedulous ape" to

Milton or Mary Powell: but if one could imagine a gentle and tender
Boswell to these two, then Miss Manning has well proved her aptitude
for the place. Of Mary Powell she has made a charming creature. The
diary of Mary Powell is full of sweet country smells and sights and
sounds. Mary Powell herself is as sweet as her flowers, frank, honest,
loving and tender. Her diary catches for us all the enchantment of an
old garden; we hear Mary Powell's bees buzz in the mignonette and
lavender; we see her pleached garden alleys; we loiter with her on the
bowling-green, by the fish ponds, in the still-room, the dairy and the
pantry. The smell of aromatic box on a hot summer of long ago is in
our nostrils. We realise all the personages--the impulsive, hot-headed
father; the domineering, indiscreet mother; the cousin, Rose Agnew,
and her parson husband; little Kate and Robin of the Royalist
household--as well as John Milton and his father, and the two nephews
to whom the poet was tutor--and a hard tutor. Miss Manning's
delightful humour comes out in the two pragmatical little boys. But
Mary herself dominates the picture. She is so much a thing of the
country, of gardens and fields, that perforce one is reminded of Sir
Thomas Overbury's Fair and Happy Milkmaid:--
"She doth all things with so sweet a grace it seems ignorance will not
suffer her to do ill, being her mind is to do well. . . . The garden and
bee-hive are all her physic and chirugery, and she lives the longer for it.
She dares go alone and unfold sheep in the night and fears no manner
of ill because she means none: yet to say truth she is never alone, for
she is still accompanied by old songs, honest thoughts and prayers, but
short ones. . . . Thus lives she, and all her care is that she may die in the
spring-time, to have store of flowers stuck upon her winding-sheet."
The last remnants of Forest Hill, Mary Powell's home, were pulled
down in 1854. A visitor to it three years before its demolition tells us:--
"Still the rose, the sweet-brier and the eglantine are reddest beneath its
casements; the cock at its barn-door may be seen from any of the
windows. . . . In the kitchen, with its vast hearth and overhanging
chimney, we discovered tokens of the good living for which the old
manor-house was famous in its day. . . . The garden, in its massive wall,

ornamental gateway and old sun-dial, retains some traces of its
manorial dignities." The house indeed is gone, but the sweet country
remains, the verdant slopes and the lanes with their hedges full of
sweet-brier that stretch out towards Oxford. And there is the church in
which Mary Powell prayed. I should have liked to quote another of
Miss Manning's biographers, the Rev. Dr. Hutton, who tells us of old
walls partly built into the farmhouse that now stands there, and of the
old walnut trees in the farmyard, and in a field hard by the spring of
which John Milton may have tasted, and the church on the hill, and the
distant Chilterns.
Milton's cottage at Chalfont St. Giles's is happily still in a good state of
preservation, although Chalfont and its neighbourhood have suffered a
sea-change even since Dr. Hutton wrote, a decade ago. All that quiet
corner of the world, for so long green and secluded,--a "deare secret
greennesse"--has now had the light of the world let in upon it.
Motor-cars whizz through that Quaker country; money-making
Londoners hurry away from it of mornings, trudge home of evenings,
bag in hand; the jerry-builder is in the land, and the dust of much traffic
lies upon the rose and eglantine wherewith Milton's eyes were
delighted. The works of our hands often mock us by their durability.
Years and ages and centuries after the busy brain and the feeling heart
are dust, the houses built with hands stand up to taunt our mortality.
Yet the works of the mind remain. Though Forest Hill be only a
party-wall, and Chalfont a suburb of London, the Forest Hill of Mary
Powell, the Chalfont of Milton, yet live for us in Anne Manning's
delightful pages.
Miss Manning did not wish her Life to be written, but we do get some
glimpses of her real self from herself in a chance page here and there of
her reminiscences.
Here is one such glimpse:--
"I must confess I have never been able to write comfortably when
music was going on. I think I have always written to most purpose
coming in fresh from a morning walk when the larks were