e 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 churc