h
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 singing and lambs
bleating and distant cocks in farmyards crowing, and a distant dog
barking to an echo which answered his voice, and when the hedges and
banks were full of wild flowers with quaint and pretty names.

"Next to that, I have found the best time soon after early tea, when my
companions were all in the garden, and likely to remain there till
moonlight."

Not very much by way of a literary portrait, and yet one can fill it in
for oneself, can place her in old-world Reigate, fast, alas! becoming
over-built and over-populated like all the rest of the country over
which falls the ever-lengthening London shadow. As one ponders upon
Fo