"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 Forest Hill for Mary Powell's sake--is not Shotover as dear a name as Shottery?--and Chalfont for Milton's sake, one thinks on Reigate surrounded by its hills for Anne Manning's sake, and keeps the place in one's heart. _Mary Powell_, with its sequel, _Deborah's Diary_--Deborah was the young thing whom to bring into the world Mary Powell died--is one of the most fragrant books in English literature. One thinks of it side by side with John Evelyn's _Mrs. Godolphin_. Miss Manning had a beautiful style--a style given to her to reconstruct an idyll of old-world sweetness. Limpid as flowing water, with a thought of syllabubs and new-made hay in it, it is a perpetual delight. This mid-Victorian, dark-haired lady, with the aquiline nose and high colour, although she may not have looked it, possessed a charming style, in which tenderness, seriousness, gaiety, humour, poetry, appear in the happiest atmosphere of sweetness and light. KATHARINE TYNAN. _April_ 1908 Bibliography The following is a complete list of her published works:--