The Countess of Warwick is best known from her _Diary_, her _Autobiography_, and the sermon preached at her funeral by Dr. Anthony Walker, rector of Fyfield in Essex. The _Diary_ was kept from July, 1666, till 1678. The part from 1666 to 1672 was published in 1847 by the Religious Tract Society with a memoir. The remainder is among the manuscripts in the British Museum.[119] Her _Autobiography_, under the title, _Some Specialties in the Life of M. Warwicke_, was published by the Percy Society in 1848.[120] Dr. Walker's sermon, entitled _The Virtuous Woman found, her loss bewailed, and character exemplified_, etc., was published in 1678 and 1687.[121] Mary Boyle was married to Mr. Rich, afterwards Earl of Warwick, when she was but fifteen. Her life before that time she thus describes: "I was married into my husband's family, as vain, as idle, and as inconsiderate a person as possible, minding nothing but curious dressing and fond and rich clothes, and spending my precious time in nothing else but reading romances, and in reading and seeing plays, and in going to court, and Hide Park and Spring Garden; and I was so fond of the court, that I had taken a secret resolution that if my father died, and I was mistress of myself, I would become a courtier."[122] But by the time she was twenty-one a complete change was manifest. She became exceedingly devout. There is no more romance reading. The books on her chosen list are "St. Bernard, George Herbert, Jeremy Taylor, Baxter, Samuel Rutherford Clarke, the _Confessions_ of St. Augustine, John Janeway's _Dying_, Foxe's _Book of Martyrs_, Cayley's _Glimpses of Eternity_."[123] Her writing was all religious in tone. Rules for a Holy Life, Occasional Meditations, and Pious Reflections were among the topics she found most congenial. The _Specialties in the Life of M. Warwicke_ shows the intensity of her struggle after spiritual perfection and her genuine aloofness from the gay and splendid scenes in which her rank compelled her to bear a part. The most ordinary occurrences, such as "lighting many candles at once," or "drawing the window-curtains to prevent the sun's putting out the fire," suggested pious reflections. At a glorious banquet at Whitehall "the trumpets sounding in the midst of all that great show" put mortifying thoughts into her mind and made her consider "what if the trump of God should now sound?" In a meditation entitled "Upon looking out of my window at Chelsea, upon the Thames," her delight in the sweet river when it is calm and serene, and her dislike of it--so that she shut her window and ceased to look--when it was rough, is moralized into the charm of calm and patient people as against those of turbulent passions.[124]