Cherry and Violet: A Tale of the Great Plague

SO reticent was Miss Manning in her lifetime, and so loyally have her wishes been obeyed by her kindred since her death, that when Mr. Nimmo last year re-published her beautiful memorial portrait, “The Household of Sir Thomas More,” it was clear that whatever of her personal history had ever been known had been already forgotten. She had indeed been confused, in a Biographical Dictionary, with another writer: it even needed the assurance of her surviving niece to convince inquirers that she lived and died unmarried. Thus to live and die, “the world forgetting, by the world forgot,” was what the gentle spirit chose. To be known through her books, and loved, there can be little question, was her ambition, and it was a wish which I cannot doubt is fulfilled. The “author of ‘Mary Powell,’” as she styled herself on her title-pages, has left several exquisite little studies, highly appreciated when they first saw the light, and still worthy, as it seems to me, of that kind of immortality of regard which is won by those writers whom none of us would place in the first rank of Literature, but whom all who know them remember with something of a personal affection. When I say that Miss Manning reminds me of Miss Rossetti, I do not mean that the earlier writer has the genius of the most perfect poet that ever, in the English tongue, linked the highest aspirations of Religion with the most exquisite expressions of Poetry; but rather that their minds were both beautiful, their experiences pathetic, their hearts true. They would walk together in Paradise, and understand each other: when our Lady of Sorrows sings “Magnificat,” they would stand by, and their souls would echo to her song. The matter of the work of each is very different, yet in the manner there is something indescribably akin. Christina Rossetti is one of the greatest writers of the century; but, unique though she is, and unapproachable in her sphere, in the land below her the author of “Mary Powell” has thought some of the same thoughts, and thought them in the same way.