is incomparably more sparkling and anecdotic than the Puritan
Colonel's, and she does not adopt the somewhat tiresome "doormat"
attitude of wifely adoration towards the subject of her memoir which
"Mad Margaret" (as Pepys called her Grace of Newcastle) thought
fitting when she took up her fatally facile pen to endow her idolised
lord with all the virtues and all the graces and every talent under
the sun.

Yet with less lavishly laid on colours, how vivid is the portrait Lady
Fanshawe has painted for posterity of the gallant gentleman and
scholar, one of those "very perfect gentle knights" which that age
produced; loyal and religious, with the straightforward simple piety
that held unwaveringly to the Anglican Church in which he had been
born and brought up.

And of herself, too, she unconsciously presents a series of charming
pictures. The description of her girlhood is a glimpse into the
bringing up of a Cavalier maiden of quality, of the kind that is
invaluable in a reconstruction of the past from the domestic side. In
the town-house in Hart Street which her father, Sir John Harrison,
rented for the winter months from "my Lord Dingwall," where she was
born, her education was carried on "with all the advantages the time
afforded." She learnt French, singing to the lute, the virginals, and
the art of needlework, and confesses that though she was quick at
learning she was very wild and loved "riding, running and all active
pastimes."

One can picture the light-hearted "hoyting girl" breaking loose when
she found herself at Balls in Hertfordshire, where the family spent
the summer, and skipping and jumping for sheer joy at being alive. And