Powell" she touched the heart of her generation, and few books of its day had a wider circulation. "The Household of Sir Thomas More" is a still more painstaking study, and a more complete and delightful portrait. Its perfect sympathy and its quaint charm of manner secured for it a welcome even among those who claimed for the hero and his opinions a sanctity which Miss Manning's historical judgment did not ratify. Cardinal Manning, writing on March 11, 1887, rejoiced at its republication, and said: "The book is a singularly beautiful one, and I regret that I had not the pleasure of knowing the writer, whose mental gifts were of a very high order." Miss Manning was a keen critic of the Romanism of the Reformation period, as her Appendices to the fourth edition of her book show; but she did not suffer her own opinions to destroy her sympathy for him whom Reginald Pole called "the best of all the English."

"The Household of Sir Thomas More" is an imaginary portrait of a noble character. It professes to be the journal begun by Margaret, More's eldest daughter, most learned and best beloved, when she was but fifteen years old, and continued till she had taken her father's head from the pole whereon it was exposed, to treasure it till she should lay it on her breast as she too passed into the peace of God. Among "fair women" the heroic daughter is immortal:—

So Tennyson recorded the pathetic legend with which Miss Manning ended her beautiful book.

When she wrote, it was not so hard as it is now to recall the London of Henry VIII. Miss Manning herself described very happily in 1859 what she remembered many years before.

"When we say," she wrote, "that some of our happiest and earliest years were spent on the site of Sir Thomas More's country house in the 'village of palaces,' some of our readers will hardly believe we can mean Chelsea. But, in those days, the gin-palace and tea-garden were not; Cremorne was a quiet, aristocratic seclusion, where old Queen Charlotte

'Would sometimes counsel take, and sometimes tea.'

"A few old, quiet streets and rows, with names and sites dear to the antiquary, ran down to the Thames, then a stranger to steamboats; a row of noble elms along its strand lent their deep shade to some quaint old houses with heavy architraves, picturesque flights of steps, and elaborate gates; while Queen Elizabeth's Walk, the Bishop's Walk, and the Bishop's Palace gave a kind of dignity to the more modern designations of the neighbourhood.

"When the Thames was the great highway, and every nobleman had his six or eight oared barge, the banks of the river as high as Chelsea were studded with country houses. At the foot of Battersea Bridge, which in those days did not disfigure the beautiful reach, Sir Thomas More, then a private gentleman and eminent lawyer in full practice, built the capital family house which was afterwards successively occupied by the Marquis of Winchester, Lord Dacre, Lord Burleigh, Sir Robert Cecil, the Earl of Lincoln, Sir Arthur Gorges, Lord Middlesex, the first Duke of Buckingham, Sir Bulstrode Whitlock, the second Duke of Buckingham, the Earl of Bristol, and the Duke of Beaufort. It stood about a hundred yards from the river; its front exhibited a projecting porch in the centre, and four bay windows alternating with eight large casements; while its back presented a confused assemblage of jutting casements, pent-houses, and gables in picturesque intricacy of detail, affording 'coigns of vantage,' we doubt not, to many a tuft of golden moss and stone-crop. This dwelling, which for convenience and beauty of situation and interior comfort was so highly prized by its many and distinguished occupants, appears at length to have been pulled down when it became rickety and untenantable from sheer old age—in Ossian's words, 'gloomy, windy, and full of ghosts.'"

Nor was Miss Manning obliged to rely only on her memory for a picture of More's house as it had been. The site, when she knew it, was like the New Place at Stratford-on-Avon, where only a few stones and foundations enable us to picture how stood the house where Shakespeare died. But while the household was still fresh in men's minds, and More was beginning to be reverenced as a martyr and a saint, Ellis Heywood published at Florence, in 1556, his sketch, "Il Moro," in which he set in a true description of the Chelsea garden an imaginary picture of the Chancellor and his friends talking on matters of high import to soul and spirit. "From one part of the garden," he tells us, "almost the whole of the noble city of London was visible, and from another the beautiful Thames, with green meadows and wooded hills all around." The garden had its own charm too. "It was crowned with an almost perpetual verdure, and the branches of the fruit-trees that grew near were interwoven in a manner so beautiful that it seemed like a living tapestry worked by Nature herself."

So wrote Ellis Heywood of the external beauty of the scene. Of the inner harmony Erasmus had written years before to Ulrich von Hutten:—"More has built himself a house at Chelsea. There he lives with his wife, his son, his daughter-in-law, his three daughters and their husbands, with eleven grandchildren. There is not a man alive so loving as he: he loves his old wife as if she were indeed a young maiden." For Dame Alice, whom More had wedded very soon after the death of his first child-wife, was nec bella nec puella—neither a beauty nor a girl. And besides these, in the year when little Margaret, according to Miss Manning, began to write in her "fayr Libellus" which her tutor, Master Gunnel, gave her, there were dwelling in the house the aged father, Sir John More, good judge and humorous man, with his third wife.

"And the household," said Erasmus, "was a very 'platonic academy'—were it not," he adds, "an injustice to compare it with an academy where disputations concerning numbers and figures were only occasionally mingled with discussion on the moral virtues. I should rather call his house a school of Christianity; for though there is no one in it who does not study the liberal sciences, the special care of all is piety and virtue. No quarrelling or ill-tempered words are ever heard, and idleness is never seen."

In such a household it was that Margaret, More's dearest and most heroic child, was nurtured:—

She was one of those fine souls to whom come alike learning and love, and in whom religion shows its fairest fruits. Holbein draws her with a Seneca in her hand, but not far away is her prayer-desk. All the children answered to their father's careful culture, for it is an idle tale that makes young John More but a silly fellow. Elizabeth, who married Mr. Dancey, Cecily, who became the wife of Giles Heron, a ward of her father's, the step-daughter Alice, who became Lady Alington, and the adopted child, Margaret Giggs, whom young Clement, sometime their fellow-scholar, wedded, were all instructed in humane letters. But Margaret was the flower of them