Curiosa: Brief Notices

I'm cataloging Miltoniana, and ran into this encomium by Katharine Tynan in the introduction to the 1908 Everyman's Library edition of Anne Manning's Maiden and Married Life of Mary Powell, Afterwards Mistress Milton:

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.

Tastes change -- Robert J. Wickenheiser, whose bibliography of the Milton collection at the University of South Carolina has been my vade mecum of late, is less enthusiastic (and hence more coherent):

Printed in seventeenth-century style and a rather simplistic attempt at "ye olde Englishe" with a few references to seventeenth-century politics [to] distinguish Mary Powell's adventures from what must have been both the chief dread -- an unhappy marriage -- and the chief aspiration -- marriage to a famous man -- of many nineteenth-century young ladies.

Well, at least we've got good entries for our copies now, in case anyone wants to have a read and judge for him/herself.

Syllabubs and new-made hay? Oy ...