AN 1814-1831 DIARY.
A facetious and most rural MS., composed by an Oxford- shire gravedigger, has been unearthed (with apologies for the word) by that breezy little green quarterly, the Countryman. Yorick tells in brief and phonetic script salient village facts, which are chiefly either scandals or the price of food, though he has a taste for flowers and fruit, if out of season, as : "Dec 23 i went to get primroses upon the full Blow. A Clove Pink Also upon the full Blow on Christmas Day." There must be extant scores of such MSS. either in diaries or in parish registers. They are of real value and should be perpetuated. It is a genuine service to our social history to seek them out and save them. The Countryman is edited in a country village (from Idbury Manor, near Hingham, Oxford), and owes perhaps some of its discoveries and its own originality to this fact. But Oxford has been on the whole more earnest than other counties to recover its buried wealth. What admirable oral traditions were traced some years ago by Mrs. Gretton, who wrote about North Oxfordshire, and the same Hingham neighbourhood !
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