this group can touch him here. Wiseman's work was to inaugurate a hierarchy in which his co-religionists alone could be expected to feel an interest. Vaughan was presently to build a Cathedral whose subtle and mysterious beauty only his co-religionists, perhaps, are capable of appreciating. Newman, working a little apart from the rest, was producing a philosophy too delicate for common minds to grasp. But Manning preached the Gospel to the poor; and, in one of those days of decision when the Gospel alone seems to interpose between the naked passions of wealth and poverty, he knew how to make the cause of the poor his own and the hearts of the poor his conquest. No one could doubt that he was a man and a leader of men. What sort of a Cardinal he may have been-how far he solved, or failed to solve, the paradox of the cardinalate-has remained open for discussion to this day.

The answer is presumably to be read in the books that lie before us, if not, perhaps, in any one of them alone. Mr Leslie, indeed, though his standpoint is quite his own, modestly describes his biography of Manning as a supplement to that of Purcell; and Purcell's Life is certainly not one that can be lightly set aside. Lord Rosebery is credited with having placed it among the five best biographies in the language; and, even if more than one subsequent piece of biographical work has driven it further down the list, it remains, in spite of some discreditable blunders to which Mr Leslie draws attention, a work to be reckoned with. Not the least difficulty in appraising its merit lies in the uncertainty that surrounds Purcell's intention. He claimed, indeed, as Mr Strachey claims, as we all claim, that purity of purpose which should set a man free from malice or favour, from suggestion of what is false and suppression of what is true. But this claim was unfortunately not in perfect harmony with the reputation he enjoyed; and the damaging tradition about the way in which he obtained one of Manning's diaries, even if it be correctly recalled in Mr Leslie's rather attenuated version of the tale, reduces him, so far as character is concerned, to the level of a journalist of the baser sort. Anyhow, he got so thorough a possession of the field that for two decades the Cardinal was generally

reckoned to have suffered a damaging exposure. Such defences as Mr Aubrey de Vere's article and Father Ignatius Ryder's posthumously-published but important paper, were open to the charge of being Catholic in origin. Hutton's generous Anglican estimate had long passed out of notice; Bodley's study was not much more than a personal impression; and Grant Duff's essay largely sacrificed the Cardinal's personality to a review of the Catholic revival in England, France, and Germany during the 19th century. Meanwhile one age was passing into another; and no one who, after looking at the books just enumerated, takes up Mr Strachey's essay or Mr Leslie's biography can doubt that the transition has been effected. The atmosphere is completely changed. The sober style, the considered opinion, the religious, or at least ethical interest has gone; and instead there reigns a philosophy almost purely psychological and a manner almost tediously entertaining. Never, perhaps, has the Time-Spirit executed so rapid, so startling a metamorphosis.

Mr Strachey, to give him his due, is probably the best example of a literary valet that any country has ever had the good fortune to possess. He has no heroes at all; and he consequently valets the Victorian Age, where heroes abounded, with the most finished perfection. At any trial of character the evidence of so attentive a servant would be invaluable, though the jury would have to be reminded that one does not learn quite all a master's secrets by listening in likely corners or looking for mud-stains to brush. There was nothing perhaps that Mr Strachey was more sure of than the Cardinal's desire to bury the recollection of his early marriage. And so it seemed until Baron von Hügel suddenly upset the critic's inference by disclosing an anecdote which displayed in the most touching fashion Manning's unchanging spiritual devotion to the memory of his beautiful wife. Reserve is, indeed, one of the qualities that the 20th century has no aptitude for, and does not therefore easily detect. But Mr Strachey is so clever that he might have escaped a limitation which hampers others of us, if only the contemplation of the poverty and weakness

* Contemp. Review,' March 1896.

of human nature had not given him quite so much pleasure.

Mr Leslie, though he lacks something of Mr Strachey's extreme skill in selection, composition, and expression, and though he professes a faith at which Mr Strachey would probably smile, betrays himself not the less unmistakably as a child of the same century. There is a restless cleverness about his writing that has its root, perhaps, in the constant effort of literature to arrest attention in an age of headlines, but that is unfortunately incompatible with the finest art, and perhaps with finer things than art can ever be. It is true that in the later chapters of the book the style becomes calmer and the thought less embarrassed by the scintillations of a lively wit; but it must remain doubtful whether the subject of the biography, with his austere ideas about literary method, would have approved the technique of his latest biographer. But, if the form of the book suffers to some extent from the journalistic habit of the day, it may at least be claimed that its matter possesses the distinction of vitality, the force of enthusiasm, and the merit of novelty. Things that Purcell never knew have been derived from a variety of sources of which some previously untapped volumes of Manning's Diary and one or two previously unprinted but vitally important letters to Monsignor Talbot are the chief. No future writer is likely to be in a position to throw on Manning's life any further documentary light of any consequence, at least until the Vatican archives of the later 19th century are thrown open to view. And perhaps not even then! For the correspondence with Monsignor Talbot appears to be now complete; and Talbot, the protagonist in the most obscure and canvassed episode in Manning's life, being, according to Manning's own estimate, 'the most imprudent man that ever lived.'

The facts then are, or may be presumed to be, at our disposal. What impression do they render? Mr Leslie, who of all Manning's critics is in the best position to reply, is perhaps among them all the least ready with any answer. His conclusion, which is hardly to be called an estimate, extends little beyond a quotation; and that quotation is drawn from Griffith's speech to Katharine in Shakespeare's Henry VIII (Iv, 2):

"This Cardinal

Was fashioned to much honour from his cradle.
He was a scholar, and a ripe and good one;
Exceeding wise, fair-spoken and persuading;
Lofty and sour to them that loved him not;

But to those men that sought him sweet as summer.'

To those who know their Shakespeare the words are reminiscent of what has just gone before-of the Queen's gently-prefaced but most damning judgment to the effect that Wolsey was

'A man

Of an unbounded stomach, ever ranking
Himself with princes;

His own opinion was his law: i' the presence
He would say untruths, and be ever double
Both in his words and meaning.'

And in those who know their Purcell there may revive a memory of that closing thrust in Newman's correspondence with Manning, where the Oratorian bluntly declares that he does not know whether he is 'on his head or his heels' when he has active relations with his correspondent. What was the Cardinal, we may well ask again, as we cast our minds back over the career which began so brilliantly at Oxford, which became the cynosure of the eyes of Europe in Rome, and which closed in such sombre magnificence at Archbishop's House in Westminster?

When a lock defies us, we are in the habit of trying different keys until we hit upon the right one. The problem of character has to be similarly treated. In Manning's case the lock to be turned appears to be a double one; and of the two most likely keys it would not be surprising to discover that neither would do its work without the other. Manning was first of all-by nature, as his co-religionists would say a statesman; and this key is easy to find and easy to handle. The other needs more looking for and greater skill in application. Manning was to a degree, rarely if ever now to be detected in English public men, a supernaturalist in politics, or quite simply, if the word is used in its proper and not its popular sense, a prophet. To eyes that could see, his countenance carried the imprint of another

world. His face, declared William Lockhart, was to him a 'first dim revelation of the supernatural in man.' And Purcell, working along the same line of thought, observes that Manning's

'unfailing belief in the supernatural-in the actual guidance of God's hand in all that appertained to his sacred office and its public duties gave, aided, perhaps, half unconsciously by the bent of his own nature, a concentrated force to his will and rule which would have been almost despotic, had it not been tempered, at least to his own mind, by a vivid belief in Divine direction.'

Just as Newman's religious sentiment-to follow a profound suggestion of Dean Church's-sought in Catholic pilgrimages the modern counterpart of the crowds that had once thronged the hillsides of Galilee, so Manning required for the full exercise of his activities the image of a kingdom standing in startling, visible contrast to the kingdoms of this world. He could have found this nowhere else but where he did.

The subject of these conjectures was born, though Purcell made a mistake about it, in the year 1808, of an old family and a prosperous stock. His father was a member of parliament and a Governor of the Bank of England; and, when the delicious child, whose portrait is one of the most charming things in Mr Leslie's biography, grew to the maturity of academic and oratorical honours at Oxford, it seemed as if a high place in the counsels of the nation was as well assured to him as to William Ewart Gladstone, his friend and contemporary. Just in that critical hour of life, however, his father came to hopeless financial grief. Parliamentary ambitions had to be immediately exchanged for a supernumerary clerkship at the Colonial Office; and all ambition seemed likely to be satisfied, or extinguished, by the lot of a civil servant. Then a Merton Fellowship offered, the acceptance of which, like other fellowships in those days, involved ordination; and Manning decided to become a clergyman. Spiritual things had lately had an interest for him; and a friendship with an Evangelical lady-Miss Bevan-whose name

'Dublin Review,' April 1892.