would
not have done. But as I saw more and more through the dim light what was
to happen, it became more and more like the affection felt for one
departed.' Hope, he says, was not one of those shallow souls who think
that such a relation can continue after its daily bread has been taken
away. At the end of March he enters in his diary: 'Wrote a paper on
Manning's question and gave it him. He smote me to the ground by
announcing with suppressed emotion that he is now upon the _brink_, and
Hope too. Such terrible blows not only overset and oppress but, I fear,
demoralise me.' On the same day in April 1851, Manning and Hope were
received together into the Roman church. Political separations, though
these too have their pangs, must have seemed to Mr. Gladstone trivial
indeed, after the tragic severance of such a fellowship as this had
been.

MANNING AND HOPE GO OVER

'They were my two props,' he wrote in his diary the next day. 'Their
going may be to me a sign that my work is gone with them.... One
blessing I have: total freedom from doubts. These dismal events have
smitten, but not shaken.' The day after that, he made a codicil to his
will striking out Hope as executor, and substituting Northcote.
Friendship did not die, but only lived 'as it lives between those who
inhabit separate worlds.' Communication was not severed; social
intercourse was not avoided; and both on occasions in life, the passing
by of which, as Hope-Scott said, would be a loss to friendship, and on
smaller opportunities, they corresponded in terms of the old affection.
_Quis desiderio_ is Mr. Gladstone's docket on one of Hope's letters, and
in another (1858) Hope communicates in words of tender feeling the loss
of his wife, and the consolatory teachings of the faith that she, like
himself, had embraced; and he recalls to Mr. Gladstone that the root of
their friendship which struck the deepest was fed by a common interest
in religion.[239]

In Manning's case the wound cut deeper, and for many years the
estrangement was complete.[240] To Wilberforce, the archdeacon, Mr.
Gladstone wrote (April 11, 1851):--

I do indeed feel the loss of Manning, if and as far as I am capable
of feeling anything. It comes to me cumulated, and doubled, with
that of James Hope. Nothing like it can ever happen to me again.
Arrived now at middle life, I never _can_ form I suppose with any
other two men the habits of communicati