aken rank
among the best biographies of the last half-century.

[36] An anecdote was told at the time that when he found himself in
the prison yard at Kilmainham, he said, in a sort of soliloquy,
"I shall live yet to dance upon those two old men's graves."

CARDINAL MANNING

Henry Edward Manning, Archbishop of Westminster and Cardinal of the
Holy Roman Church, was born in 1808, eight years after Cardinal
Newman, and died in 1892. He was one of the most notable figures of
his generation; and, indeed, in a sense, an unique figure, for he
contributed a new type to the already rich and various ecclesiastical
life of England. If he could scarcely be described as intellectually a
man of the first order, he held a considerable place in the history of
his time, having effected what greater men might perhaps have failed
to effect, for the race is not always to the swift, and time and
chance favoured Manning.

He was the son of wealthy parents, his father a City of London
merchant; was educated at Harrow and at Oxford, where he obtained high
classical honours and a Fellowship at Merton College; was ordained a
clergyman, and soon rose to be Archdeacon of Chichester; and, having
by degrees been led further and further from his original Low Church
position into the Tractarian movement, ultimately, at the age of
forty-three, went over to the Church of Rome. Having some time before
lost his wife, he was at once re-ordained a priest, was appointed
Archbishop of Westminster on Cardinal Wiseman's death in 1865, and
raised to the Cardinalate by Pope Pius IX. in 1875.

He was not a great thinker nor a man of wide learning. His writings
show no trace of originality, nor indeed any conspicuous philosophical
acuteness or logical power. So far as purely intellectual gifts are
concerned, he was not to be named with Cardinal Newman or with several
other of the ablest members of the English Tractarian party, such as
were the two metaphysicians W. G. Ward and Dalgairns, both of whom
passed over to Rome, or such as was Dean Church, an accomplished
historian, and a man of singularly beautiful character, who remained
an Anglican till his death in 1890. Nor, though he had won a high
reputation at his University, was Manning a leading spirit in the
famous "Oxford Movement." It was by his winning manners, his graceful
rhetoric, and his zealous discharge of clerical duties, rather than by
any commanding talents that h