e rose to eminence in the Church of
England. Neither had his character the same power either to attract or
to awe as that of Newman. Nobody in those days called him great, as
men called Newman. Nobody felt compelled to follow where he led. There
was not, either in his sermons or in his writings, or in his bodily
presence and conversation, anything which could be pronounced
majestic, or lofty, or profound. In short, he was not in the grand
style, either as a man or as a preacher, and wanted that note of
ethereal purity or passionate fervour which marks the two highest
forms of religious character.

Intelligent, however, skilful, versatile he was in the highest degree;
cultivated, too, with a knowledge of all that a highly educated man
ought to know; dexterous rather than forcible in theological
controversy; an admirable rhetorician, handling language with
something of that kind of art which Roman ecclesiastics most
cultivate, and in their possession of which the leading Tractarians
showed their affinity to Rome, an exact precision of phrase and a
subtle delicacy of suggestion. Newman had it in the fullest measure.
Dean Church had it, with less brilliance than Newman, but with no less
grace and dignity. Manning equalled neither of these, but we catch in
him the echo. He wrote abundantly and on many subjects, always with
cleverness and with the air of one who claimed to belong to the _ames
d'elite_, yet his style never attained the higher kind of literary
merit. There was no imaginative richness about it, neither were there
the weight and penetration that come from sustained and vigorous
thinking. Similarly, with a certain parade of references to history
and to out-of-the-way writers, he gave scant evidence of solid
learning. He was an accomplished disputant in the sense of knowing
thoroughly the more obvious weaknesses of the Protestant (and
especially of the Anglican) position, and of being able to contrast
them effectively with the external completeness and formal symmetry of
the Roman system. But he never struck out a new or illuminative
thought; and he seldom ventured to face--one could indeed sometimes
mark him seeking to elude--a real difficulty.

What, then, was the secret of his great and long-sustained reputation
and influence? It lay in his power of dealing with men. For the work
of an ecclesiastical ruler he had three inestimable gifts--a resolute
will, captivating manners, and a tact equally acute and vigila