A kind of proud humility was constantly present in his speech and bearing.  Ostentation, display, lavish expenditure would have been abhorrent alike to his taste and his principles.  The stately figure which bore itself so majestically in Courts and Parliaments naturally unbent among the costermongers of Whitechapel and the labourers of Dorsetshire.  His personal appointments were simple to a degree; his own expenditure was restricted within the narrowest limits.  But he loved, and was honestly proud of, his beautiful home—­St. Giles’s House, near Cranbourne; and when he received his guests, gentle or simple, at “The Saint,” as he affectionately called it, the mixture of stateliness and geniality in his bearing and address was an object-lesson in high breeding.  Once Lord Beaconsfield, who was staying with Lord Alington at Crichel, was driven over to call on Lord Shaftesbury at St. Giles’s.  When he rose to take his leave, he said, with characteristic magniloquence, but not without an element of truth, “Good-bye, my dear Lord.  You have given me the privilege of seeing one of the most impressive of all spectacles—­a great English nobleman living in patriarchal state in his own hereditary halls.”

IV.

CARDINAL MANNING.

I have described a great philanthropist and a great statesman.  My present subject is a man who combined in singular harmony the qualities of philanthropy and of statesmanship—­Henry Edward, Cardinal Manning, and titular Archbishop of Westminster.

My acquaintance with Cardinal Manning began in 1833.  Early in the Parliamentary session of that year he intimated, through a common friend, a desire to make my acquaintance.  He wished to get an independent Member of Parliament, and especially, if possible, a Liberal and a Churchman, to take up in the House of Commons the cause of Denominational Education.  His scheme was much the same as that now[3] adopted by the Government—­the concurrent endowment of all denominational schools; which, as he remarked, would practically come to mean those of the Anglicans, the Romans, and the Wesleyans.  In compliance with his request, I presented myself at that barrack-like building off the Vauxhall Bridge Road, which was formerly the Guards’ Institute, and is now the Archbishop’s House.  Of course, I had long been familiar with the Cardinal’s shrunken form and finely-cut features, and that extraordinary dignity of bearing which gave him, though in reality below the middle height, the air and aspect of a tall man.  But I only knew him as a conspicuous and impressive figure in society, on public platforms, and (where he specially loved to be) in the precincts of the House of Commons.  I had never exchanged a word with him, and it was with a feeling of very special interest that I entered his presence.