His dignity was astonishing.  The position of a cardinal with a princely rank recognized abroad but officially ignored in England was difficult to carry off, but his exquisite tact enabled him to sustain it to perfection.  He never put himself forward; never asserted his rank; never exposed himself to rebuffs; still, he always contrived to be the most conspicuous figure in any company which he entered; and whether one greeted him with the homage due to a prince of the Church or merely with the respect which no one refuses to a courtly old gentleman, his manner was equally easy, natural, and unembarrassed.  The fact that the Cardinal’s name, after due consideration, was inserted in the Royal Commission on the Housing of the Poor immediately after that of the Prince of Wales and before Lord Salisbury’s was the formal recognition of a social precedence which adroitness and judgment had already made his own.

To imagine that Cardinal Manning regarded station, or dignity, or even power, as treasures to be valued in themselves would be ridiculously to misconceive the man.  He had two supreme and absorbing objects in life—­if, indeed, they may not be more properly spoken of as one—­the glory of God and the salvation of men.  These were, in his intellect and conscience, identified with the victory of the Roman Church.  To these all else was subordinated; by its relation to these all else was weighed and calculated.  His ecclesiastical dignity, and the secular recognition of it, were valuable as means to high ends.  They attracted public notice to his person and mission; they secured him a wider hearing; they gave him access to circles which, perhaps, would otherwise have been closed.  Hence, and for no other reason, they were valuable.

It has always to be borne in mind that Manning was essentially a man of the world, though he was much more than that.  Be it far from me to disparage the ordinary type of Roman ecclesiastic, who is bred in a seminary, and perhaps spends his lifetime in a religious community.  That peculiar training produces, often enough, a character of saintliness and unworldly grace on which one can only “look,” to use a phrase of Mr. Gladstone’s, “as men look up at the stars.”  But it was a very different process that had made Cardinal Manning what he was.  He had touched life at many points.  A wealthy home, four years at Harrow, Balliol in its palmiest days, a good degree, a College Fellowship, political and secular ambitions of no common kind, apprenticeship to the practical work of a Government office, a marriage brightly but all too briefly happy, the charge of a country parish, and an early initiation into the duties of ecclesiastical rulership—­all these experiences had made Henry Manning, by the time of his momentous change, an accomplished man of the world.

His subsequent career, though, of course, it superadded certain characteristics of its own, never obliterated or even concealed the marks left by those earlier phases, and the octogenarian Cardinal was a beautifully-mannered, well-informed, sagacious old gentleman who, but for his dress, might have passed for a Cabinet Minister, an eminent judge, or a great county magnate.