His mental alertness was remarkable.  He seemed to read everything that came out, and to know all that was going on.  He probed character with a glance, and was particularly sharp on pretentiousness and self-importance.  A well-known publicist, who perhaps thinks of himself rather more highly than he ought to think, once ventured to tell the Cardinal that he knew nothing about the subject of a painful agitation which pervaded London in the summer of 1885.  “I have been hearing confessions in London for thirty years, and I fancy more people have confided their secrets to me than to you, Mr. ——­,” was the Cardinal’s reply.

Once, when his burning sympathy with suffering and his profound contempt for Political Economy had led him, in his own words, to “poke fun at the Dismal Science,” the Times lectured him in its most superior manner, and said that the venerable prelate seemed to mistake cause and effect.  “That,” said the Cardinal to me, “is the sort of criticism that an undergraduate makes, and thinks himself very clever.  But I am told that in the present day the Times is chiefly written by undergraduates.”

I once asked him what he thought of a high dignitary of the English Church, who had gone a certain way in a public movement, and then had been frightened back by clamour.  His reply was the single word “infirmus,” accompanied by that peculiar sniff which every one who ever conversed with him must remember as adding so much to the piquancy of his terse judgments.  When he was asked his opinion of a famous biography in which a son had disclosed, with too absolute frankness, his father’s innermost thoughts and feelings, the Cardinal replied, “I think that ——­ has committed the sin of Ham.”

His sense of humour was peculiarly keen, and though it was habitually kept under control, it was sometimes used to point a moral with admirable effect.

“What are you going to do in life?” he asked a rather flippant undergraduate at Oxford.

“Oh, I’m going to take Holy Orders,” was the airy reply.

“Take care you get them, my son.”

Though he was intolerant of bumptiousness, the Cardinal liked young men.  He often had some about him, and in speaking to them the friendliness of his manner was touched with fatherliness in a truly attractive fashion.  And as with young men, so with children.  Surely nothing could be prettier than this answer to a little girl in New York who had addressed some of her domestic experiences to “Cardinal Manning, England.”

“My Dear Child,—­You ask me whether I am glad to receive letters from little children.  I am always glad, for they write kindly and give me no trouble.  I wish all my letters were like theirs.  Give my blessing to your father, and tell him that our good Master will reward him a hundredfold for all he has lost for the sake of his faith.  Tell him that when he comes over to England he must come to see me.  And mind you bring your violin, for