Eminent Victorians | Page 5

characteristics.
Through all the changes of his fortunes the powerful spirit of the man
worked on undismayed. It was as if the Fates had laid a wager that they
would daunt him; and in the end they lost their bet.
His father was a rich West Indian merchant, a governor of the Bank of
England, a Member of Parliament, who drove into town every day from
his country scat in a coach and four, and was content with nothing short
of a bishop for the christening of his children. Little Henry, like the rest,
had his bishop; but he was obliged to wait for him--for as long as
eighteen months. In those days, and even a generation later, as Keble
bears witness, there was great laxity in regard to the early baptism of
children. The delay has been noted by Manning's biographer as the first
stumbling-block in the spiritual life of the future Cardinal; but he
surmounted it with success.
His father was more careful in other ways. 'His refinement and delicacy
of mind were such,' wrote Manning long afterwards, 'that I never heard
out of his mouth a word which might not have been spoken in the
presence of the most pure and sensitive--except,' he adds, 'on one
occasion. He was then forced by others to repeat a negro story which,
though free from all evil de sexu, was indelicate. He did it with great
resistance. His example gave me a hatred of all such talk.'
The family lived in an atmosphere of Evangelical piety. One day the
little boy came in from the farmyard, and his mother asked him
whether he had seen the peacock. 'I said yes, and the nurse said no, and
my mother made me kneel down and beg God to forgive me for not
speaking the truth.' At the age of four the child was told by a cousin of
the age of six that 'God had a book in which He wrote down everything
we did wrong. This so terrified me for days that I remember being
found by my mother sitting under a kind of writing-table in great fear. I
never forgot this at any time in my life,' the Cardinal tells us, 'and it has

been a great grace to me.' When he was nine years old he 'devoured the
Apocalypse; and I never all through my life forgot the "lake that
burneth with fire and brimstone". That verse has kept me like an
audible voice through all my life, and through worlds of danger in my
youth.'
At Harrow the worlds of danger were already around him; but yet he
listened to the audible voice. 'At school and college I never failed to say
my prayers, so far as memory serves me, even for a day.' And he
underwent another religious experience: he read Paley's Evidences. 'I
took in the whole argument,' wrote Manning, when he was over
seventy, 'and I thank God that nothing has ever shaken it.' Yet on the
whole he led the unspiritual life of an ordinary schoolboy. We have
glimpses of him as a handsome lad, playing cricket, or strutting about
in tasselled Hessian top- boots. And on one occasion at least he gave
proof of a certain dexterity of conduct which deserved to be
remembered. He went out of bounds, and a master, riding by and seeing
him on the other side of a field, tied his horse to a gate, and ran after
him. The astute youth outran the master, fetched a circle, reached the
gate, jumped on to the horse's back and rode off. For this he was very
properly chastised; but, of what use was chastisement? No whipping,
however severe, could have eradicated from little Henry's mind a
quality at least as firmly planted in it as his fear of Hell and his belief in
the arguments of Paley.
It had been his father's wish that Manning should go into the Church;
but the thought disgusted him; and when he reached Oxford, his tastes,
his ambitions, his successes at the Union, all seemed to mark him out
for a political career. He was a year junior to Samuel Wilberforce, and
a year senior to Gladstone. In those days the Union was the
recruiting-ground for young politicians; Ministers came down from
London to listen to the debates; and a few years later the Duke of
Newcastle gave Gladstone a pocket borough on the strength of his
speech at the Union against the Reform Bill. To those three young men,
indeed, the whole world lay open. Were they not rich, well-connected,
and endowed with an infinite capacity for making speeches? The event
justified the highest expectations of their friends; for the least
distinguished of the three died a bishop. The only danger lay in