'
There was one to whom Manning's elevation would no doubt have
given a peculiar satisfaction--his old friend Monsignor Talbot.
But this was not to be. That industrious worker in the cause of
Rome had been removed some years previously to a sequestered home
at Passy, whose padded walls were impervious to the rumours of
the outer world. Pius IX had been much afflicted by this
unfortunate event; he had not been able to resign himself to the
loss of his secretary, and he had given orders that Monsignor
Talbot's apartment in the Vatican should be preserved precisely
as he had left it, in case of his return. But Monsignor Talbot
never returned. Manning's feelings upon the subject appear to
have been less tender than the Pope's. In all his letters, in all
his papers, in all his biographical memoranda, not a word of
allusion is to be found to the misfortune, nor to the death, of
the most loyal of his adherents. Monsignor Talbot's name
disappears suddenly and for ever-- like a stone cast into the
waters.
Manning was now an old man, and his outward form had assumed that
appearance of austere asceticism which is, perhaps, the one thing
immediately suggested by his name to the ordinary Englishman. The
spare and stately form, the head-- massive, emaciated, terrible--
with the great nose, the glittering eyes, and the mouth drawn
back and compressed into the grim rigidities of age, self-
mortification, and authority--such is the vision that still
lingers in the public mind-- the vision which, actual and
palpable
like some embodied memory of the Middle Ages, used to pass and
repass, less than a generation since, through the streets of
London.
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