'
Manning died on January 14th, 1892, in the eighty-fifth year of
his age. A few days later Mr. Gladstone took occasion, in a
letter
to a friend, to refer to his relations with the late Cardinal.
Manning's conversion was, he said, 'altogether the severest blow
that ever befell me. In a late letter the Cardinal termed it a
quarrel, but in my reply I told him it was not a quarrel, but a
death; and that was the truth. Since then there have been
vicissitudes. But I am quite certain that to the last his
personal feelings never changed; and I believe also that he kept
a promise made in 1851, to remember me before God at the most
solemn moments; a promise which I greatly valued. The whole
subject is to me at once of extreme interest and of considerable
restraint.' 'His reluctance to die,' concluded Mr. Gladstone,
'may
be explained by an intense anxiety to complete unfulfilled
service.'
The funeral was the occasion of a popular demonstration such as
has rarely been witnessed in the streets of London. The route of
the procession was lined by vast crowds of working people, whose
imaginations, in some instinctive manner, had been touched. Many
who had hardly seen him declared that in Cardinal Manning they
had lost their best friend. Was it the magnetic vigour of the
dead man's spirit that moved them? Or was it his valiant
disregard of common custom and those conventional reserves and
poor punctilios which are wont to hem about the great? Or was it
something untameable in his glances and in his gestures? Or was
it, perhaps, the mysterious glamour lingering about him, of the
antique organisation of Rome? For whatever cause, the mind of the
people had been impressed; and yet, after all, the impression was
more acute than lasting.
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