The swiftness of his rise is a striking instance of the power which intellectual concentration and a strenuous will can exert, for he had no adventitious help from wealth or family connection or from the reputation of having suffered for his country. _Ergo vivida vis animi pervicit._ When he entered Parliament he was only thirty, with no experience of affairs and no gift of speech; but the quality that was in him of leading and ruling men, of taking the initiative, of seeing and striking at the weak point of the enemy, and fearlessly facing the brunt of an enemy's attack, made itself felt in a few months, and he rose without effort to the first place. With some intellectual limitations and some great faults, he will stand high in the long and melancholy series of Irish leaders: less lofty than Grattan, less romantic than Wolfe Tone, less attractive than O'Connell, less brilliant than any of these three, yet entitled to be remembered as one of the most remarkable characters that his country has produced in her struggle of many centuries against the larger isle.
[35] The _Life of Parnell_, by Mr. R. Barry O'Brien, has taken rank among the best biographies of the last half-century.
[36] An anecdote was told at the time that when he found himself in the prison yard at Kilmainham, he said, in a sort of soliloquy, "I shall live yet to dance upon those two old men's graves."
Henry Edward Manning, Archbishop of Westminster and Cardinal of the Holy Roman Church, was born in 1808, eight years after Cardinal Newman, and died in 1892. He was one of the most notable figures of his generation; and, indeed, in a sense, an unique figure, for he contributed a new type to the already rich and various ecclesiastical life of England. If he could scarcely be described as intellectually a man of the first order, he held a considerable place in the history of his time, having effected what greater men might perhaps have failed to effect, for the race is not always to the swift, and time and chance favoured Manning.
He was the son of wealthy parents, his father a City of London merchant; was educated at Harrow and at Oxford, where he obtained high classical honours and a Fellowship at Merton College; was ordained a clergyman, and soon rose to be Archdeacon of Chichester; and, having by degrees been led further and further from his original Low Church position into the Tractarian movement, ultimately, at the age of forty-three, went over to the Church of Rome. Having some time before lost his wife, he was at once re-ordained a priest, was appointed Archbishop of Westminster on Cardinal Wiseman's death in 1865, and raised to the Cardinalate by Pope Pius IX. in 1875.