1892] Cardinal Manning's Last Days 75 



Baring as to the kind of reforms wanted, but disagreed with his way 

 of carrying them out through Englishmen. It could have no other re- 

 sult but to make evacuation more and more difficult. ' You may wait 

 ten years,' I said, ' and you will find no better occasion to evacuate 

 than the present. I mean, of course, if you really wish it.' He assured 

 me over and over again that that was their policy and their desire. 

 About Arabi he was not encouraging, but I am to call Rosebery's atten- 

 tion to the matter. 



" 15th Sept. — At Crabbet. I have seen Countess Hoyos several 

 times. She rode here one morning, and I have been twice to tea at 

 Paddockhurst (their country place in Sussex, two miles from Crabbet). 

 Her daughter, just married to Herbert Bismarck, she tells me, is su- 

 premely happy, having tamed her Bismarck to a point which could not 

 have been believed. He had been a great coureur de femmes, women 

 mainly of the baser sort, and she has touched him to an ideal love. He 

 is forty-three, she twenty, a beautiful romance. 



" I have had an answer from Rosebery, that is from Villiers, of a 

 most civil kind, but with the usual official evasion of my questions. Sir 

 Wilfrid Lawson has also written. 



" iyth Sept. — A letter from Margot. She has been paying visits 

 with her political admirers, Haldane and Asquith. She describes all 

 in a few words as well as such descriptions could possibly be., 



" Lady Lytton was here to-day with her girls to say good-bye before 

 starting for the Cape. Meynell also, and his wife. After dinner he, 

 Meynell, gave me a most interesting account of Cardinal Manning's 

 last days. Meynell was the old man's confidant in his many disappoint- 

 ments and vexations. The Cardinal's mind had grown large in the 

 later years of his life, and his view of the Catholic Church, and of 

 Christianity, comprehensive of all sects and creeds. He was at odds 

 with his fellow bishops in England, who looked upon him as unortho- 

 dox, and worried him a thousand ways, and he had no one of them all 

 for a friend. His last hours had been troubled by the worries of his 

 clergy. There had been a dispute between two of the Bishops, which 

 he had referred to Rome, and which caused him great annoyance, and 

 when he was taken ill the Bishop of Salford (Herbert Vaughan, after- 

 wards Cardinal Vaughan) was unfortunately staying with him, whom 

 he specially disliked. His old servant Newman had died, and there 

 was no one to take care of him. He refused to believe that he was 

 dying, and had a strong desire to live, and Vaughan was hard on him 

 in his insistence on certain formalities demanded of a dying Archbishop, 

 then having got his way Vaughan left him, and he lay all night alone, 

 and was found next morning insensible and dying, his fire out in the 

 grate and no one with him. Truly death is bitter even to the righteous. 



" Meynell told me also of a new movement within the body of the 



