Cardinal Wiseman was an able and a discreet man. He was calm, plausible, powerful. He was very earnest in the cause of his Church, but he seemed much more like a man of the world than Newman or Dr. Manning. There was little of the loftily spiritual in his manner or appearance. His bulky person and swollen face suggested at the first glance a sort of Abbot Boniface; he was, I believe, in reality an ascetic. The corpulence which seemed the result of good living was only the effect of ill health. He had a persuasive and an imposing way. His ability was singularly flexible. His eloquence was often too gorgeous and ornamental for a pure taste, but when the occasion needed he could address an audience in language of the simplest and most practical common sense. The same adaptability, if I may use such a word, was evident in all he did. He would talk with a cabinet minister on terms of calm equality, as if his rank must be self-evident, and he delighted to set a band of poor school children playing around him. He was a cosmopolitan--English and Irish by extraction, Spanish by birth, Roman by education. When he spoke English he was exactly like what a portly, dignified British bishop ought to be--a John Bull in every respect. When he spoke Italian at Rome he fell instinctively and at once into all the peculiarities of intonation and gesture which distinguish the people of Italy from all other races. When he conversed in Spanish he subsided into the grave, somewhat saturnine dignity and repose of the true Castilian. All this, I presume, was but the natural effect of that flexibility of temperament I have attempted to describe. I had but slight personal acquaintance with Cardinal Wiseman, and I paint him only as he impressed me, a casual observer. I am satisfied that he was a profoundly earnest and single-minded man; the testimony of many whom I know and who knew him well compels me to that conviction. But such was not the impression he would have left on a mere acquaintance. He seemed rather one who could, for a purpose which he believed great, be all things to all men. He impressed me quite differently from the manner in which I have been impressed by John Henry Newman and by Archbishop Manning. He reminded one of some great, capable, worldly-wise, astute Prince of the Church of other generations, politician rather than priest, more ready to sustain and skilled to defend the temporal power of the Papacy than to illustrate its highest spiritual influence.