Henry Edward Manning, at the age of four, had his portrait taken by a miniature-painter, who depicted him upon a cliff above the sea, absorbed in listening to the murmur of a shell. This most interesting picture of the future Cardinal, together with companion portraits of his little brothers and sisters, long hung upon the wall of the library of his father's house at Totteridge. But one night the house was broken into by a gang of burglars, and, among other valuables, the miniatures were carried off. The vexation of the family was extreme; but by a curious freak of fortune the portraits were at length discovered in an old curiosity shop in London, and, after years of absence, resumed their old position on the library wall. The second of our portraits shows the future Cardinal as Archdeacon of Chichester, at a time when he was universally regarded as one of the strongest pillars of the English Church. Alas for human foresight! Seven years later, on Passion Sunday, 1851, he felt himself compelled to make the great renunciation, and laid before the footstool of the Pope the costly offering of such a character as in its blend of saintly life, of strength of intellect, of eloquence alike of tongue and pen, and of unrivalled knowledge of the world, has rarely been bestowed on any of the sons of men. For these portraits we are indebted to the courtesy of Cardinal Manning, of Mr. Wilfred Meynell, and of Messrs. Henry Graves & Co., Pall Mall. JOHN RUSKIN. BORN 1819. [Illustration: AGE 38. _From a Drawing by G. Richmond, R.A._] At the age of twenty, Mr. Ruskin, then at Christ Church, Oxford, had just won the Newdigate prize poem. Two years later the first volume of "Modern Painters" showed that a new poet had indeed arisen, though a poet who was destined not to cast his thoughts in verse, but in "the other harmony of prose." At eight-and-thirty "Stones of Venice" had appeared. At eight-and-forty (as in our second portrait) he had recently been elected Rede Lecturer at Cambridge, and was in the height of his great combat with the world he lives in--a world which, in his eyes, is given up almost beyond redemption to canters, money-grubbers, inventors of improved machinery, and every kind of charlatan. In volume after volume, he was putting forth--in the midst of much which reason found fantastic--bursts of satire fierce as Juvenal's, and word-pictures more gorgeous than the tints of Turner, conveyed in that inimitable style which is as strong and sweet as Shelley's verse. In these latter days (as our last portrait shows him) Mr. Ruskin, like a prophet in a hermitage, has become more and more of a recluse, though now and then his voice is still audible in a wrathful letter to the papers, like a voice heard crying in the wilderness that all is lost. [Illustration: AGE 48. _From a Photo. by Messrs. Elliott & Fry._] [Illustration: AGE 63. _From a Photo. by Messrs. Elliott & Fry._] THE RIGHT HON. W. E. GLADSTONE, M.P. BORN 1809.