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Collections and Recollections by George William Erskine Russell
page 42 of 401 (10%)

I once asked him what he thought of a high dignitary of the English
Church, who had gone a certain way in a public movement, and then had
been frightened back by clamour. His reply was the single word
"_infirmus_," accompanied by that peculiar sniff which every one who
ever conversed with him must remember as adding so much to the piquancy
of his terse judgments. When he was asked his opinion of a famous
biography in which a son had disclosed, with too absolute frankness, his
father's innermost thoughts and feelings, the Cardinal replied, "I think
that ---- has committed the sin of Ham."

His sense of humour was peculiarly keen, and though it was habitually
kept under control, it was sometimes used to point a moral with
admirable effect.

"What are you going to do in life?" he asked a rather flippant
undergraduate at Oxford.

"Oh, I'm going to take Holy Orders," was the airy reply.

"Take care you get them, my son."

Though he was intolerant of bumptiousness, the Cardinal liked young men.
He often had some about him, and in speaking to them the friendliness of
his manner was touched with fatherliness in a truly attractive fashion.
And as with young men, so with children. Surely nothing could be
prettier than this answer to a little girl in New York who had addressed
some of her domestic experiences to "Cardinal Manning, England."

"My Dear Child,--You ask me whether I am glad to receive letters from
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