decrees of the Council of Trent. Wiseman was deeply pained: 'My
own coadjutor,' he exclaimed, 'is acting as solicitor against me
in a lawsuit.' There was a rush to Rome, where, for several
ensuing years, the hostile English parties were to wage a furious
battle in the antechambers of the Vatican. But the dispute over
the Oblates now sank into insignificance beside the rage of
contention which centred round a new and far more deadly
question; for the position of Dr. Errington himself was at stake.
The Cardinal, in spite of illness, indolence, and the ties of
friendship, had been brought at last to an extraordinary step--
he was petitioning the Pope for nothing less than the deprivation
and removal of the Archbishop of Trebizond.

The precise details of what followed are doubtful. It is only
possible to discern with clearness, amid a vast cloud of official
documents and unofficial correspondences in English, Italian, and
Latin, of Papal decrees and voluminous scritture, of confidential
reports of episcopal whispers and the secret agitations of
Cardinals, the form of Manning, restless and indomitable,
scouring like a stormy petrel the angry ocean of debate. Wiseman,
dilatory, unbusinesslike, and infirm, was ready enough to leave
the conduct of affairs in his hands. Nor was it long before
Manning saw where the key of the whole position lay. As in the
old days, at Chichester, he had secured the goodwill of Bishop
Shuttleworth by cultivating the friendship of Archdeacon Hare, so
now, on this vaster scale of operations, his sagacity led him
swiftly and unerringly up the little winding staircase in the
Vatican and through the humble door which opened into the cabinet
of Monsignor Talbot, the private secretary of the Pope. Monsignor
Talbot was a priest who embodied in a singular manner, if not the