I SUCCEEDED in obtaining a drawing in pastel of Cardinal Manning which I was induced to part with to the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, to my great regret, and which I have offered to repurchase.
The Cardinal was one of my best and most amiable sitters. While I worked, he read his breviary, or chatted with me upon many of the social and economic topics of the day. How futile such discussions are can only be realized after a lapse of twenty years, when changes have taken place that alter radically one's conception of details—the underlying principles only remaining unchanged.
Cardinal Manning was a tall, picturesque ecclesiastic, very careless in dress, with an exceedingly small face but a wide and prominent forehead. On one occasion when he was lecturing, he told me, a man up in the gallery, looking down upon him, and seeing his face foreshortened, called out in a voice that he and all could hear, "Why, he has no face; he's all forehead!"
"The only time a man should look in a mirror is when he is shaving," the Cardinal continued; and I thought to myself that, in his case, to avoid the sin of vanity, he considered once a week sufficient. He did not look on the reverse of the picture; for some people suffer agonies of remorse and self-abasement when they look into mirrors.
The Cardinal did not consider sitting for a portrait so
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