Henry Manning has proved to be a figure of considerable interest for biographers, and versions of his life story have been committed to print in various different forms. First, came E. S. Purcell’s Life of Cardinal Manning: full of subtle insinuation and open attack, constructed around a cab load of pilfered papers, riddled with errors, and therefore, of course, immensely popular. Several other smaller works of some interest but no great merit appeared subsequently, but then came Lytton Strachey’s Eminent Victorians: Purcell’s animus against Manning was transplanted into a man who had little to say for the Victorians and a great deal to say against them. The result was malicious, unfair, vitriolic, and even more popular. So Shane Leslie, when a fellow of King’s College, Cambridge, set out a few years later to write a fairer study and to restore the damage, but his book lacks sustained scholarly depth and, as I shall attempt to show in this study, cannot always be relied upon in its opinions.