Gilbert de Motier, Marquis de Lafayette, only child of an ancient house, was born 6th September, 1757, at the castle of Chavaniac, in the central and mountainous province of Auvergne, in France. He came into the world an orphan,--for his father, a colonel of grenadiers in the French army, had already perished at the Battle of Minden. The verses which once interested Burns and excited the youthful admiration of Scott, though suggested by a humbler lot, depict some of the circumstances which surrounded his:-- “Cold on Canadian hills or _Minden’s plain_, Perhaps that parent mourned her soldier slain, Bent o’er her babe, her eye dissolved in dew, The big drops mingling with the milk he drew.”[53] The mother died soon after, leaving her child alone in the world, with rank and fortune such as few possess. In the Memoirs, written by his own hand, Lafayette mentions simply his birth, without allusion to family or ancestry. This was characteristic of one who had so completely renounced all such distinctions. But the temptations he overcame and the prejudices he encountered can be fully appreciated only when we know his origin. His family was not merely ancient and noble, but for generations historic. It had given to French renown a Marshal, who, after honorable service in Italian campaigns, fought by the side of the Maid of Orléans in the expulsion of the English from France; and it had added to the more refined glories of the nation an authoress of that name, the friend of Rochefoucauld and Madame de Sévigné, who shone by literary genius at the court of Louis the Fourteenth, and became an early example of what woman may accomplish: so that the young orphan bore a name which, in a land of hereditary distinctions, seemed to enlist him for their conservation, while it gave him everywhere an all-sufficient passport.