An absolute and unswerving demeanour, drawn from so strict an adherence to so limited a creed, lent him those qualities which are not more admirable, though they are more popular, when they are produced by convictions larger and more comprehensive. These are, first, courage of that rare and indomitable sort which meets with precisely the same rigidity physical danger, corporal pain, public shame, the accidents of loss in affection or fortune, the change of environing things, the default of human support even where it seemed most sure; secondly, a minute attention to duty where duty is commanded by the logical consequences of one’s faith rather than suggested by the affections; thirdly, a generosity in action which proceeds not from charity of any warmth of temperament, but from an apprehension of what a creed demands, so that if the creed demand in certain circumstances such and such a sacrifice, the sacrifice, however great, is unhesitatingly and immediately made. In such adherence to fixed principle and in the consequences of that tenacity lay the core of Lafayette’s nature; beyond that core there was little else. We must add to it certain extraneous details not proceeding from it, but merely aggravated to it. He was vain after that fashion of vanity which is certainly not a vice and is almost a virtue, since it betrays a great carelessness of power and an indifference to anything less noble than praise. Again--what has nothing to do with his vanity--he loved to find himself leading men, though he did not love the act of leadership. This last passion, the love of leadership, one might ascribe to an energetic activity in him were such activity discoverable in other relations of his life; but it is not so discoverable; for in conversation, in the emission of ideas, in the criticism of others, in writing, planning, or doing, he was not conspicuously active, nor was he conspicuously active in the things of the body. He was not laborious; he neither liked nor understood the expression of high energy; nor, conversely, was he prone to be exhausted or to be tempted to lassitude in any form. Many sober men in a phase of their early youth present this character. It is the same cast of mind which often makes such youth, in that early phase, uncompromising, constantly asserting truths apparently universal and patent, and ready to judge the enormous (and, for it, untried) complexity of human affairs.