The long process of years usually disturbs that image: for good and for evil it is changed: and men as they advance in experience tend also to suffer what the poet has nobly called the “contagion of the world’s slow stain.” But at the same time they grow to admit into their faces a humorous charity and a confession of fellowship with the uncertain and erring human millions of which they are each one tiny element. Repeated anxiety and the repeated example of the pains and dishonour that follow upon poverty make men as they grow older exaggerate the importance of wealth and they lose the just sense of proportion in mortal arrangements. Principle will be sacrificed in affection, especially if that affection be the constant and glowing affection for one’s own family involved in one’s own precarious fortune; the manifold imbecility of men in their political action will weaken interest in, though it does not in the same degree destroy intellectual conviction of, those prime political truths which make of sane and just men republicans. On the other hand, in a hundred little details which must count heavily in the fate of the soul, men so perturbed and declined from their early standing show comprehension, charity, a good individual judgment for practical affairs, and commonly, as life advances, develop virile and useful rules of action for themselves and for others. These rules are but subconscious in their origin, they are difficult to formularize; but they are wise and are proved wise by their fruits. Why did Lafayette fail to acquire this enlargement--for it is an enlargement--of the mature mind, as he failed also to suffer those contaminations which commonly accompany it? Interior causes were present, to preserve him unchanged. There stood in his mind a barrier against expanding emotion. The native limitation which made him a stoic (and through which he has been less justly called a prig) would in all circumstances have restrained his development, keeping him from knowing men, but also preserving intact his high conviction and his conspicuous morals. I say a personal inhibition of this kind was present from the beginning, native to him, and necessarily present in his soul; but this interior preservative constraint was powerfully aided by two external circumstances: first, he was born immensely wealthy and therefore had not in the whole of his life acquired one prolonged and educative experience of what the absence of security might effect in the character of man; secondly, the strong and moulding emotions, which come to nearly all men successively, came to him (as did the full control of his wealth) all at once and that in very early youth. He was married in his teens; he was a father before he was twenty; he was a military hero with a fame not only national, but universal, before he was of age.