In this war the father of Lafayette fell in the cause of his king but not of his country.  He was an officer of an invading army, the instrument of his sovereign’s wanton ambition and lust of conquest.  The people of the electorate of Hanover had done no wrong to him or to his country.  When his son came to an age capable of understanding the irreparable loss that he had suffered, and to reflect upon the causes of his father’s fate, there was no drop of consolation mingled in the cup from the consideration that he had died for his country.  And when the youthful mind was awakened to meditation upon the rights of mankind, the principles of freedom, and theories of government, it cannot be difficult to perceive in the illustrations of his own family records the source of that aversion to hereditary rule, perhaps the most distinguishing feature of his own political opinions and to which he adhered through all the vicissitudes of his life....

Lafayette was born a subject of the most absolute and most splendid monarchy of Europe, and in the highest rank of her proud and chivalrous nobility.  He had been educated at a college of the University of Paris, founded by the royal munificence of Louis XIV., or Cardinal Richelieu.  Left an orphan in early childhood, with the inheritance of a princely fortune, he had been married, at sixteen years of age, to a daughter of the house of Noailles, the most distinguished family of the kingdom, scarcely deemed in public consideration inferior to that which wore the crown.  He came into active life, at the change from boy to man, a husband and a father, in the full enjoyment of everything that avarice could covet, with a certain prospect before him of all that ambition could crave.  Happy in his domestic affections, incapable, from the benignity of his nature, of envy, hatred, or revenge, a life of “ignoble ease and indolent repose” seemed to be that which nature and fortune had combined to prepare before him.  To men of ordinary mold this condition would have led to a life of luxurious apathy and sensual indulgence.  Such was the life into which, from the operation of the same causes, Louis XV. had sunk, with his household and court, while Lafayette was rising to manhood surrounded by the contamination of their example.  Had his natural endowments been even of the higher and nobler order of such as adhere to virtue, even in the lap of prosperity, and in the bosom of temptation, he might have lived and died a pattern of the nobility of France, to be classed, in aftertimes, with the Turennes and the Montausiers of the age of Louis XIV., or with the Villars or the Lamoignons of the age immediately preceding his own.

But as, in the firmament of heaven that rolls over our heads, there is, among the stars of the first magnitude, one so pre-eminent in splendor as, in the opinion of astronomers, to constitute a class by itself, so in the fourteen hundred years of the French monarchy, among the multitudes of great and mighty men which it has evolved, the name of Lafayette stands unrivaled in the solitude of glory.