Page:Ethel Churchill 1.pdf/116

fiance. No two people are more different in outward seeming, than a man sometimes grows to differ from himself. Twenty-five and fifty are epochs which bear no resemblance. In the reserved, cautious, yet bland and insinuating statesman, no one could have recognised the gay, wild, and extravagant young man that Lord Norbourne had once been. A younger brother, he had been the architect of his own fortunes; and having one's own way to make in the world is not the best possible method towards giving a good opinion of it. One by one Lord Norbourne had left behind him the generous belief, the warm affection, and the elevated sentiment. If he now thought at all about them, it was only to think how much, and how often, they had been imposed upon. The fault of his system was, that he gave the head an undue preponderance over the heart. It was the inevitable result of his experience: there are no weaknesses which we so thoroughly despise as those to which ourselves have yielded; and no faults strike us so forcibly as our own, when they are past.