No doubt the truth was that success sweetened
his character, and developed, as is so often the case, those
possibilities of his better nature which a fruitless struggle would
have kept in the germ or altogether crushed. His excellent wife
influenced him profoundly; at her death the work was continued by
the daughter she left him. The defects of his early education could
not of course be repaired, but it is never too late for a man to go
to school to the virtues which civilise. Remaining the sturdiest of
Conservatives, he bowed in sincere humility to those very claims
which the Radical most angrily disallows: birth, hereditary station,
recognised gentility--these things made the strongest demand upon
his reverence. Such an attitude was a testimony to his own capacity
for culture, since he knew not the meaning of vulgar adulation, and
did in truth perceive the beauty of those qualities to which the
uneducated Iconoclast is wholly blind. It was a joyous day for him
when he saw his daughter the wife of Godfrey Eldon. The loss which
so soon followed was correspondingly hard to bear, and but for Mrs.
Eldon's gentle sympathy he would scarcely have survived the blow. We
know already how his character had impressed that lady; such respect
was not lightly to be won, and he came to regard it as the most
precious thing that life had left him.
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