t better
than any other mob, will run after money, position, talent, beauty, for
a time; but it requires a quality higher and deeper than these, and
distinct from them all, to produce lasting popularity.

This the earl had. In spite of his infirmities, he possessed the rare
power of winning love, of making people love him for his own sake. At
first, of course, his society was sought from mere curiosity, or even
through meaner motives; but gradually, like the good clergyman with whom

"Fools who came to scoff remained to pray,"

Those who visited him to stare at, or pity a fellow-creature so
afflicted, remained, attached by his gentleness, his patience, his
wonderful unselfishness. And some few, of noble mind, saw in him the
grandest and most religious spectacle that men can look upon--a
human soul which has not suffered itself to be conquered by adversity.

Very soon the earl gathered round him, besides acquaintances, a knot of
real friends, affectionate and true, who, in the charm of his cultivated
mind, and the simplicity of his good heart, found ample amends for every
thing that nature had denied him, the loss of which he bore so
cheerfully and uncomplainingly.

By-and-by, induced by these, the excellent people whom, as by mesmeric
attraction, goodness soon draws to itself, he began to go out a little
into society. It could be done, with some personal difficulty and pain,
and some slight trouble to his friends, which last was for a long time
his chief objection; for a merciful familiarity with his own affliction
had been brought about by time, and by the fact that he had never known
any other sort of existence, and only, as a blind person guesses at
colors, could speculate upon how it must feel to move about freely, to
walk and run. He had also lost much of his early shyness, and ceased to
feel any actual dread of being looked at. His chief difficulty was the
practical one of locomotion, and this for him was solved much easier
than if he had been a man of limited means. By some expenditure of
money, and by a good deal of ingenious contrivance, he managed to be
taken about as easily in Edinburg as at Cairnforth; was present at
church and law-court, theatre and concert-room, and at many a pleasant
reunion of pleasant people every where.

For in his heart Lord Cairnforth rather liked society. To him, whose
external resources were so limited, who could in truth do nothing for
his own amusement but read,