was reversed and turued inward, or as if the soul which lighted them was far away. The teeth are white and regular, and it is only when a smile, radiant, captivating and winning as was ever given to mortal, transfigures the plain countenance, that you begin to realize that it is not impossible for artists to admire and woman to love it.

As the world has rung with ridicule of the ungainliness of his manners, I may be permitted to say, that without any pretensions to superfine polish, they were frank, cordial, and dignified, without rudeness, without offence, and without any violation of the proprieties and etiquettes of his high position. As fastidious and keen a master of such nice matters as Mr. Everett has said, "I recognize in the PRESIDENT, a full measure of the qualities which entitle him to the personal respect of the people. On the only social occasion on which I ever had the honor to be in his company, viz: the Commemoration at Gettysburg, he sat at the table at the house of my friend David Willis, Esq., by the side of several distinguished persons, ladies and gentlemen, foreigners and Americans, among them the French Minister at Washington, since appointed French Ambassador at Madrid, and the Admiral of the French Fleet, and that in gentlemanly appearance, manners and conversation he was the peer of any man at the table."

To borrow one of his own conversational phrases he did'nt brag on deportment. He was not a Turveydrop or Sir Harcourt Courtly or General Banks. It would have puzzled him to stand in tableau for the Earl of Chatham, or the Pompeian Ajax. He was not proud of his leg, like President Dwight, nor was he a George the Fourth at a bow. He stood, and moved, and bowed, without affectation, and without obtrusive awkwardness, pretty much as nature prompted, and as if he regarded carriage as about as bad a criterion as color of genuine nobility of soul. He was not overcareful of his dignity, feeling assured that his dignity could take care of itself, and consenting to rend the web of official formalities, and to waive all ceremony and precedence which might bar his passage to a good deed by the most expeditious route. He has been convicted in contempt of "the divinity which doth hedge a king," of conferring with his counsellors in a great emergency, and of performing an act of kindness and mercy, enveloped in no robe of state but a cotton nightgown of scanty pattern, and on one memorable occasion he even presumed to solve an enigma, raised in a congress of ambassadors, by the little story of "root hog or die." He was what Dr. Johnson calls a thoroughly "clubbable" man, eminently social and familiar; in private interviews and sometimes in public, overflowing with

illustrations of every theme, always apt and racy, and frequently humorous, with a habit like the Doctor himself, of upsetting a pedantry or a sophism by an epigram or an anecdote, and with a story telling method of reasoning like our own Doctor Franklin. While unrivaled as a raconteur in the pith and variety of his store, he was not half so broad in his narratives as many an assuming Chesterfield on both sides of the water. It is the weak invention of false friends and open enemies, to lay at his door all the prurient jokes which their foul imaginations conceived and to falsely asseverate that he was in the habit of indulging in unseemly jest and repartee on grave and solemn occasions. I can adopt and endorse the precise language of Mr. F. B. Carpenter, who as an artist had free access to MR. LINCOLN's presence, and was for several months an inmate of the White House, when he says, "I feel that it is due to Mr. Lincoln's memory to state, that during my residence in Washington, after witnessing his intercourse with all classes of people, including Governors, Senators, Members of Congress, Officers of the Army and familiar friends, I can not recollect to have heard him relate a circumstance to any one of them all that would have been out of place if uttered in a lady's drawing room. I am aware that a different impression may prevail, founded it may be in some instances on facts, but

where there is one fact of the kind, I am persuaded that there are forty falsehoods at least."

Of his intellectual capacity, Mr. Lincoln gave the most signal proof, in that memorable contest with Judge Douglas, and his speeches are in no sense inferior to his rivals-the Charles James Fox of our forum, by universal consent the most athletic and expert offhand debater who ever graced the United States Senate. The PRESIDENT's mind was so original and self dependent, so unwilling to borrow knowledge and opinion, that he fairly scorned all adventitious support and external auxiliaries. No President ever leaned so lightly upon his Cabinet. No man reproduces less in official documents, the argument and thought which he imbibes at consultations, and it is a marvelous fact that no sentence is to be found in any of his state papers, which suggests the suspicion of any other impress but that of his own mint, or where he attempts to strengthen or vindicate a position, by quoting from any book or citing any authority. And his greatness, his greatness! is the most original and bizarre in the world's history, shaped after no model, suggesting as a compact whole no pattern, no parallel-not even a resemblance, contravening every antique and modern standard of Hero-worship, a greatness which admits of no exact analysis and can only be loosely described as com

posed of great simplicity, great naturalness, great bonhomie, great shrewdness, great strength, great devotion, great equanimity, and great success, on the greatest theatre ever offered to such qualities for exhibition. He appears like an erratic streaming comet amid the fixed orbs of greatness, a fiery meteor plunging and howling through their subdued and chastened atmosphere. Ennobled by no patent but that of nature, with no diploma but his record; crowned, as it were, with the wild flowers of the forest and with all its flavor and freshness upon him, he walks into the surprised Pantheon of the world's great men, a huge, grotesque Backwoodsman, but with credentials to admission which can not be challenged or disallowed; like the hirsute and half naked Brennus striding into the grave and reverend decorums of a Roman Senate; like Hans Luther's plebeian and beetle-browed son confronting the stoled, mitered and ermined Diet of Charles the Fifth; like a rednosed, cropped and mail-clad Cromwell shuffling through the silken splendors, the Vandyke dresses, the perfumed love-locks, and the fastidious etiquette of outraged Whitehall; like St. Artegans' iron soldier marching, with his invincible flail, into the startled and shrinking ranks of vulnerable and pain suffering warriors. It may be said of him, as has been said of another indigenous American type of manliness, that