bitious young man and an ardent supporter of Chase as a candidate for the Presidency. He had never seen Lincoln but immediately after the October election he hastened to Illinois just in time to hear the last of the memorable debates. I have today a vivid recollection of the irrepressible enthusiasm for Lincoln with which General Ashley returned to his Toledo home, and to the people who had just chosen him as their representative in Congress. He remained loyal to Chase, however, as the first choice of Ohio for the Presidential nomination two years later, but his high estimate of Lincoln's ability soon became known throughout the state and had much to do in producing the condition of public thought that caused the votes of four Ohio delegates in the Chicago convention to be changed from Chase to Lincoln, by which the latter on the third ballot was nominated for President. Although it was at the close of that long and taxing struggle, Lincoln's vitality and strength were sufficient to accomplish that result and to cause General Ashley at the close of his distinguished and useful life to say: "When I heard Mr. Lincoln proclaim at Alton 'that it was a question between right and wrong' his face glowed as if tinged with a halo, and to me he looked the prophet of hope and joy."

The impressiveness and force of Mr. Lincoln's heroic stature was accentuated by the symmetry and grace of his physical construction. In size and form the members of his body were all in perfect proportion. Considered separately they seemed ponderous, but the size of each one was in faultless harmony with the heroic figure of which it formed a part.

Some writers have unfortunately referred to "his long arms" and "his large hands and feet," forgetting as it seems that Mr. Lincoln was a very large man and would have been ill-formed if any of his members had been of less dimensions. Nicolay says: "The first impression will naturally be that a man with such long limbs and large and prominent features could not possibly be handsome; and this would be true of a

man of ordinary height. Long limbs and large and strong features were fitted to this unusual stature, and harmonized perfectly with it; there was no effect of disproportion or grotesqueness.""

Sculptors and critics are agreed in characterizing Lincoln's hands as marvelously shapely and beautiful. Borglum says: “His hands were not disproportionately large. In his early life hard labor had developed the palms of his hands, and the thick muscle part of his thumb was full and strong; but this shrank later to the thumb of a literary man."

Bartlett says: "The photograph of Lincoln and Little Tad shows the President's great style of hand and its splendid articulation with the wrist. A hand fit not only for the first and greatest American, but in every way worthy to write, as he did, literature that is nothing less than biblical in its majestic simplicity."

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Bernard says: "Next to the face, as an index of Lincoln's character, came his hands. The fingers are long and tapering, and the lines that divide them are almost straight and parallel. The hands suggest sensitiveness, silence and repose.'

His shoulders were broad and his chest massive, like those of his muscular father. His arms and legs were longer than were Thomas Lincoln's, for he was of much greater height. All sculptors who have made a careful study of Mr. Lincoln's physical form are united in the declaration that he was of very rare and symmetrical construction. Very tall men are usually clumsy and awkward in movement, but it was quite otherwise with Mr. Lincoln. Bartlett quotes approvingly the following from Nicolay: "There was neither oddity, eccentricity, awkwardness nor grotesqueness in his face, figure or movement. On the contrary he was prepossessing in appearance when the entire man was fairly considered, mentally and physically, his unusual height and proportion, and the general movement of body and mind. His walk was vigorous, elastic,

The Century, Vol. 20, p. 932.

10 Portraits of Lincoln, p. 33.

easy, rather quick, firm and dignified; no shuffling or hesitancy."

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Hon. H. C. Deming describes "his posture and carriage" as being “with the grace of unstudied and careless ease rather than of cultivated airs and highbred pretensions." My own recollections are that seated or standing he had an artless and unconscious dignity of which there could be no counterfeit or imitation, and every movement however slight or considerable was gracefully pleasing and impressive.

There have been published some very careless and misleading statements concerning Mr. Lincoln's habits of dress.

Hon. Joseph H. Choate, the distinguished lawyer, statesman and diplomat, was a young man when Lincoln delivered the Cooper Institute address and in his personal reminiscences of that event in describing Lincoln's appearance he says: "His great stature signalled him out from the crowd. His clothes hung awkwardly on his giant frame."

One of the members of the Young Men's Central Republican Union, under whose auspices that address was delivered, in a recently published account of that affair writes: "His dress that night before a New York audience was the most unbecoming that a fiend's ingenuity could have devised for a tall, gaunt man-a black frock coat, ill setting and short for him in the body, skirt and arms—a rolling collar low down, disclosing his long, thin, shrivelled throat, uncovered and exposed."

These two descriptions of Mr. Lincoln's attire at the time of that most important event in his pre-presidential life are fairly representative of similar statements which have been published in periodicals and books. No such severe characterization of Mr. Lincoln's dress upon that momentous occasion was published at the time of the event, nor until after it had become the prevailing custom for writers to exercise their best gifts upon efforts to disparage Mr. Lincoln's personal appearance. Some writers seem to think that a true and faithful 11 Portraits of Lincoln, p. 12.