The main interest of his doings in Illinois politics and in Congress is the help they may give in penetrating his later mind. On the one hand, it is certain that Lincoln trained himself to be a great student of the fitting opportunity. He evidently paid very serious attention to the counsels of friends who would check his rasher impulses. One of his closest associates insists that his impulsive judgment was bad, and he probably thought so himself. It will be seen later that the most momentous utterance he ever made was kept back through the whole space of two years of crisis at the instance of timid friends. It required not less courage and was certainly more effective when at last it did come out. The same great capacity for waiting marks any steps that he took for his own advancement. Indeed it was a happy thing for him and for his country that his character and the whole cast of his ideas and sympathies were of a kind to which the restraint imposed on an American politician was most congenial and to which therefore it could do least harm. He was to prove himself a patient man in other ways as well as this. On many things, perhaps on most, the thoughts he worked out in his own mind diverged very widely from those of his neighbours, but he was not in the least anxious either to conceal or to obtrude them. His social philosophy as he expressed it to his friends in these days was one which contemplated great future reforms-abolition of slavery and a strict temperance policy were among them. But he looked for them with a sort of fatalistic confidence in the ultimate victory of reason, and saw no use and a good deal of harm in premature political agitation for them. such questions," he is reported to have said, "must find lodgment with the most enlightened souls who stamp them with their approval. In God's own time they will be organised into law and thus woven into the fabric of our institutions." This seems a little cold-blooded, but perhaps we can already begin to recognise the man who, when the time had fully come, would be on the right side, and in whom the evil which he had deeply

"All

but restrainedly hated would find an appallingly wary foe.

But there were crucial instances which test sufficiently whether this wary politician was a true man or not. The soil of Illinois was free scil by the Ordinance of 1787, and Congress would only admit it to the Union as a free State. But it had been largely peopled from the South. There had been much agitation against this restriction: prevailing sentiment to a late date strongly approved of slavery; it was at Alton in Illinois that, in 1835, Elijah Lovejoy, an Abolitionist publisher, had been martyred by the mob which had failed to intimidate him. In 1837, when the bold agitation of the Abolitionists was exciting much disapproval, the Illinois Legislature passed resolutions condemning that agitation and declaring in soothing tones the constitutional powerlessness of Congress to interfere with slavery in the Southern States. Now Lincoln himself-whether for good reasons or bad must be considered later—thoroughly disapproved of the actual agitation of the Abolitionists: and the resolutions in question, but for one merely theoretical point of law and for an unctuous misuse of the adjective "sacred." contained nothing which he could not literally have accepted. The objec tion to them lay in the motive which made it worth while to pass them. Lincoln drew up and placed on the records of the House a protest against these resolutions. He defines in it his own quite conservative opinions; he deprecates the promulgation of Abolition doctrines; but he does so because it "tends rather to increase than abate the evils" of slavery; and he lays down "that the institution of slavery is founded on both injustice and bad policy." One man alone could he induce to sign this protest with him, and that man was not seeking re-election.

By 1842 Lincoln had grown sensibly older, and a little less ready, we may take it, to provoke unnecessary antagonism. Probably very old members of Free Churches are the people best able to appreciate the

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daring of the following utterance. Speaking on Washington's birthday in a Presbyterian church to a temperance society formed among the rougher people of the town and including former drunkards who desired to reform themselves, he broke out in protest against the doctrine that respectable persons should shun the company of people tempted to intemperance. "If," he said, they believe as they profess that Omnipotence condescended to take upon Himself the form of sinful man, and as such die an ignominious death, surely they will not refuse submission to the infinitely lesser condescension, for the temporal and perhaps eternal salvation of a large, erring, and unfortunate class of their fellow creatures! Nor is the condescension very great. In my judgment such of us as have never fallen victims have been spared more from the absence of appetite than from any mental or moral superiority over those who have. Indeed, I believe, if we take habitual drunkards as a class, that their heads and their hearts will bear an advantageous comparison with those of any other class." It proved, at a later day, very lucky for America that the virtuous Lincoln, who did not drink strong drinknor, it is sad to say, smoke, nor, which is all to the good, chew-did feel like that about drunkenness. But there was great and loud wrath. "It's a shame," said one,

that he should be permitted to abuse us so in the house of the Lord." It is certain that in this sort of way he did himself a good deal of injury as an aspiring politician. It is also the fact that he continued none the less persistently in a missionary work conceived in a spirit none the less Christian because it shocked many pious people.

3. Marriage.

The private life of Lincoln continued, and for many years increasingly, to be equally marked by indiscriminate sociability and brooding loneliness. Comfort and the various influences which may be associated with the old

fashioned American word elegance seem never to enter into it. What is more, little can be discerned of positive happiness in the background of his life, as the freakish elasticity of his youth disappeared and, after a certain measure of marked success, the further objects of his ambition though not dropped became unlikely of attainment and seemed, we may guess, of doubtful value. All along he was being moulded for endurance rather than for enjoyment.

Nor, though his children evidently brought him happiness, does what we know of his domesticities and dearest affections weaken this general impression. When he married he had gone through a saddening experience. He started on manhood with a sound and chivalrous outlook on women in general, and a nervous terror of actual women when he met them. In New Salem days he absented himself from meals for the whole time that some ladies were staying at his boarding house. His clothes and his lack of upbringing must have weighed with him, besides his natural disposition. None the less, of course he fell in love. Miss Ann Rutledge, the daughter of a store and tavern keeper from Kentucky with whom Lincoln was boarding in 1833, has been described as of exquisite beauty; some say this is overstated, but speak strongly of her grace and charm. A lady who knew her gives these curiously collocated particulars: "Miss Rutledge had auburn hair, blue eyes, fair complexion. She was pretty, slightly slender, but in everything a good-hearted young woman. She was about five feet two inches high, and weighed in the neighbourhood of a hundred and twenty pounds. She was beloved by all who knew her. She died as it were of grief. In speaking of her death and her grave Lincoln once said to me, 'My heart lies buried there.'" The poor girl, when Lincoln first came courting to her, had passed through a grievous agitation. She had been engaged to a young man, who suddenly returned to his home in the Eastern States, after revealing to her, with some explanation which was more convincing to her than

to her friends, that he had been passing under an assumed name. It seems that his absence was strangely prolonged, that for a long time she did not hear from him, that his letters when they did come puzzled her, that she clung to him long, but yielded at last to her friends, who urged their very natural suspicions upon her. It is further suggested that there was some good explanation of his conduct all the while, and that she learnt this too late when actually engaged to Lincoln. However that may be, shortly after her engagement to Lincoln she fell seriously ill, insisted, as she lay ill, on a long interview with Lincoln alone, and a day or two later died. This was in 1835, when he was twenty-six. It is perhaps right to say that one biographer throws doubt on the significance of this story in Lincoln's life. The details as to Ann Rutledge's earlier lover are vague and uncertain. The main facts of Lincoln's first engagement and almost immediate loss of his betrothed are quite certain; the blow would have been staggering enough to any ordinary young lover and we know nothing of Lincoln which would discredit Mr. Herndon's judgment that its effect on him was both acute and permanent. There can be no real doubt that his spells of melancholy were ever afterwards more intense, and politer biographers should not have suppressed the testimony that for a time that melancholy seemed to his friends to verge upon insanity. He always found good friends, and, as was to happen again later, one of them, Mr. Bowline Greene, carried him off to his own secluded home and watched him carefully. He said "the thought that the snows and rains fell upon her grave filled him with indescribable grief." Two years later he told a fellow-legislator that "although he seemed to others to enjoy life rapturously, yet when alone he was so overcome by mental depression, he never dared to carry a pocket-knife." Later still Greene, who had helped him, died, and Lincoln was to speak over his grave. For once in his life he broke down entirely; "the tears ran down his yellow and shrivelled cheeks. . . . After re