He had read a great many books, and all the books that he had read he knew. He had a tenacious memory, just as he had the ability to see the essential thing. He never took an unimportant point and went off upon that; but he always laid hold of the real thing, of the real question, and attended to that, without attending to the others any more than was indispensably necessary.

Thus, while we say that Mr. Lincoln was an uneducated man, uneducated in the sense that we recognize here in New Haven, or at any other great college town, he yet had a singularly perfect education in regard to everything that concerns the practical affairs of life. His judgment was excellent, and his information was always accurate. He

knew what the thing was. He was a man of genius, and, contrasted with men of education, genius will always carry the day. I remember very well going into Mr. Stanton's room in the War Department on the day of the Gettysburg celebration, and he said, "Have you seen these these Gettysburg speeches?"

"No," said I; "I did n't know you had them."

He said, "Yes; and the people will be delighted with them. Edward Everett has made a speech that will make three columns in the newspapers, and Mr. Lincoln has made a speech of perhaps forty or fifty lines. Everett's is the speech of a scholar, polished to the last possibility. It is elegant and it is

learned; but Lincoln's speech will be read by a thousand men where one reads Everett's, and will be remembered as long as anybody's speeches are remembered who speaks in the English language."

That was the truth. If you will compare those two speeches now you will get an idea how superior genius is to education; how superior that intellectual faculty is which sees the vitality of a question, and knows how to state it; how superior that intellectual faculty is which regards everything with the fire of earnestness in the soul, with the relentless purpose of a heart devoted to objects beyond literature.

Another remarkable peculiarity of Mr. Lincoln's was that he seemed to

have no illusions. He had no freakish notions that things were so, or might be so, when they were not so. All his thinking and all his reasoning, all his mind, in short, was based continually upon actual facts, and upon facts of which, as I said, he saw the essence. I never heard him say anything that was not so. I never heard him foretell things; he told what they were, but I never heard him intimate that such and such consequences were likely to happen without the consequences following. I should say, perhaps, that his greatest quality was wisdom. And that is something superior to talent, superior to education. I do not think it can be acquired. He had it; he was wise; he was not mistaken; he saw things as they

were. All the advice that he gave was wise, it was judicious, and it was always timely. This wisdom, it is scarcely necessary to add, had its animating philosophy in his own famous words, "With charity toward all, with malice toward none." Or, to afford a more extended illustration, let me quote, from Nicolay and Hay's "History" (vol. vi, p. 152), the main part of his most admirable letter of August 22, 1862, to Horace Greeley:

If there be those who would not save the Union unless they could at the same time save slavery, I do not agree with them. If there be those who would not save the Union unless they could at the same time destroy slavery, I do not agree with them. My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union, and is not either to save or to destroy slavery. If I could save the Union with