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No doubt it was a divinity, shaping his end, that sent him back to Springfield and out on the muddy roads of the old Eighth Circuit, a saddened, disillusioned, and disappointed man. Politically, he seemed to himself, indeed, and to his friends, a man without a future; but that was less important than the fact that he was not prepared for the future that awaited him. Even at forty he was singularly immature; he had not yet come to a full mastery of his powers; and the conflicting elements in his nature needed to be melted and fused into a more solid unity. As has often been pointed out, this came at last with the emergence in him of a vein of mysticism, which, with his fine sagacity and his humane pity, more and more swayed him, softening all that was hard within and hardening all that was soft. Of this we are sure: when he returned to public life in 1854, as a living voice of a great cause, he was a changed man, moving with a firmer tread, in one way simple and frank, but in another a separate and detached soul as one whose eye was set on some star visible to himself alone.

II

After an absence of nearly three years having been immersed in politics since 1846-it was with some reluctance that Lincoln resumed the practice of law. His term in Congress had made him widely known in the State, but more as a stump-speaker and politician than as a lawyer, and he had now to begin almost anew and make his way at the bar. He declined a partnership in a Chicago law firm, offered by Grant Goodrich, on the ground that he had a tendency to consumption and feared the effect of city life upon his health. He liked best the journeying life of the circuit, its freedom, its comradeship, with the human comedy of country taverns, and if he earned smaller fees he felt much happier. Mr. Herndon writes:

Of course, what practice he himself controlled passed into other hands. I retained all the business I could, and worked steadily on until, when he returned, our practice was as extensive as that of any other firm at the bar. Lin

coln realized that much of this was due to my efforts, and on his return he therefore suggested that he had no right to share in the business and profits that I had made. I responded that, as he had aided me and given me prominence when I was young and needed it, I could afford now to be grateful if not generous. I therefore recommended a continuation of the partnership, and we went on as before. I could notice a difference in Lincoln's movement as a lawyer from this time forward. He had begun to realize a certain lack of discipline a want of mental training and method. Ten years had wrought some change in the law, and more in the lawyers, of Illinois.

There was, of course, the same riding on circuit as before, but the courts had improved in tone and morals, and there was less laxity at least it appeared so to Lincoln. Political defeat had wrought a marked effect in him. It went below the skin and made a changed man of him. He was not soured by his seeming political decline, but still he determined to eschew politics from that time forward and devote himself entirely to the law. And now he began to make up for time lost in politics by studying the law in earnest. No man had greater power of application than he. Once fixing his mind on any subject, nothing could interfere with or disturb him. It is proper to

add that he detested the mechanical work of the office. He wrote few papers -less perhaps than any other man at the bar. Such work was usually left to me for the first few years we were together. Afterwards we made good use of students who came to learn the law in our office.1

Nor did Lincoln confine himself to the study of law, keenly as he felt the need of a more thorough familiarity with its philosophy and history. His stay in Washington, and particularly his visit to the East, had made him aware of the defects of his early training, and more than once he remarked to Herndon a student by nature and a wide reader by habit that the "mast-fed lawyer," as he described himself, must have a broader basis and a better method if he was to compete with the college men who were coming to the West. Native wit and a flow of words would no longer win at the bar. More solid qualities were required, and he began a course of rigid mental discipline with the intent to improve 1 Abraham Lincoln, by Herndon and Weik, Vol. 1, pp. 307-312.

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his faculties, especially his powers of logic and of language. Hence his fondness for Euclid, which he carried with him on the circuit until he could with ease demonstrate all the propositions in the six books; often studying far into the night, with a candle near his pillow, while his fellow-lawyers, half a dozen in a room, filled the air with interminable snoring. In the same way he undertook German, but seems never to have attained a working mastery of it. Shakespeare and the Bible he read devotedly, parts of them many times, as much for their simple, sinewy, virile style as for their wealth of high and beautiful truth. This study of great books bore fruit in a more delicate literary instinct, a finer feeling for words, and the florid, fiery rhetoric in which he had indulged in his early years became an aversion. Therefore his advice to Herndon, which that ardent man, much given to lofty metaphor, could neither follow nor forget:-"Billy, don't shoot too high aim lower and the common people will understand you. They are the ones you want to reach. The educated and refined people will understand you any way. If you aim too high your ideas will go over the heads of the masses, and only hit those who need no hitting." Years of such training made him a master of lucid, direct, vivid statement, whether he was arguing a case in a justice court or pleading a cause in the national forum. As one of his friends said, without waste of words he could put more flesh on the skeleton of an idea than any other man of his day.

Mid-summer found Lincoln absorbed in the law, preparing for work on the circuit in the autumn. It was probably at this time that he began making notes of cases and authorities in a quaint little memorandum-book which he carried in his

1 Reports of Lincoln's reading vary, and it is not easy to know the facts. Herndon says that he read less and thought more than any other man of his day, while others seem determined to graduate him from a university. The truth lies mid-way, perhaps, as Prof. Dodge has shown in his study of Abraham Lincoln: The Evolution of His Literary Style (1900). He was not a wide reader, apart from the newspapers, but he read carefully, assimilating the essence of a few great books. His habit of committing to memory bits of poetry made his range of reading appear more extensive than it really was.

pocket, and which on the circuit served as a ready reference when it was not possible to consult law reports.1 His figure, garbed in black, was familiar in Springfield as he strode along, usually with one of his boys struggling to keep up, between his home on Eighth Street and his office on the Square. The office of the firm was on the second floor of a brick building just across from the court house a large back room, afterwards divided into two rooms, with windows overlooking stable-roofs, ash-heaps, and dingy back yards. Two baizecovered tables, a few chairs, a cot, an old fashioned "secretary," and a book-case containing perhaps two hundred lawbooks, made up the furnishings. Few books were needed, as the state-house library was nearby for reference when other sources of information failed. Rarely has an office been conducted with less method. Lincoln carried most of his memoranda in his high "stove-pipe " hat, together with bits of poetry and other items clipped from the newspapers, of which he was an assiduous reader sometimes to the annoyance of his partner. Often he would have to hunt for lost documents, and upon one of the bundles which littered his desk he wrote, "When you can't find it anywhere else, look in this." What order there was came when some student clerk, unable to endure the confusion, undertook to sweep the room and sort the papers. Several years later John H. Littlefield, in cleaning up the office, found a quantity of Congressional garden seed mixed with Whig speeches and Abolitionist pamphlets, and some of the seed had sprouted in the accumulated dirt. He has left us vivid memories of the two men, both of whom had minds too broad and grave for the details of life.

In many partnerships there is one man who is all gentleness and geniality, who would if he could; and another man on whom devolves the rough work; whose "No" is all the harder for the air of mild benignity which sits so well on his colleague. One who attends to the nether side of the practice must be content to be thought harsh and unapproachable, to

1 This memorandum-book is now in the possession of Mr. Jesse W. Weik, of Greencastle, Indiana, to whose courtesy and kindness all Lincoln students are indebted.

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THE LINCOLN & HERNDON LAW OFFICE [By courtesy of D. Appleton & Co.]

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