of state. His humour and wit are fabulous, his stories legion. He wound up arguments with anecdotes, more often coarse than delicate, but always telling.

He understood good poetry; he read Byron and Burns, and recited over and over again the speech from Hamlet beginning "Oh, my offence is rank," but naïve, lugubrious, sentimental verse had a special appeal for him. They seemed to fit into his everyday mood, and one poem has been quoted by many because of his fondness for it. For more than thirty years he recited "Oh, why should the spirit of mortal be proud "-a long poem of innumerable stanzas, a few of which will suffice:

"Oh! why should the spirit of mortal be proud!
Like a swift-fleeting meteor, a fast-flying cloud,
A flash of the lightning, a break of the wave,
He passeth from life to his rest in the grave.

The leaves of the oak and the willow shall fade,

Be scattered around, and together be laid;

And the young and the old, and the low and the high,
Shall moulder to dust, and together shall lie.

The infant a mother attended and loved;
The mother that infant's affection who proved;
The husband that mother and infant who blest-
Each, all, are away to their dwellings of rest.

"

He had many idiosyncrasies. He noticed the height of men, and was proud of his own great stature. "I rarely fail in taking a man's true altitude by the eye," he said. He had a penchant for measuring himself impromptu back to back with tall men whom he met, even on occasions of state. When the committee came to his home in Springfield to make the formal announcement that he had been nominated

for President, his first words after his acceptance were to the Governor of New York, who happened to be very tall: " Pray, Governor, how tall may you be?" Lincoln found himself to be an inch taller. With that beginning the embarrassing stiffness of the function wore away, and things went smoothly. Sherman said that when he first met Lincoln, in Washington, he took his hands in both of his, drew himself up to his full height, and looking at him steadily, said: "You are John Sherman. Well, I'm taller than you. Let's measure." Thereupon they stood back to back and someone announced that he was two inches taller than Sherman. But with Sumner, the radical Senator from Massachusetts, he could make no headway. "Sumner," said Lincoln, “declined to stand up with me back to back to see which was the taller, and made a fine speech about this being a time for uniting our fronts against the enemy and not our backs." Sumner was more his idea of a bishop, he said, though he confessed he had not much to do with bishops where he came from.

In all this he had no lack of dignity, for he was earnest and sincere. No one was known to call him by his first name when he grew to manhood. He was "Mr Lincoln " to everyone; "Old Lincoln" behind his back at the age of thirty-seven. It was the newspapers and the usual American candidate-talk which gave him the name of "Old Abe." No one who knew him personally felt near enough to him to make free with him. Humorous, genial, going out of his way to meet people, he remained courageous in his isolation, a detached personality where the problems of life were analyzed and solved undisturbed by anyone.

His personal appearance was odd in the extreme. It has been described by many persons, and it seems that his giant frame and awkward lines produced a far from favourable impression when first seen; but that his face, with its deep melancholy, its glowing eyes, always held something for even a passer-by which was never to be forgotten. “I see very plainly," said Whitman, "Abraham Lincoln's dark brown face, with the deep-cut lines, the eyes always to me with a deep, latent sadness in the expression. . . None of the artists or pictures has caught the deep though subtle and indirect expression of this man's face. There is something else there. One of the great portrait painters of two or three centuries ago is needed."

The best pen picture of him is given by his friend Herndon:

"Mr Lincoln was six feet four inches high, and when he left the city of his home for Washington was fifty-one years old, having good health and no grey hairs, or but few, on his head. He was thin, wiry, sinewy, raw-boned; thin through the breast to the back, and narrow across the shoulders; standing he leaned forward—was what may be called stoop-shouldered, inclining to the consumptive by build. His usual weight was one hundred and eighty pounds. . . . His structure was loose and leathery; his body shrunk and shrivelled; he had dark skin, dark hair, and looked woe-struck. The whole man, body and mind, worked slowly, as if it needed oiling. Physically he was a very powerful man, lifting with ease four hundred, and in one case six hundred, pounds. Hence there was very little bodily or mental wear and tear in him.

"When he walked he moved cautiously but firmly; his long arms and giant hands swung down by his side.

He walked with even tread, the inner sides of his feet being parallel. He put the whole foot down flat on the ground at once, not landing on the heel. Hence he had no spring in his walk. His walk was undulatory-catching and pocketing tire, weariness and pain all up and down his person, and thus preventing them from locating. The first impression of a man who did not observe closely was that his walk implied shrewdness and cunning-that he was a tricky man; but, in reality, it was the walk of caution and firmness. In sitting down on a common chair he was no taller than ordinary men. His legs and arms were abnormally, unnaturally long, and in undue proportion to the rest of his body. It was only when he stood up that he loomed above other men. Mr Lincoln's head was long, and tall from the base of the brain and from the eyebrows. His head ran backwards, his forehead rising as it ran back at a low angle, like Clay's, and unlike Webster's, which was almost perpendicular. The size of his hat measured at the hatter's block was seven and one-eighth, his head being, from ear to ear, six and one-half inches. Thus measured it was not below the medium size. His forehead was narrow but high; his hair was dark, almost black, and lay floating where his fingers or the wind left it, piled up at random. His cheeks were high, sharp and prominent; his nose was large, long, blunt, and a little awry towards the right eye; his chin was sharp and up-curved; his eyebrows cropped out like a huge rock on the brow of a hill; his long sallow face was wrinkled and dry, with a hair here and there in the surface; his cheeks were leathery; his ears were large, and ran out almost at right angles to his head, caused partly by heavy hats and partly by nature; his lower lip was thick, hanging and under-curved, while his chin reached for the lip upcurved; his neck was neat and trim, his head being well balanced on it; there was a large mole on his cheek, and Adam's apple on his throat. Thus stood, walked, acted and looked Abraham Lincoln."

T

CHAPTER XVII

FIFTY YEARS AFTER

HERE is a specific meaning in the growing popularity of Abraham Lincoln. His life,

romantic in the extreme, lent itself easily to the popular imagination. The man whose name was hardly known a day before his nomination was elevated to the Presidency of the United States. Kings and potentates of the world sent condolences to a whole nation for the loss of one who had been a rail-splitter and a flat-boatman. For a generation after his death it was this phase of his life which was emphasized with patriotic fervour. The boy of ten was told of this poor child born in a log cabin, who did his sums at night by the light of the open fire, scratching them on a wooden shovel, and who grew so tall that he had to split many rails to earn enough to buy himself the very long trousers he needed. When this boy grew up into a man he became President of the United States of America.

For the older child the story went a little farther— that when he became President slavery existed in this, the land of the free and the home of the brave," which so outraged the kind heart of the good President that he issued an Emancipation Proclamation which freed all the slaves at once.

And even for the people at large his name had almost the same bed-time story effect, a little more detailed