122 ABRAHAM LINCOLN. 



have sometimes in our impatience thought otherwise, has 

 always waited, as a wise man should, till the right moment 

 brought up all his reserves. Semper nocuit differre paratis, 

 is a sound axiom, but the really efficacious man will also be 

 sure to know when he is not ready, and be firm against all 

 persuasion and reproach till he is. 



One would be apt to think, from some of the criticisms 

 made on Mr. Lincoln s course by those who mainly agree 

 with him in principle, that the chief object of a statesman 

 should be rather to proclaim his adhesion to certain doc 

 trines than to achieve their triumph by quietly accomplishing 

 his ends. In our opinion, there is no more unsafe politician 

 than a conscientiously rigid doctrinaire, nothing more sure 

 to end in disaster than a theoretic scheme of policy that 

 admits of no pliability for contingencies. True, there is a 

 popular image of an impossible He, in whose plastic hands 

 the submissive destinies of mankind become as wax, and to 

 whose commanding necessity the toughest facts yield with 

 the graceful pliancy of fiction ; but in real life we commonly 

 find that the men who control circumstances, as it is called, 

 are those who have learned to allow for the influence of their 

 eddies, and have the nerve to turn them to account at the 

 happy instant. Mr. Lincoln s perilous task has been to carry 

 a rather shaky raft through the rapids, making fast the un 

 rulier logs as he could snatch opportunity, and the country 

 is to be congratulated that he did not think it his duty to run 

 straight at all hazards, but cautiously to assure himself with 

 his setting-pole where the main current was, and keep steadily 

 to that. He is still in wild water, but we have faith that his 

 skill and sureness of eye will bring him out right at last. 



A curious, and, as we think, not inapt parallel, might be 

 drawn between Mr. Lincoln and one of the most striking 

 figures in modern history Henry IV. of France. The career 

 of the latter may be more picturesque, as that of a daring 

 captain always is ; but in all its vicissitudes there is nothing 

 more romantic than that sudden change, as by a rub of Alad 

 din s lamp, from the attorney s office in a country town of 

 Illinois to the helm of a great nation in times like these. The 

 analogy between the characters and circumstances of the two 

 men is in many respects singularly close. Succeeding to a 

 rebellion rather than a crown, Henry s chief material depen 

 dence was the Huguenot party, whose doctrines sat upon 

 him with a looseness distasteful certainly, if not suspicious, 



