124 ABRAHAM LINCOLN. 



of melancholy interest we will allow ourselves to touch upon. 

 That Mr. Lincoln is not handsome nor elegant, we learn from 

 certain English tourists who would consider similar revela 

 tions in regard to Queen Victoria as thoroughly American in 

 their want of biensdance. It is no concern of ours, nor does 

 it affect his fitness for the high place he so worthily occupies ; 

 but he is certainly as fortunate as Henry in the matter of 

 good looks, if we may trust contemporary evidence. Mr. 

 Lincoln has also been reproached with Americanism by some 

 not unfriendly British critics; but, with all deference, we 

 cannot say that we like him any the worse for it, or see in it 

 any reason why he should govern Americans the less wisely. 



People of more sensitive organisations may be shocked, 

 but we are glad that in this our true war of independence, 

 which is to free us for ever from the Old World, we have had 

 at the head of our affairs a man whom America made, as 

 God made Adam, out of the very earth, unancestried, un 

 privileged, unknown, to show us how much truth, how much 

 magnanimity, and how much statecraft await the call of op 

 portunity in simple manhood when it believes in the justice 

 of God and the worth of man. Conventionalities are all very 

 well in their proper place, but they shrivel at the touch of 

 nature like stubble in the fire. The genius that sways a na 

 tion by its arbitrary will seems less august to us than that 

 which multiplies and reinforces itself in the instincts and 

 convictions of an entire people. Autocracy may have some 

 thing in it more melodramatic than this, but falls far short of 

 it in human value and interest. 



Experience would have bred in us a rooted distrust of 

 improvised statesmanship, even if we did not believe politics 

 to be a science, which, if it cannot always command men 

 of special aptitude and great powers, at least demands the 

 long and steady application of the best powers of such men 

 as it can command to master even its first principles. It is 

 curious that, in a country which boasts of its intelligence, 

 the theory should be so generally held that the most com 

 plicated of human contrivances, and one which every day 

 becomes more complicated, can be worked at sight by any 

 man able to talk for an hour or two without stopping to 

 think. 



Mr. Lincoln is sometimes claimed as an example of a 

 ready-made ruler. But no case could well be less in point ; 

 for, besides that he was a man of such fair-mindedness as is 



