no ABRAHAM LINCOLN. 



commonly make a shift to find as much as he needs. Mr. 

 Lincoln, as it seems to us in reviewing his career, though 

 we 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 accomplish 

 ing 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 circum 

 stances, 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 peril 

 ous task has been to carry a rather shaky raft through the 

 rapids, making fast the unrulier 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 



