Your letter of July 23rd reaches me here, and I beg to express my thanks for your kind remembrances of me in London....  I am much interested in learning that you were present at the time my father made his speech at Cooper Institute.  I, of course, remember the occasion very well, although I was not present.  I was at that time in the middle of my year at Phillips Exeter Academy, preparing for the Harvard entrance examination of the summer of 1860....  After the Cooper Institute address, my father came to Exeter to see how I was getting along, and this visit resulted in his making a number of speeches in New England on his way and on his return, and at Exeter he wrote to my mother a letter which was mainly concerned with me, but which did make reference to these speeches....  He said that he had had some embarrassment with these New England speeches, because in coming East he had anticipated making no speech excepting the one at the Cooper Institute, and he had not prepared himself for anything else....  In the later speeches, he was addressing reading audiences who had, as he thought probable, seen the report of his Cooper Institute speech, and he was obliged, therefore, from day to day (he made about a dozen speeches in New England in all) to bear that fact in mind.

    Sincerely yours,

    ROBERT LINCOLN.

(From Judge Nott)

    WILLIAMSTOWN, MASS.,

    July 26, 1909.

    DEAR PUTNAM: 

I consider it very desirable that the report of Mr. Lincoln’s speech, embodying the final revision, should be preserved in book form....  The text in the pamphlet now in your hands is authentic and conclusive.  Mr. Lincoln read the proof both of the address and of the notes.  I am glad that you are to include in your reprint the letters from Mr. Lincoln, as these letters authenticate this copy of the address as the copy which was corrected by him with his own hand....

The preface to the address, written in September, 1860, has interest because it shows what we thought of the address at that time....  Your worthy father was, if I remember rightly, one of the vice-presidents of the meeting....

    Yours faithfully,

    CHARLES C. NOTT.

(From Cephas Brainerd)

    NEW YORK, August 18, 1909.

    DEAR MAJOR PUTNAM: 

I am very glad to learn that there is good prospect that the real Lincoln Cooper Institute address, with the evidence in regard to it, will now be available for the public....  I am glad also that with the address you are proposing to print the letters received by Judge Nott from Mr. Lincoln.  One or two of these have, unfortunately, not been preserved.  I recall in one an observation made by Lincoln to the effect that he “was not much of a literary man.”

I did not see much of Mr. Lincoln when he was in New York, as my most active responsibility