The response to our New Life of Lincoln is so extraordinary as to demand something more than mere acknowledgment from us.

Within ten days of the publication of the magazine no less than forty thousand new buyers were added to our list, and at this writing (November 25th) the increase has reached one hundred thousand, making a clear increase of one hundred thousand in three months, and bringing the total edition for the present number up to a quarter of a million.

But even more gratifying have been the strong expressions of approval from many whose intimate knowledge of Lincoln’s life enables them to distinguish what is new in this life.

As Mr. Medill says in an editorial in the Chicago “Tribune,” “It is not only full of new things, but is so distinct and clear in local color that an interest attaches to it which is not found in other biographies.”

And Mr. R.W.  Diller, of Springfield, Illinois, who knew Mr. Lincoln intimately for nearly twenty years before his election to the Presidency, writes to us about Miss Tarbell’s article:  “As far as read she goes to rock-bottom evidence and will beat her Napoleon out of sight.”

There are certainly few men more familiar with all that has been written about Lincoln than William H. Lambert, Esq., of Philadelphia, whose collection includes practically every book, pamphlet, or printed document about Lincoln, and who has one of the finest collections of Lincolniana in the world.  He writes: 

“I have read your first article with intense interest, and I am confident that you will make a most important addition to our knowledge of Lincoln.”

But perhaps it is better to print some of the letters we have received commenting on the first article and on the early portrait and other portraits and illustrations.

John T. Morse, Jr., author of the lives of Abraham Lincoln, John Quincy Adams, Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, and Benjamin Franklin, published by Houghton, Mifflin & Co. in their “American Statesmen Series,” and editor of this series, writes as follows about the early portrait: 

    6 FAIRCHILD STREET, BOSTON,

    November 2, 1895.

    S.S.  MCCLURE, ESQ.—­Dear Sir:  I thank you very much for the
    artist’s proof of the engraving of the earliest picture of
    Abraham Lincoln.

I have studied this portrait with very great interest.  All the portraits with which we are familiar show us the man as made; this shows us the man in the making; and I think every one will admit that the making of Abraham Lincoln presents a more singular, puzzling, interesting study than the making of any other man known in human history.

I have shown it to several persons, without telling them who it was.  Some say, a poet; others, a philosopher, a thinker, like Emerson.  These comments also are interesting,