But the slow progress of the years of war had brought a different estimate of Lincoln—­a curious blending of admiration for the growth of his personal authority and for his steadiness of purpose, with criticism of his alleged despotism.  Now, with his death, following so closely the collapse of the Confederacy, there poured out from British press and public a great stream of laudation for Lincoln almost amounting to a national recantation.  In this process of “whitening Abraham’s tomb,” as a few dyed-in-the-wool Southern sympathizers called it, Punch led the way in a poem by Tom Taylor: 

“You lay a wreath on murdered Lincoln’s bier, You, who with mocking pencil wont to trace, Broad for the self-complacent British sneer, His length of shambling limb, his furrowed face.”

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     “Yes, he had lived to shame me from my sneer,
     To lame my pencil and confute my pen—­
     To make me own this hind of princes peer,
     This rail-splitter a true-born king of men[1294].”

Less emotional than most papers, but with a truer estimate of Lincoln, stood the Times.  Severely reprobating the act of Booth and prophesying a disastrous effect in the treatment of the conquered South, it proceeded: 

“Starting from a humble position to one of the greatest eminence, and adopted by the Republican party as a make-shift, simply because Mr. Seward and their other prominent leaders were obnoxious to different sections of the party, it was natural that his career should be watched with jealous suspicion.  The office cast upon him was great, its duties most onerous, and the obscurity of his past career afforded no guarantee of his ability to discharge them.  His shortcomings moreover were on the surface.  The education of a man whose early years had been spent in earning bread by manual labour had necessarily been defective, and faults of manner and errors of taste repelled the observer at the outset.  In spite of these drawbacks, Mr. Lincoln slowly won for himself the respect and confidence of all.  His perfect honesty speedily became apparent, and, what is, perhaps, more to his credit, amid the many unstudied speeches which he was called upon from time to time to deliver, imbued though they were with the rough humour of his early associates, he was in none of them betrayed into any intemperance of language towards his opponents or towards neutrals.  His utterances were apparently careless, but his tongue was always under command.  The quality of Mr. Lincoln’s administration which served, however, more than any other to enlist the sympathy of bystanders was its conservative progress.  He felt his way gradually to his conclusions, and those who will compare the different stages of his career one with another will find that his mind was growing throughout the course of it.”

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