and overbearing....  Lincoln also was a thoroughly trained speaker.  He had met successfully, year after year, at the bar and on the stump, the ablest men of Illinois and the Northwest, including Lamborn, Stephen T. Logan, John Calhoun, and many others.  He had contended, in generous emulation, with Hardin, Baker, Logan, and Browning; and had very often met Douglas, a conflict with whom he always courted rather than shunned.  His speeches, as we read them to-day, show a more familiar knowledge of the slavery question than those of any other statesman of our country.  This is especially true of the Peoria speech and the Cooper Institute speech.  Lincoln was powerful in argument, always seizing the strong points, and demonstrating his propositions with a clearness and logic approaching the certainty of mathematics.  He had, in wit and humor, a great advantage over Douglas.  Then he had the better temper; he was always good humored, while Douglas, when hard pressed, was sometimes irritable.  Douglas perhaps carried away the more popular applause; Lincoln made the deeper and more lasting impression.  Douglas did not disdain an immediate ad captandum triumph; while Lincoln aimed at permanent conviction.  Sometimes, when Lincoln’s friends urged him to raise a storm of applause, which he could always do by his happy illustrations and amusing stories, he refused, saying, ’The occasion is too serious; the issues are too grave.  I do not seek applause, or to amuse the people, but to convince them.’  It was observed in the canvass that while Douglas was greeted with the loudest cheers, when Lincoln closed the people seemed serious and thoughtful, and could be heard all through the crowd, gravely and anxiously discussing the subjects on which he had been speaking.”

Soon after the arrangements for the debate had been made, Senator Douglas visited Alton, Illinois.  A delegation of prominent Democrats there paid their respects to him, and during the conversation one of them congratulated Douglas on the easy task he would have in defeating Lincoln; at the same time expressing surprise at the champion whom he had selected.  Douglas replied:  “Gentlemen, you do not know Mr. Lincoln.  I have known him long and well, and I know that I shall have anything but an easy task.  I assure you I would rather meet any other man in the country than Abraham Lincoln." This was Douglas’s mature opinion of the man of whom, years before, he had said, in his characteristic way:  “Of all the d——­d Whig rascals about Springfield, Abe Lincoln is the ablest and honestest.”  On another occasion, Douglas said:  “I have known Lincoln for nearly twenty-five years.  There were many points of sympathy between us when we first got acquainted.  We were both comparatively boys, and both struggling with poverty in a strange land.  I was a school-teacher in the town of Winchester, and he a flourishing grocery-keeper in the town of Salem.  He was more successful in