picture, the first taken in New York.  At the gallery he met and was introduced to Hon. George Bancroft, and had a brief conversation with that gentleman, who welcomed him to New York.  The contrast in the appearance of the men was most striking; the one courtly and precise in his every word and gesture, with the air of a trans-Atlantic statesman; the other bluff and awkward, his very utterance an apology for his ignorance of metropolitan manners and customs.  ’I am on my way to Massachusetts,’ he said to Mr. Bancroft, ’where I have a son at school, who, if report be true, already knows much more than his father.’”

On the evening of February 27 a large and brilliant audience gathered at Cooper Institute, to hear the famous Western orator.  The scene was one never to be forgotten by those who witnessed it.  Upon the platform sat many of the prominent men of the Republican party, and in the body of the hall were many ladies.  The meeting was presided over by the distinguished citizen and poet William Cullen Bryant, of whom Mr. Lincoln afterward said, “It was worth a journey to the East merely to see such a man.”  The orator of the evening was introduced by Mr. Bryant with some very complimentary allusions, especially to his controversy with Douglas.  “When Mr. Lincoln came on the platform and was introduced by Mr. Bryant,” says one who was present, “he seemed a giant in contrast with him.  His first sentence was delivered in a peculiarly high-keyed voice, and disappointed us.  In a short time the sharp points of his address began to come, and he had not been speaking for half an hour before his audience seemed wild with enthusiasm.”  Another account says:  “His manner was, to a New York audience, a very strange one, but it was captivating.  He held the vast meeting spell-bound, and as one by one his oddly expressed but trenchant and convincing arguments confirmed the soundness of his political conclusions, the house broke out in wild and prolonged enthusiasm.  I think I never saw an audience more thoroughly carried away by an orator.”  This speech was full of trenchant passages, which called forth tumultuous applause.  The following is a specimen: 

I defy anyone to show that any living man in the whole world ever did, prior to the beginning of the present century (and I might almost say prior to the beginning of the last half of the present century), declare that, in his understanding, any proper division of local from Federal authority, or any part of the Constitution, forbade the Federal Government to control slavery in the Federal territories.  To those who now so declare, I give not only our fathers who framed the government under which we live, but with them all other living men within the century in which it was framed, among whom to search, and they shall not be able to find the evidence of a single man agreeing with them.

Referring to the South, and the growing political discontent in that quarter, he said: