full of favorite quotations and sound criticisms.”  His musical tastes, says Mr. Brooks, who knew him well, “were simple and uncultivated, his choice being old airs, songs, and ballads, among which the plaintive Scotch songs were best liked.  ‘Annie Laurie,’ ‘Mary of Argyle,’ and especially ‘Auld Robin Gray,’ never lost their charm for him; and all songs which had for their theme the rapid flight of time, decay, the recollections of early days, were sure to make a deep impression.  The song which he liked best, above all others, was one called ’Twenty Years Ago’—­a simple air, the words to which are supposed to be uttered by a man who revisits the playground of his youth.  I remember that one night at the White House, when a few ladies were with the family, singing at the piano-forte, he asked for a little song in which the writer describes his sensations when revisiting the scenes of his boyhood, dwelling mournfully on the vanished joys and the delightful associations of forty years ago.  It is not likely that there was much in Lincoln’s lost youth that he would wish to recall; but there was a certain melancholy and half-morbid strain in that song which struck a responsive chord in his heart.  The lines sank into his memory, and I remember that he quoted them, as if to himself, long afterward.”

Lincoln’s memory was extraordinarily retentive, and he seemed, without conscious effort, to have stored in his mind almost every whimsical or ludicrous narrative which he had read or heard.  “On several occasions,” says Mr. Brooks, “I have held in my hand a printed slip while he was repeating its contents to somebody else, and the precision with which he delivered every word was marvellous.”  He was fond of the writings of “Orpheus C. Kerr” and “Petroleum V. Nasby,” who were famous humorists at the time of the Civil War; and he amused himself and others in the darkest hours by quoting passages from these now forgotten authors.  Nasby’s letter from “Wingert’s Corners, Ohio,” on the threatening prospects of a migration of the negroes from the South, and the President’s “evident intenshun of colonizin’ on ’em in the North,” he especially relished.  After rehearsing a portion of this letter to his guests at the Soldiers’ Home one evening, a sedate New England gentleman expressed surprise that he could find time for memorizing such things.  “Oh,” said Lincoln, “I don’t.  If I like a thing, it just sticks after once reading it or hearing it.”  He once recited a long and doleful ballad, something like “Vilikins and his Dinah,” the production of a rural Kentucky bard, and when he had finished he added with a laugh, “I don’t believe I have thought of that before for forty years.”  Mr. Arnold testifies that “although his reading was not extensive, yet his memory was so retentive and so ready that in history, poetry, and in general literature, few if any marked any deficiency.  As an illustration of the powers of his memory, may be related the following: