V. Prosperity.

1.  Carpenter, 304-305.

2.  Lamon, 243, 252-269; Herndon, 226-243, 248-251; N. and H., 201, 203-12.

3.  A great many recollections of Lincoln attempt to describe him.  Except in a large and general way most of them show that lack of definite visualization which characterizes the memories of the careless observer.  His height, his bony figure, his awkwardness, the rudely chiseled features, the mystery in his eyes, the kindliness of his expression, these are the elements of the popular portrait.  Now and then a closer observer has added a detail.  Witness the masterly comment of Walt Whitman.  Herndon’s account of Lincoln speaking has the earmarks of accuracy.  The attempt by the portrait painter, Carpenter, to render him in words is quoted later in this volume.  Carpenter, 217-218.  Unfortunately he was never painted by an artist of great originality, by one who was equal to his opportunity.  My authority for the texture of his skin is a lady of unusual closeness of observation, the late Mrs. M. T. W. Curwen of Cincinnati, who saw him in 1861 in the private car of the president of the Indianapolis and Cincinnati railroad.  An exhaustive study of the portraits of Lincoln is in preparation by Mr. Winfred Porter Truesdell, who has a valuable paper on the subject in The Print Connoisseur, for March, 1921.

4.  Herndon, 264.

5.  Ibid.

6.  Ibid., 515.

7.  A vital question to the biographer of Lincoln is the credibility of Herndon.  He has been accused of capitalizing his relation with Lincoln and producing a sensational image for commercial purposes.  Though his Life did not appear until 1890 when the official work of Nicolay and Hay was in print, he had been lecturing and corresponding upon Lincoln for nearly twenty-five years.  The “sensational” first edition of his Life produced a storm of protest.  The book was promptly recalled, worked over, toned down, and reissued “expurgated” in 1892.

Such biographers as Miss Tarbell appear to regard Herndon as a mere romancer.  The well poised Lincoln and Herndon recently published by Joseph Fort Newton holds what I feel compelled to regard as a sounder view; namely, that while Herndon was at times reckless and at times biased, nevertheless he is in the main to be relied upon.

Three things are to be borne in mind:  Herndon was a literary man by nature; but he was not by training a developed artist; he was a romantic of the full flood of American romanticism and there are traceable in him the methods of romantic portraiture.  Had he been an Elizabethan one can imagine him laboring hard with great pride over an inferior “Tamburlane the Great”—­and perhaps not knowing that it was inferior.  Furthermore, he had not, before the storm broke on him, any realization of the existence in America of another school of portraiture, the heroic—­conventual, that could not understand the romantic.  If Herndon strengthened as much