country as well as Minister in London as his grandfather had done after the War of Independence, lamented to the end that Seward, his immediate chief, had to serve under an inferior man; and a more sympathetic man, Lord Lyons, our representative at Washington, refers to Lincoln with nothing more than an amused kindliness.  No detail of his policy has escaped fierce criticism, and the man himself while he lived was the subject of so much depreciation and condescending approval, that we are forced to ask who discovered his greatness till his death inclined them to idealise him.  The answer is that precisely those Americans of trained intellect whose title to this description is clearest outside America were the first who began to see beneath his strange exterior.  Lowell, watching the course of public events with ceaseless scrutiny; Walt Whitman, sauntering in Washington in the intervals of the labour among the wounded by which he broke down his robust strength, and seeing things as they passed with the sure observation of a poet; Motley, the historian of the Dutch Republic, studying affairs in the thick of them at the outset of the war, and not less closely by correspondence when he went as Minister to Vienna—­such men when they praised Lincoln after his death expressed a judgment which they began to form from the first; a judgment which started with the recognition of his honesty, traced the evidence of his wisdom as it appeared, gradually and not by repentant impulse learned his greatness.  And it is a judgment large enough to explain the lower estimate of Lincoln which certainly had wide currency.  Not to multiply witnesses, Motley in June, 1861, having seen him for the second time, writes:  “I went and had an hour’s talk with Mr. Lincoln.  I am very glad of it, for, had I not done so, I should have left Washington with a very inaccurate impression of the President.  I am now satisfied that he is a man of very considerable native sagacity; and that he has an ingenuous, unsophisticated, frank, and noble character.  I believe him to be as true as steel, and as courageous as true.  At the same time there is doubtless an ignorance about State matters, and particularly about foreign affairs, which he does not attempt to conceal, but which we must of necessity regret in a man placed in such a position at such a crisis.  Nevertheless his very modesty in this respect disarms criticism.  We parted very affectionately, and perhaps I shall never set eyes on him again, but I feel that, so far as perfect integrity and directness of purpose go, the country will be safe in his hands.”  Three years had passed, and the political world of America was in that storm of general dissatisfaction in which not a member of Congress would be known as “a Lincoln man,” when Motley writes again from Vienna to his mother, “I venerate Abraham Lincoln exactly because he is the true, honest type of American democracy.  There is nothing of the shabby-genteel, the would-be-but-couldn’t-be fine gentleman; he is the great American Demos, honest, shrewd, homely, wise, humorous, cheerful, brave, blundering occasionally, but through blunders struggling onwards towards what he believes the right.”  In a later letter he observes, “His mental abilities were large, and they became the more robust as the more weight was imposed upon them.”