what was due in decency to any man discharging his task.  The evidence collected by Mr. Rhodes as to the tone prevailing in 1864 at Washington and among those in touch with Washington suggests that strictly political society was on the average as poor in brain and heart as the court of the most decadent European monarchy.  It presents a stern picture of the isolation, on one side at least, in which Lincoln had to live and work.

A little before this crowning period of Lincoln’s career Walt Whitman described him as a man in the streets of Washington could see him, if he chose.  He has been speaking of the cavalry escort which the President’s advisers insisted should go clanking about with him.  “The party,” he continues, “makes no great show in uniform or horses.  Mr. Lincoln on the saddle generally rides a good-sized, easy-going grey horse, is dressed in plain black, somewhat rusty and dusty, and looks about as ordinary in attire, etc., as the commonest man.  The entirely unornamental cortege arouses no sensation; only some curious stranger stops and gazes.  I see very plainly Abraham Lincoln’s dark brown face, with the deep-cut lines, the eyes always to me with a deep latent sadness in the expression.  We have got so that we exchange bows, and very cordial ones.  Sometimes the President goes and comes in an open barouche” (not, the poet intimates, a very smart turn-out).  “Sometimes one of his sons, a boy of ten or twelve, accompanies him, riding at his right on a pony.  They passed me once very close, and I saw the President in the face fully as they were moving slowly, and his look, though abstracted, happened to be directed steadily in my eye.  He bowed and smiled, but far beneath his smile I noticed well the expression I have alluded to.  None of the artists or pictures has caught the deep though subtle and indirect expression of this man’s face.  There is something else there.  One of the great portrait painters of two or three centuries ago is needed.”

The little boy on the pony was Thomas, called “Tad,” a constant companion of his father’s little leisure, now dead.  An elder boy, Robert, has lived to be welcomed as Ambassador in this country, and was at this time a student at Harvard.  Willie, a clever and lovably mischievous child, “the chartered libertine of the White House” for a little while, had died at the age of twelve in the early days of 1862, when his father was getting so impatient to stir McClellan into action.  These and a son who had long before died in infancy were the only children of Mr. and Mrs. Lincoln.  Little has been made public concerning them, but enough to convey the impression of a wise and tender father, trusted by his children and delighting in them.  John Nicolay, his loyal and capable secretary, and the delightful John Hay must be reckoned on the cheerful side—­for there was one—­of Lincoln’s daily life.  The life of the home at the White House, and sometimes in summer at the “Soldiers’