When Lincoln’s strength became visibly tried friends often sought to persuade him to spare himself the needless, and to him very often harrowing, labour of incessant interviews.  They never succeeded.  Lincoln told them he could not forget what he himself would feel in the place of the many poor souls who came to him desiring so little and with so little to get.  But he owned to the severity of the strain.  He was not too sensitive to the ridicule and reproach that surrounded him.  “Give yourself no uneasiness,” he had once said to some one who had sympathised with him over some such annoyance, “I have endured a great deal of ridicule without much malice, and have received a great deal of kindness not quite free from ridicule.  I am used to it.”  But the gentle nature that such words express, and that made itself deeply felt by those that were nearest him, cannot but have suffered from want of appreciation.  With all this added to the larger cares, which before the closing phases of the war opened had become so intense, Lincoln must have been taxed near to the limit of what men have endured without loss of judgment, or loss of courage or loss of ordinary human feeling.  There is no sign that any of these things happened to him; the study of his record rather shows a steady ripening of mind and character to the end.  It has been seen how throughout his previous life the melancholy of his temperament impressed those who had the opportunity of observing it.  A colleague of his at the Illinois bar has told how on circuit he sometimes came down in the morning and found Lincoln sitting alone over the embers of the fire, where he had sat all night in sad meditation, after an evening of jest apparently none the less hilarious for his total abstinence.  There was no scope for this brooding now, and in a sense the time of his severest trial cannot have been the saddest time of Lincoln’s life.  It must have been a cause not of added depression but of added strength that he had long been accustomed to face the sternest aspect of the world.  He had within his own mind two resources, often, perhaps normally, associated together, but seldom so fully combined as with him.  In his most intimate circle he would draw upon his stores of poetry, particularly of tragedy; often, for instance, he would recite such speeches as Richard II.’s: 

  “For God’s sake let us sit upon the ground
  And tell sad stories of the death of kings.
  . . . . .  All murdered.”

Slighter acquaintances saw, day by day, another element in his thoughts, the companion to this; for the hardly interrupted play of humour in which he found relief continued to help him to the end.  Whatever there was in it either of mannerism or of coarseness, no one can grudge it him; it is an oddity which endears.  The humour of real life fades in reproduction, but Lincoln’s, there is no doubt was a vein of genuine comedy, deep, rich, and unsoured, of a larger human