proposed an arrangement which involved no money debt.  He took him upstairs and installed him—­Western domestic arrangements were and are still simple—­as the joint occupant of his own large bed.  “Well, Speed, I’m moved,” was the terse acknowledgment.  Speed was to move him later by more precious charity.  We are concerned for the moment with what moved Speed.  “I looked up at him,” said he, long after, “and I thought then, as I think now, that I never saw so gloomy and melancholy a face in my life.”  The struggle of ambition and poverty may well have been telling on Lincoln; but besides that a tragical love story (shortly to be told) had left a deep and permanent mark; but these influences worked, we may suppose, upon a disposition quite as prone to sadness as to mirth.  His exceedingly gregarious habit, drawing him to almost any assembly of his own sex, continued all his life; but it alternated from the first with a habit of solitude or abstraction, the abstraction of a man who, when he does wish to read, will read intently in the midst of crowd or noise, or walking along the street.  He was what might unkindly be called almost a professional humorist, the master of a thousand startling stories, delightful to the hearer, but possibly tiresome in written reminiscences, but we know too well that gifts of this kind are as compatible with sadness as they certainly are with deadly seriousness.

The Legislature of Illinois in the eight years from 1834 to 1842, in which Lincoln belonged to it, was, though not a wise, a vigorous body.  In the conditions which then existed it was not likely to have been captured as the Legislatures of wilder and more thinly-peopled States have sometimes been by a disreputable element in the community, nor to have subsided into the hands of the dull mechanical class of professional politicians with which, rightly or wrongly, we have now been led to associate American State Government.  The fact of Lincoln’s own election suggests that dishonest adventurers might easily have got there, but equally suggests that a very different type of men prevailed.  “The Legislature,” we are told, “contained the youth and blood and fire of the frontier.”  Among the Democrats in the Legislature was Stephen Douglas, who was to become one of the most powerful men in the United States while Lincoln was still unknown; and several of Lincoln’s Whig colleagues were afterwards to play distinguished or honourable parts in politics or war.  We need not linger over them, but what we know of those with whom he had any special intimacy makes it entirely pleasant to associate him with them.  After a short time in which, like any sensible young member of an assembly, he watched and hardly ever spoke, Lincoln soon made his way among these men, and in 1838 and 1840 the Whig members—­though, being in a minority, they could not elect him—­gave him their unanimous votes for the Speakership of the Assembly.  The business which engrossed the Legislature,