There is more than the conventional reason for apology for pressing the subject a little further.  Nothing very illuminating can be said as to the course of Lincoln’s married life, but much has already been made public about it which, though it cannot be taken as reaching to the heart of the matter, is not properly to be dismissed as mere gossip.  Mrs. Lincoln, it is clear, had a high temper—­the fact that, poor woman! after her husband had been murdered by her side, she developed clear symptoms of insanity, may or may not, for all we are entitled to know, be relevant in this regard.  She was much younger than her husband, and had gone through a cruel experience for him.  Moreover, she had proper ambitions and was accustomed to proper conventional refinements; so her husband’s exterior roughness tried her sorely, not the less we may be sure because of her real pride in him.  Wife and tailor combined could not, with any amount of money, have dressed him well.  Once, though they kept a servant then, Lincoln thought it friendly to open the door himself in his shirt sleeves when two most elegant ladies came to call.  On such occasions, and doubtless on other occasions of less provocation, Mrs. Lincoln’s high temper was let loose.  It seems pretty certain, too, that he met her with mere forbearance, sad patience, and avoidance of conflict.  His fellow lawyers came to notice that he stayed away from home on circuit when all the rest of them could go home for a day or two.  Fifteen years after his wedding he himself confessed to his trouble, not disloyally, but in a rather moving remonstrance with some one who had felt intolerably provoked by Mrs. Lincoln.  There are slight indications that occasions of difficulty and pain to Lincoln happened up to the end of his life.  On the other hand, there are slight indications that common love for their children helped to make the two happier, and there are no indications at all of any approach to a serious quarrel.  All that is told us may be perfectly true and not by any means have justified the pity that some of Lincoln’s friends were ready to feel for him.  It is difficult to avoid suspecting that Lincoln’s wife did not duly like his partner and biographer, Mr. Herndon, who felt it his duty to record so many painful facts and his own possibly too painful impression from them.  On the other side, Mr. Herndon makes it clear that in some respects Mrs. Lincoln was an admirable wife for her husband.  She faced the difficulties of their poverty with spirit and resolution.  Testimony from other sources to her graceful hospitality abounds.  More than this, from the very first she believed in his powers.  It seems she had the discernment to know, when few others can have done so, how far greater he was than his rival Douglas.  It was Herndon’s belief, in days when he and Mrs. Lincoln were the two persons who saw most of him, that she sustained his just ambition, and that at the most critical moment of his personal career she had the courage to make him refuse an attractive appointment which must have ruined it.  The worst that we are told with any certainty amounts to this, that like the very happily married writer of “Virginibus Puerisque,” Lincoln discovered that marriage is “a field of battle and not a bed of roses”—­a battle in which we are forced to suspect that he did not play his full part.