Boswell’s absurdities.  He succeeded on the whole in his aim, for the figure that more or less distinctly emerges from the litter of his workshop is lovable; but in spite of all Lincoln’s melancholy, the dreariness of his life, sitting with his feet on the table in his unswept and untidy office at Illinois, or riding on circuit or staying at ramshackle western inns with the Illinois bar, cannot have been so unrelieved as it is in Mr. Herndon’s presentation.  And Herndon overdid his part.  He ferreted out petty incidents which he thought might display the acute Lincoln as slightly too acute, when for all that can be seen Lincoln acted just as any sensible man would have acted.  But the result is that, in this part of his life especially, Lincoln’s way of living was subjected to so close a scrutiny as few men have undergone.

Herndon’s scrutiny does not reveal the current of his thoughts either on life generally or on the political problem which hereafter was to absorb him.  It shows on the contrary, and the recollections of his Presidency confirm it, that his thought on any important topic though it might flash out without disguise in rare moments of intimacy, usually remained long unexpressed.  His great sociability had perhaps even then a rather formidable side to it.  He was not merely amusing himself and other people, when he chatted and exchanged anecdotes far into the night; there was an element, not ungenial, of purposeful study in it all.  He was building up his knowledge of ordinary human nature, his insight into popular feeling, his rather slow but sure comprehension of the individual men whom he did know.  It astonished the self-improving young Herndon that the serious books he read were few and that he seldom seemed to read the whole of them—­though with the Bible, Shakespeare, and to a less extent Burns, he saturated his mind.  The few books and the great many men were part of one study.  In so far as his thought and study turned upon politics it seems to have led him soon to the conclusion that he had for the present no part to play that was worth playing.  By 1854, as he said himself, “his profession as a lawyer had almost superseded the thought of politics in his mind.”  But it does not seem that the melancholy sense of some great purpose unachieved or some great destiny awaiting him ever quite left him.  He must have felt that his chance of political fame was in all appearance gone, and would have liked to win himself a considerable position and a little (very little) money as a lawyer; but the study, in the broadest sense, of which these years were full, evidently contemplated a larger education of himself as a man than professional keenness, or any such interest as he had in law, will explain.  Middle-aged and from his own point of view a failure, he was set upon making himself a bigger man.