But if in comparison with the acknowledged masterpieces of our prose we rank many passages in these speeches very high—­and in fact the men who have appreciated them most highly have been fastidious scholars—­we shall not yet have measured Lincoln’s effort and performance.  For these are not the compositions of a cloistered man of letters, they are the outpourings of an agitator upon the stump.  The men who think hard are few; few of them can clothe their thought in apt and simple words; very, very few are those who in doing this could hold the attention of a miscellaneous and large crowd.  Popular government owes that comparative failure, of which in recent times we have taken perhaps exaggerated notice, partly to the blindness of the polite world to the true difficulty and true value of work of this kind; and the importance which Roman education under the Empire gave to rhetoric was the mark not of deadness, but of the survival of a manly public spirit.  Lincoln’s wisdom had to utter itself in a voice which would reach the outskirts of a large and sometimes excited crowd in the open air.  It was uttered in strenuous conflict with a man whose reputation quite overshadowed his; a person whose extraordinary and good-humoured vitality armed him with an external charm even for people who, like Mrs. Beecher Stowe, detested his principles; an orator whose mastery of popular appeal and of resourceful and evasive debate was quite unhampered by any weakness for the truth.  The utterance had to be kept up day after day and night after night for a quarter of a year, by a man too poor to afford little comforts, travelling from one crowded inn to another, by slow trains on a railway whose officials paid little attention to him, while his more prosperous and distinguished rival could travel in comfort and comparative magnificence.  The physical strain of electioneering, which is always considerable, its alternation of feverish excitement with a lassitude that, after a while, becomes prevailing and intense, were in this case far greater and more prolonged than in any other instance recorded of English or probably of American statesmen.  If, upon his sudden elevation shortly afterwards, Lincoln was in a sense an obscure man raised up by chance, he was nevertheless a man who had accomplished a heroic labour.

On the whole the earthen vessel in which he carried his treasure of clear thought and clean feelings appears to have enhanced its flavour.  There was at any rate nothing outward about him that aroused the passion of envy.  A few peculiarly observant men were immediately impressed with his distinction, but there is no doubt that to the ordinary stranger he appeared as a very odd fish.  “No portraits that I have ever seen,” writes one, “do justice to the awkwardness and ungainliness of his figure.”  Its movements when he began to speak rather added to its ungainliness, and, though to a trained actor his elocution seemed perfect, his voice when he first