opened his mouth surprised and jarred upon the hearers with a harsh note of curiously high pitch.  But it was the sort of oddity that arrests attention, and people’s attention once caught was apt to be held by the man’s transparent earnestness.  Soon, as he lost thought of himself in his subject, his voice and manner changed; deeper notes, of which friends record the beauty, rang out, the sad eyes kindled, and the tall, gaunt figure, with the strange gesture of the long, uplifted arms, acquired even a certain majesty.  Hearers recalled afterwards with evident sincerity the deep and instantaneous impression of some appeal to simple conscience, as when, “reaching his hands towards the stars of that still night,” he proclaimed, “in some things she is certainly not my equal, but in her natural right to eat the bread that she has earned with the sweat of her brow, she is my equal, and the equal of Judge Douglas, and the equal of any man.”  Indeed, upon a sympathetic audience, already excited by the occasion, he could produce an effect which the reader of his recorded speeches would hardly believe.  Of his speech at an early state convention of the Republican party there is no report except that after a few sentences every reporter laid down his pen for the opposite of the usual reason, and, as he proceeded, “the audience arose from their chairs and with pale faces and quivering lips pressed unconsciously towards him.”  And of his speech on another similar occasion several witnesses seem to have left descriptions hardly less incongruous with English experience of public meetings.  If we credit him with these occasional manifestations of electric oratory—­as to which it is certain that his quiet temperament did at times blaze out in a surprising fashion—­it is not to be thought that he was ordinarily what could be called eloquent; some of his speeches are commonplace enough, and much of his debating with Douglas is of a drily argumentative kind that does honour to the mass meetings which heard it gladly.  But the greatest gift of the orator he did possess; the personality behind the words was felt.  “Beyond and above all skill,” says the editor of a great paper who heard him at Peoria, “was the overwhelming conviction imposed upon the audience that the speaker himself was charged with an irresistible and inspiring duty to his fellow men.”

One fact about the method of his speaking is easily detected.  In debate, at least, he had no use for perorations, and the reader who looks for them will often find that Lincoln just used up the last few minutes in clearing up some unimportant point which he wanted to explain only if there was time for it.  We associate our older Parliamentary oratory with an art which keeps the hearer pleasedly expectant rather than dangerously attentive, through an argument which if dwelt upon might prove unsubstantial, secure that it all leads in the end to some great cadence of noble sound.  But in Lincoln’s