a style more lucid than that which he had achieved before his death is scarcely conceivable. I doubt if it was the supreme elegance of clear and simple forms of expression which caused Lincoln to cultivate this style, though unquestionably he had an instinctive feeling for the simple expression. He was rather driven to it by what was in him an intellectual necessity. He had a mind which was never quiet until it had solved to its own satisfaction the questions with which it struggled. Even in his boyhood days his companions noticed that he constantly was searching for the reason of things and that he "explained so clearly." To a friend who asked him once how he had achieved his pure style he said: "When a mere child, I used to get irritated when anybody talked to me in a way I could not understand. I do not think that I ever got angry at anything else in my life; but that always disturbed my temper, and has ever since. I can remember going to my little bedroom, after hearing the neighbors talk of an evening with my father, and spending no small part of the night walking up and down, trying to make out what was the exact meaning of some of their, to me, dark sayings.

"I could not sleep when I got on such a hunt for an idea until I had caught it; and when I thought I had got it, I was not satisfied until I had put it in a language plain enough, as I thought, for any boy to comprehend. This was a kind of a passion with me, and it has stuck by me; for I am never easy now, when I am handling a thought, till I have bounded it north, and bounded it south, and bounded it east, and bounded it west."

This is exactly what he did in his public speeches and letters. When he had found what seemed to him the truth of a subject, he tried to put it into a form so simple that nobody could mistake his meaning. He stated his case with mathematical exactness, in the fewest words possible, and always with the simplest words. The result was that his statements of what

he considered the vital points in any great question are really axioms. In the debates with Douglas, for example, his vital arguments were condensed into a few phrases which appear again and again. The most notable example is probably the famous paragraph of his first speech in the campaign, where he stated the position on which he intended to stand in the contest. "A house divided against itself cannot stand.' I believe this government cannot endure permanently half slave and half free. I do not expect the Union to be dissolved -I do not expect the house to fall - but I do expect it will cease to be divided. It will become all one thing or all the other."

But while the appeal to the intellect is so strong in Lincoln's literary work, the appeal to the emotions is hardly less. He could move the heart to its depths. Again and again in his public career he poured forth his emotions in words so elevated, in imagery so lofty, that the effect can only be compared to that of some noble sacred poem. Take for instance, the closing paragraphs of the Second Inaugural:

"Fondly do we hope- fervently do we pray-— that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondman's two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said, 'The judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.'

"With malice toward none; with charity for all; with firmness in the right, as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in; to bind up the nation's wounds; to care for him who shall have borne the battle, and for his widow, and his orphan - to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves, and with all nations." The same lofty feeling and imagery characterize Lincoln's Gettysburg speech. In this speech, universally acknowledged

to be one of the most perfect bits of English prose ever written, we have Lincoln's clearness of expression admirably illustrated, while the sympathetic charm which pervades it thrills the heart to-day as deeply as it did forty years ago.

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But Lincoln's English has something in it besides its clearness and its loftiness. It has a delightful original flavor, distinctive and natural, untainted by conventional culture, which having once caught you always recognize. In no particular is this originality more conspicuous than in the quaint figures of speech with which he illustrates his meaning. It was the fashion of his time to seek metaphors and other embellishments in the classics. He never went among the ancients for figures," he used to say. Instead he drew them from his own experience. That experience had been humble enough, but it yielded in his hands a fruitful crop of powerful illustrations. Some of the most typical of these occur in his dispatches to officers during the war. Such was his dispatch to Hooker in June, 1863. Fearing that Hooker might cross to the south of the Rappahannock and give Lee a chance to get behind the Federals, he wrote, I would not take any risk of being entangled up on the river, like an ox jumped half over a fence and liable to be torn by dogs front and rear without a fair chance to gore one way or kick the other." Equally pertinent was his message sent a few days later to the same general: "If the head of Lee's army is at Martinsburg, and the tail of it on the plank road between Fredericksburg and Chancellorsville, the animal must be very slim somewhere. Could you not break him?”. and nothing could have been better than his advice to Grant in 1864,- "Hold on with a bulldog grip, and chew and choke as much as possible."

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Lincoln's private letters are all marked by this distinctive personal style. There have been published a series of letters to a stepbrother who must have been a shiftless fellow, which are as good examples of well-put common sense as anything Poor

Richard himself ever gave us. His letter to General Hooker in January, 1863, when the command of the Army of the Potomac was given into his charge, is a perfect example of the wise and kindly, yet firm, writing which Lincoln could employ when he thought best.

It is not difficult to see now as we study Lincoln's life that his mastery of expression was of incalculable value in dealing with the terrible problems of a Civil War President. For instance, his aptness in illustrating his meaning by stories and figures solved many a problem for the country. At first men complained at what they called his triviality, his buffonery. What right had the President of the United States to tell stories and laugh when the country was at war? Yet gradually the discerning began to see that every one of his stories settled a question. Frequently, when the Cabinet was perplexed and fearful, it was one of Lincoln's stories which broke its tense, irritable mood, clearing up doubt and torment as a shower clears the hot overburdened air. Again and again, commissions of good but narrow men came to him to present a theory which, if adopted, they were sure would alone end the war, free the slave, satisfy the South, and restore happiness. The President simply told them a story and they filed out without a word, the theory shattered in their hands. These stories were not classic. They were not drawn from literature or history; frequently they were coarse in grain. They came straight from raw human life as Lincoln had observed it, were full of humor, not unlike that of Rabelais, and of homely pioneer picturesqueness; but they were profound in their philosophy and truthfulness, and no argument he or any other could have advanced would have had their convincing force.

The source of his inexhaustible supply of stories was always a mystery to his associates. Did he invent them? If not, where did he get them? The greater majority no doubt dated back to his early life in Illinois when, as a postmaster and a surveyor,

and later as an itinerant lawyer and a member of the Illinois State Assembly, he met constantly large numbers of quaint and original people, and when he was thrown much with a class of men who, for lack of other amusements, entertained one another with stories. A new story in a community like that in which Lincoln spent his earlier manhood has an importance not unlike that of a new play or a new book in a town of to-day. Everybody wants to hear it, and hearing it, everybody discusses it and passes judgment on it. In Springfield, where Lincoln lived at this period, nobody was more eager than he to hear each man's new stories. Let one of his friends go away for a trip, and his first greeting on the man's return would be, "Any new stories?" And if the answer was affirmative, everything must wait until he heard them. If they pleased him, forthwith they were added to his repertoire. He rarely told a story, however, simply for the sake of telling it. To him it was an argument or explanation, sometimes even an exhortation. And because he told it simply to illustrate, he rarely told it twice alike. In order to make it serve his purpose he was obliged to work it over, dressing it in new colors and giving the characters new surroundings, so as to make them more suitable to his immediate object. It thus happens that there can hardly be said to be an original version of a "Lincoln story." For example, the story of Sykes's dog is well known to most of us. Sykes owned an ill-favored cur to which he was devoted but which, because of its ugly looks and its propensity for worrying inoffensive pedestrians, was heartily despised by his friends. One day a few desperate individuals induced Sykes's dog to swallow a piece of meat in which a charge of gunpowder with fuse attached was concealed. The meat was no sooner down than the fuse was lighted and the dog was scattered over the road. When Sykes came up and saw the situation he made a feeble effort to collect the pieces, but soon gave it up, remarking sorrowfully that he guessed that dog's days of usefulness were ended. After the capture of