rver has added a detail. Witness the masterly comment of Walt
Whitman. Herndon's account of Lincoln speaking has the earmarks of
accuracy. The attempt by the portrait painter, Carpenter, to render
him in words is quoted later in this volume. Carpenter, 217-218.
Unfortunately he was never painted by an artist of great originality,
by one who was equal to his opportunity. My authority for the texture of
his skin is a lady of unusual closeness of observation, the late Mrs.
M. T. W. Curwen of Cincinnati, who saw him in 1861 in the private car of
the president of the Indianapolis and Cincinnati railroad. An exhaustive
study of the portraits of Lincoln is in preparation by Mr. Winfred
Porter Truesdell, who has a valuable paper on the subject in The Print
Connoisseur, for March, 1921.

4. Herndon, 264.

5. Ibid.

6. Ibid., 515.

7. A vital question to the biographer of Lincoln is the credibility of
Herndon. He has been accused of capitalizing his relation with Lincoln
and producing a sensational image for commercial purposes. Though his
Life did not appear until 1890 when the official work of Nicolay and Hay
was in print, he had been lecturing and corresponding upon Lincoln for
nearly twenty-five years. The "sensational" first edition of his Life
produced a storm of protest. The book was promptly recalled, worked
over, toned down, and reissued "expurgated" in 1892.

Such biographers as Miss Tarbell appear to regard Herndon as a mere
romancer. The well poised Lincoln and Herndon recently published by
Joseph Fort Newton holds what I feel compelled to regard as a sounder
view; namely, that while Herndon was at times reckless and at times
biased, nevertheless he is in the main to be relied upon.

Three things are to be borne in mind: Herndon was a literary man by
nature; but he was not by training a developed artist; he was a romantic
of the full flood of American romanticism and there are traceable in him
the methods of romantic portraiture. Had he been an Elizabethan one can
imagine him laboring hard with great pride over an inferior "Tamburlane
the Great"--and perhaps not knowing that it was inferior. Furthermore,
he had not, before the storm broke on him, any realization of
the existence in America of another school of portraiture, the
heroic--conventual, that could not understand the romantic. If Herndon
strengthened as much as possible the contrasts of his subject--such
as the contrast between the sordidness of Lincol