and it would be
like taking the warmth out of a sunbeam. He _was_ truth, he thought
truth, loved the truth, surrendered himself to the truth. Under that
influence he refused to play politics, or fence for position with
Douglas. Once Lincoln won a case so easily that he returned one-half of
the retainer's fee, because he felt that he had not earned it.

Here, therefore, is found the secret of Lincoln's unbounded popularity.
The common people know their friends, and--what with Lincoln's
gentleness, his justice, his boundless kindness, his sympathy with the
poor and the unfortunate, and his honesty--he became the most beloved
man in the Illinois circuit.

Wonderful, too, his literary achievements. His great passages read like
the Bible, and have almost the moral authority thereof. If preachers
ever wear the old Bible out, Lincoln's Second Inaugural, and his speech
at Gettysburg, and certain other passages, will furnish texts for
another hundred years. One thing is certain,--if Chinese students in
their universities two thousand years from now translate any oration out
of the English language, as we now translate the speeches of
Demosthenes, these Chinese students will translate Lincoln's speech at
Gettysburg, and his Second Inaugural Address. Contrary to the usual
idea, it may be confidently affirmed that Lincoln was a well equipped
man, and had the best possible training for literary style. During the
plastic years of memory, Lincoln had three books to study, and two of
these are the finest models for style in all literature,--King James'
Version of the Bible, and Bunyan's "Pilgrim's Progress." These are the
world's great literary masterpieces, these are the wells of English,
pure and undefiled. Upon these two books Robert Burns was reared. To the
fact that his mother made him commit to memory forty chapters of the
Bible before he was seven years old, John Ruskin attributed his mastery
in English style. Second rate men know something about everything.
Lincoln was a first rate man who knew everything about some one thing.
If you want to make a versatile man, turn a boy loose in a library. If
you want a boy to have the note of distinction upon his pages, lock him
out of a library, and send him into solitude, with the English Bible,
with John Bunyan, and with AEsop's Fables, and let him take these three
books into his intellect, as he takes meat and bread into the rich blood
of the physical system.

Literary style is the