nt.
Speed was to move him later by more precious charity. We are concerned
for the moment with what moved Speed. "I looked up at him," said he,
long after, "and I thought then, as I think now, that I never saw so
gloomy and melancholy a face in my life." The struggle of ambition and
poverty may well have been telling on Lincoln; but besides that a
tragical love story (shortly to be told) had left a deep and permanent
mark; but these influences worked, we may suppose, upon a disposition
quite as prone to sadness as to mirth. His exceedingly gregarious
habit, drawing him to almost any assembly of his own sex, continued all
his life; but it alternated from the first with a habit of solitude or
abstraction, the abstraction of a man who, when he does wish to read,
will read intently in the midst of crowd or noise, or walking along the
street. He was what might unkindly be called almost a professional
humorist, the master of a thousand startling stories, delightful to the
hearer, but possibly tiresome in written reminiscences, but we know too
well that gifts of this kind are as compatible with sadness as they
certainly are with deadly seriousness.

The Legislature of Illinois in the eight years from 1834 to 1842, in
which Lincoln belonged to it, was, though not a wise, a vigorous body.
In the conditions which then existed it was not likely to have been
captured as the Legislatures of wilder and more thinly-peopled States
have sometimes been by a disreputable element in the community, nor to
have subsided into the hands of the dull mechanical class of
professional politicians with which, rightly or wrongly, we have now
been led to associate American State Government. The fact of Lincoln's
own election suggests that dishonest adventurers might easily have got
there, but equally suggests that a very different type of men
prevailed. "The Legislature," we are told, "contained the youth and
blood and fire of the frontier." Among the Democrats in the
Legislature was Stephen Douglas, who was to become one of the most
powerful men in the United States while Lincoln was still unknown; and
several of Lincoln's Whig colleagues were afterwards to play
distinguished or honourable parts in politics or war. We need not
linger over them, but what we know of those with whom he had any
special intimacy makes it entirely pleasant to associate him with them.
After a short time in which, like any sensible young member of an
assembly, he