a respected soldier of the last war, who was glorified as a
sort of Cincinnatus and elected after an outburst of enthusiastic
tomfoolery such as never before or since rejoiced the American people.
But President Harrison had hardly been in office a month when he died.
Some say he was worried to death by office seekers, but a more prosaic
cause, pneumonia, can also be alleged. It is satisfactory that this
good man's grandson worthily filled his office forty-eight years after,
but his immediate successor was of course the Vice-President, Tyler,
chosen as an influential opponent of the last Democrat Presidents, but
not because he agreed with the Whigs. Cultivated but narrow-minded,
highly independent and wholly perverse, he satisfied no aspiration of
the Whigs and paved the way effectually for the Democrat who succeeded
him.

Throughout these years Lincoln was of course working at law, which
became, with the development of the country, a more arduous and a more
learned profession. Sessions of the Legislature did not last long, and
political canvasses were only occasional. If Lincoln was active in
these matters he was in many other directions, too, a keen participator
in the keen life of the society round him. Nevertheless politics as
such, and apart from any large purpose to be achieved through them, had
for many years a special fascination for him. For one thing he was
argumentative in the best sense, with a passion for what the Greeks
sometimes called "dialectic"; his rare capacity for solitary thought,
the most marked and the greatest of his powers, went absolutely hand in
hand with the desire to reduce his thoughts to a form which would carry
logical conviction to others. Further, there can be no doubt--and such
a combination of tastes, though it seems to be uncommon, is quite
intelligible--that the somewhat unholy business of party management was
at first attractive to him. To the end he showed no intuitive
comprehension of individual men. His sincere friendly intention, the
unanswerable force of an argument, the convincing analogy veiled in an
unseemly story, must take their chance of suiting the particular taste
of Senator Sherman or General McClellan; but any question of managing
men in the mass--will a given candidate's influence with this section
of people count for more than his unpopularity with that section? and
so on--involved an element of subtle and long-sighted calculation which
was vastly congeni