of his life. On the other hand, there are slight indications that
common love for their children helped to make the two happier, and
there are no indications at all of any approach to a serious quarrel.
All that is told us may be perfectly true and not by any means have
justified the pity that some of Lincoln's friends were ready to feel
for him. It is difficult to avoid suspecting that Lincoln's wife did
not duly like his partner and biographer, Mr. Herndon, who felt it his
duty to record so many painful facts and his own possibly too painful
impression from them. On the other side, Mr. Herndon makes it clear
that in some respects Mrs. Lincoln was an admirable wife for her
husband. She faced the difficulties of their poverty with spirit and
resolution. Testimony from other sources to her graceful hospitality
abounds. More than this, from the very first she believed in his
powers. It seems she had the discernment to know, when few others can
have done so, how far greater he was than his rival Douglas. It was
Herndon's belief, in days when he and Mrs. Lincoln were the two persons
who saw most of him, that she sustained his just ambition, and that at
the most critical moment of his personal career she had the courage to
make him refuse an attractive appointment which must have ruined it.
The worst that we are told with any certainty amounts to this, that
like the very happily married writer of "Virginibus Puerisque," Lincoln
discovered that marriage is "a field of battle and not a bed of
roses"--a battle in which we are forced to suspect that he did not play
his full part.

We should perhaps be right in associating his curious record, of right
and high regard for women and inefficiency where a particular woman's
happiness depended on him, with the belief in Woman Suffrage, which he
early adopted and probably retained. Be that as it may, this part of
his story points to something which runs through his whole character,
something which perhaps may be expressed by saying that the natural
bias of his qualities was towards the negative side. We hear, no
doubt, of occasions when his vigour was instant and terrible--like that
of Hamlet on the ship for England; but these were occasions when the
right or the necessity of the case was obvious. We have seen him also
firm and absolutely independent where his conviction had already been
thought out. Where there was room for further reflection, for
patiently waiting on eve