firm
opinion with which a little later Lincoln returned to political strife
was the product of long and deep and anxious thought during the years
from 1849 to 1854. On the surface it did not go far beyond the
condemnation of slavery and acceptance of the Constitution which had
guided him earlier, nor did it seem to differ from the wide-spread
public opinion which in 1854 created a new party; but there was this
difference that Lincoln had by then looked at the matter in all its
bearings, and prepared his mind for all eventualities. We shall find,
and need not be surprised to find, that he who now hung back a little,
and who later moved when public opinion moved, later still continued to
move when public opinion had receded.

What we know of these years of private life is mainly due to Mr.
William Herndon, the young lawyer already quoted, whom he took into
partnership in 1845, and who kept on the business of the firm in
Springfield till Lincoln's death. This gentleman was, like Boswell, of
opinion that a great man is not best portrayed as a figure in a
stained-glass window. He had lived with Lincoln, groaned under his odd
ways, and loved them, for sixteen years before his Presidency, and
after his death he devoted much research, in his own memory and those
of many others, to the task of substituting for Lincoln's aureole the
battered tall hat, with valuable papers stuck in its lining, which he
had long contemplated with reverent irritation. Mr. Herndon was not
endowed with Boswell's artistic gift for putting his materials
together, perhaps because he lacked that delicacy and sureness of moral
perception which more than redeemed Boswell's absurdities. He
succeeded on the whole in his aim, for the figure that more or less
distinctly emerges from the litter of his workshop is lovable; but in
spite of all Lincoln's melancholy, the dreariness of his life, sitting
with his feet on the table in his unswept and untidy office at
Illinois, or riding on circuit or staying at ramshackle western inns
with the Illinois bar, cannot have been so unrelieved as it is in Mr.
Herndon's presentation. And Herndon overdid his part. He ferreted out
petty incidents which he thought might display the acute Lincoln as
slightly too acute, when for all that can be seen Lincoln acted just as
any sensible man would have acted. But the result is that, in this
part of his life especially, Lincoln's way of living was subjected to
so close a scr