l manner he concludes his
letter, "the whole thing is as simple as figuring out the weight of
three small hogs," and this inelegant sentence conveys with little
exaggeration one especial merit of his often austerely graceful
language. Grave difficulties are handled in a style which could arouse
all the interest of a boy and penetrate the understanding of a
case-hardened party man.

But if in comparison with the acknowledged masterpieces of our prose we
rank many passages in these speeches very high--and in fact the men who
have appreciated them most highly have been fastidious scholars--we
shall not yet have measured Lincoln's effort and performance. For
these are not the compositions of a cloistered man of letters, they are
the outpourings of an agitator upon the stump. The men who think hard
are few; few of them can clothe their thought in apt and simple words;
very, very few are those who in doing this could hold the attention of
a miscellaneous and large crowd. Popular government owes that
comparative failure, of which in recent times we have taken perhaps
exaggerated notice, partly to the blindness of the polite world to the
true difficulty and true value of work of this kind; and the importance
which Roman education under the Empire gave to rhetoric was the mark
not of deadness, but of the survival of a manly public spirit.
Lincoln's wisdom had to utter itself in a voice which would reach the
outskirts of a large and sometimes excited crowd in the open air. It
was uttered in strenuous conflict with a man whose reputation quite
overshadowed his; a person whose extraordinary and good-humoured
vitality armed him with an external charm even for people who, like
Mrs. Beecher Stowe, detested his principles; an orator whose mastery of
popular appeal and of resourceful and evasive debate was quite
unhampered by any weakness for the truth. The utterance had to be kept
up day after day and night after night for a quarter of a year, by a
man too poor to afford little comforts, travelling from one crowded inn
to another, by slow trains on a railway whose officials paid little
attention to him, while his more prosperous and distinguished rival
could travel in comfort and comparative magnificence. The physical
strain of electioneering, which is always considerable, its alternation
of feverish excitement with a lassitude that, after a while, becomes
prevailing and intense, were in this case far greater and more
prolonged