congruous with English experience of public meetings. If
we credit him with these occasional manifestations of electric
oratory--as to which it is certain that his quiet temperament did at
times blaze out in a surprising fashion--it is not to be thought that
he was ordinarily what could be called eloquent; some of his speeches
are commonplace enough, and much of his debating with Douglas is of a
drily argumentative kind that does honour to the mass meetings which
heard it gladly. But the greatest gift of the orator he did possess;
the personality behind the words was felt. "Beyond and above all
skill," says the editor of a great paper who heard him at Peoria, "was
the overwhelming conviction imposed upon the audience that the speaker
himself was charged with an irresistible and inspiring duty to his
fellow men."

One fact about the method of his speaking is easily detected. In
debate, at least, he had no use for perorations, and the reader who
looks for them will often find that Lincoln just used up the last few
minutes in clearing up some unimportant point which he wanted to
explain only if there was time for it. We associate our older
Parliamentary oratory with an art which keeps the hearer pleasedly
expectant rather than dangerously attentive, through an argument which
if dwelt upon might prove unsubstantial, secure that it all leads in
the end to some great cadence of noble sound. But in Lincoln's
argumentative speeches the employment of beautiful words is least
sparing at the beginning or when he passes to a new subject. It seems
as if he deliberately used up his rhetorical effects at the outset to
put his audience in the temper in which they would earnestly follow him
and to challenge their full attention to reasoning which was to satisfy
their calmer judgment. He put himself in a position in which if his
argument were not sound nothing could save his speech from failure as a
speech. Perhaps no standing epithet of praise hangs with such a weight
on a man's reputation as the epithet "honest." When the man is proved
not to be a fraud, it suggests a very mediocre virtue. But the method
by which Lincoln actually confirmed his early won and dangerous
reputation of honesty was a positive and potent performance of rare
distinction. It is no mean intellectual and spiritual achievement to
be as honest in speech with a crowd as in the dearest intercourse of
life. It is not, of course, pretended that he never us