popular mind or of eternal laws.
The powers which he had hitherto shown would still be needful to him, but
so too would other powers which he had never practised in any comparable
position, and which nature does not in a moment supply. Any attempt to
judge of Lincoln's Presidency--and it can only be judged at all when it
has gone on some way--must take account, not perhaps so much of his
inexperience, as of his own reasonable consciousness of it and his great
anxiety to use the advice of men who were in any way presumably more
competent.

He deliberately delayed his arrival in Washington and availed himself of
official invitations to stay at four great towns and five State capitals
which he could conveniently pass on his way. The journey abounded in
small incidents and speeches, some of which exposed him to a little
ridicule in the press, though they probably created an undercurrent of
sympathy for him. Near one station where the train stopped lived a
little girl he knew, who had recently urged upon him to wear a beard or
whiskers. To this dreadful young person, and to that persistent good
nature of his which was now and then fatuous, was due the ill-designed
hairy ornamentation which during his Presidency hid the really beautiful
modelling of his jaw and chin. He enquired for her at the station, had
her fetched from the crowd, claimed her praise for this supposed
improvement, and kissed her in presence of the press. In New York he was
guilty of a more sinister and tragic misfeasance. In that city, where,
if it may be said with respect, there has existed from of old a
fashionable circle not convinced of its own gentility and insisting the
more rigorously on minor decorum, Lincoln went to the opera, and history
still deplores that this misguided man went there and sat there with his
large hands in black kid gloves. Here perhaps it is well to say that the
educated world of the Eastern States, including those who privately
deplored Lincoln's supposed unfitness, treated its untried chief
magistrate with that engrained good breeding to which it was utterly
indifferent how plain a man he might be. His lesser speeches as he went
were unstudied appeals to loyalty, with very simple avowals of inadequacy
to his task, and expressions of reliance on the people's support when he
tried to do his duty. To a man who can sometimes speak from the heart
and to the heart as Lincoln did it is perhaps not given to be uniformly
fel