he White House--and the White House appeared to be open to
whosoever wished to enter--saw there a man of unconventional manners,
who, without the slightest effort to put on dignity, treated all men
alike, much like old neighbours; whose speech had not seldom a rustic
flavour about it; who always seemed to have time for a homely talk and
never to be in a hurry to press business; and who occasionally spoke
about important affairs of State with the same nonchalance--I might
almost say irreverence--with which he might have discussed an every-day
law case in his office at Springfield, Illinois."

Thus Lincoln was very far from inspiring general confidence in anything
beyond his good intentions. He is remembered as a personality with a
"something" about him--the vague phrase is John Bright's--which widely
endeared him, but his was by no means that "magnetic" personality which
we might be led to believe was indispensable in America. Indeed, it is
remarkable that to some really good judges he remained always
unimpressive. Charles Francis Adams, who during the Civil War served
his country as well as Minister in London as his grandfather had done
after the War of Independence, lamented to the end that Seward, his
immediate chief, had to serve under an inferior man; and a more
sympathetic man, Lord Lyons, our representative at Washington, refers
to Lincoln with nothing more than an amused kindliness. No detail of
his policy has escaped fierce criticism, and the man himself while he
lived was the subject of so much depreciation and condescending
approval, that we are forced to ask who discovered his greatness till
his death inclined them to idealise him. The answer is that precisely
those Americans of trained intellect whose title to this description is
clearest outside America were the first who began to see beneath his
strange exterior. Lowell, watching the course of public events with
ceaseless scrutiny; Walt Whitman, sauntering in Washington in the
intervals of the labour among the wounded by which he broke down his
robust strength, and seeing things as they passed with the sure
observation of a poet; Motley, the historian of the Dutch Republic,
studying affairs in the thick of them at the outset of the war, and not
less closely by correspondence when he went as Minister to Vienna--such
men when they praised Lincoln after his death expressed a judgment
which they began to form from the first; a judgment which started with