the recognition of his honesty, traced the evidence of his wisdom as it
appeared, gradually and not by repentant impulse learned his greatness.
And it is a judgment large enough to explain the lower estimate of
Lincoln which certainly had wide currency. Not to multiply witnesses,
Motley in June, 1861, having seen him for the second time, writes: "I
went and had an hour's talk with Mr. Lincoln. I am very glad of it,
for, had I not done so, I should have left Washington with a very
inaccurate impression of the President. I am now satisfied that he is
a man of very considerable native sagacity; and that he has an
ingenuous, unsophisticated, frank, and noble character. I believe him
to be as true as steel, and as courageous as true. At the same time
there is doubtless an ignorance about State matters, and particularly
about foreign affairs, which he does not attempt to conceal, but which
we must of necessity regret in a man placed in such a position at such
a crisis. Nevertheless his very modesty in this respect disarms
criticism. We parted very affectionately, and perhaps I shall never
set eyes on him again, but I feel that, so far as perfect integrity and
directness of purpose go, the country will be safe in his hands."
Three years had passed, and the political world of America was in that
storm of general dissatisfaction in which not a member of Congress
would be known as "a Lincoln man," when Motley writes again from Vienna
to his mother, "I venerate Abraham Lincoln exactly because he is the
true, honest type of American democracy. There is nothing of the
shabby-genteel, the would-be-but-couldn't-be fine gentleman; he is the
great American Demos, honest, shrewd, homely, wise, humorous, cheerful,
brave, blundering occasionally, but through blunders struggling onwards
towards what he believes the right." In a later letter he observes,
"His mental abilities were large, and they became the more robust as
the more weight was imposed upon them."

This last sentence, especially if in Lincoln's mental abilities the
qualities of his character be included, probably indicates the chief
point for remark in any estimate of his presidency. It is true that he
was judged at first as a stranger among strangers. Walt Whitman has
described vividly a scene, with "a dash of comedy, almost farce, such
as Shakespeare puts in his blackest tragedies," outside the hotel in
New York where Lincoln stayed on his journey to Washington; "h