ress, and the lives of Benjamin Franklin and Henry
Clay. He made these books his own by conning them over and over, copying
the more impressive portions until they were firmly fixed in his memory.
Commenting upon the value of this sort of mental training, Dr. Holland
wisely remarks: "Those who have witnessed the dissipating effect of many
books upon the minds of modern children do not find it hard to believe
that Abraham Lincoln's poverty of books was the wealth of his life. The
few he had did much to perfect the teaching which his mother had begun,
and to form a character which for quaint simplicity, earnestness,
truthfulness, and purity, has never been surpassed among the historic
personages of the world."

It may well have been that Lincoln's lack of books and the means of
learning threw him upon his own resources and led him into those modes
of thought, of quaint and apt and logical reasoning, so
peculiar to him. At any rate, it is certain that books can no more make
a character like Lincoln than they can make a poet like Shakespeare.

"By books may Learning sometimes befall,
But Wisdom never by books at all,"--

a saying peculiarly true of a man such as Lincoln.

A testimonial to the influence of this early reading upon his childish
mind was given by Lincoln himself many years afterwards. While on his
way to Washington to assume the duties of the Presidency he passed
through Trenton, New Jersey, and in a speech made in the Senate Chamber
at that place he said: "May I be pardoned if, upon this occasion, I
mention that away back in my childhood, in the earliest days of my being
able to read, I got hold of a small book--such a one as few of the
younger members have seen, Weems's Life of Washington. I remember all
the accounts there given of the battle-fields and struggles for the
liberties of the country; and none fixed themselves upon my imagination
so deeply as the struggle here at Trenton. The crossing of the river,
the contest with the Hessians, the great hardships endured at that time,
all fixed themselves in my memory more than any single Revolutionary
event; and you all know, for you have all been boys, how these early
impressions last longer than any others. I recollect thinking then, boy
even though I was, that there must have been something more than common
that these men struggled for. I am exceedingly anxious that that thing
which they struggled for, that something even more than National
Inde