ate
for the office until it was ascertained whether Governor Lincoln
would accept it. The Governor then declined, for the reason
I have stated in another place. He was also offered an appointment
to the Senate by Governor Washburn when Mr. Everett resigned
in 1853. But it is said that he was quite desirous of being
elected Senator when Mr. Davis was first chosen.

The Governor was, as just said, an example of Emerson's famous
saying that a Conservative is a Democrat grown old and gone
to seed. He was looked upon as the embodiment of reverend
dignity. His household was at the head of the social life
of Worcester during his later years. Every family in the
County was proud who could trace a connection with his. There
were a few traditions in the old Federalist families like
the Thomases and the Allens of a time when the Lincolns were
accounted too democratic to be respectable. But they gained
little credence with people in general. One day, however,
I had to try a real estate case which arose in the adjoining
town and involved an ancient land-title. An old man named
Bradyill Livermore was summoned as a witness for my client.
He was, I think, in his ninety-fifth year. He lived in a
sparsely settled district and had not been into Worcester
for twenty or twenty-five years. I sat down with him in the
consultation-room. After he had told me what he knew about
the case, I had a chat with him about old times and the changes
in Worcester since his youth, and he asked me about some of
the members of the Bar then on the stage. Governor Lincoln,
who had long retired, happened to be mentioned. The old fellow
brought the point of his staff down with great emphasis upon
the floor, and then held it loosely with the fingers of his
trembling and shaking hand, and said, very earnestly, but
with a shrill and strident voice like that of one of Homer's
ghosts: "They say, sir, that that Mr. Lincoln has got to
be a very respectable man. But I can remember, sir, when
he was a terrible Jacobite."

I have given elsewhere a portraiture of Charles Allen, and
a sketch of his great career. He was a man of slender physical
frame and feeble voice. But he was a leader of leaders.
When in 1848 he left the Whig Convention in Philadelphia,
an assembly flushed with the anticipation of National triumph,
declaring, amid the jeers and hisses of its members, that
the Whig Party was dead--a prediction verified within four
years--down to t