ht have been
Dictator had he pleased; but what, to a man wearied with authority and
dignity, would dictatorship be worth? If he is proud of anything, it is
of the tailor's bench from which he started. He would have everybody to
understand that he is humble,--thoroughly humble. Is this caricature?
No. It is impossible to caricature Andrew Johnson when he mounts his
high horse of humility and becomes a sort of cross between Uriah Heep
and Josiah Bounderby of Coketown. Indeed, it is only by quoting
Dickens's description of the latter personage that we have anything
which fairly matches the traits suggested by some statements in the
President's speeches. "A big, loud man," says the humorist, "with a
stare and a metallic laugh. A man made out of coarse material, which
seemed to have been stretched to make so much of him. A man with a great
puffed head and forehead, swelled veins in his temples, and such a
strained skin to his face, that it seemed to hold his eyes open and lift
his eyebrows up. A man with a pervading appearance on him of being
inflated like a balloon, and ready to start. A man who could never
sufficiently vaunt himself a self-made man. A man who was continually
proclaiming, through that brassy speaking-trumpet of a voice of his, his
old ignorance and his old poverty. A man who was the Bully of humility."

If we turn from the moral and personal to the menial characteristics of
Mr. Johnson's speeches, we find that his brain is to be classed with
notable cases of arrested development. He has strong forces in his
nature, but in their outlet through his mind they are dissipated into a
confusing clutter of unrelated thoughts and inapplicable phrases. He
seems to possess neither the power nor the perception of coherent
thinking and logical arrangement. He does not appear to be aware that
prepossessions are not proofs, that assertions are not arguments, that
the proper method to answer an objection is not to repeat the
proposition against which the objection was directed, that the proper
method of unfolding a subject is not to make the successive statements a
series of contradictions. Indeed, he seems to have a thoroughly
animalized intellect, destitute of the notion of relations, with ideas
which are but the form of determinations, and which derive their force,
not from reason, but from will. With an individuality thus strong even
to fierceness, but which has not been developed in the mental region,
and which the le