eye grown severe in dusting clothes and brushing shoes. Indeed,
first and last, he was subjected to very critical examination by the
valet-spirit throughout the world; and he seems to have passed it
triumphantly, for all our native valets, North and South, as well as
those of the English press, have long since united in honoring him.

We see him in this book of Mr. Carpenter's to that advantage which
perfect unaffectedness and sincerity can never lose. It is certainly a
very pathetic figure, however, that the painter presents us, and not to
be contemplated without sadness and that keen sense of personal loss
which we all felt in the death of Abraham Lincoln. During the time that
Mr. Carpenter was making studies for his picture of the President
signing the Emancipation Proclamation, he was in daily contact with
him,--saw him in consultation with his Cabinet, at play with his
children, receiving office-seekers of all kinds, granting many favors to
poor and friendless people, snubbing Secession insolence, and bearing
patiently much impertinence from every source,--jesting, laughing,
lamenting. It is singular that, in all these aspects of his character,
there is no want of true dignity, though there is an utter absence of
state,--and that we behold nothing of the man Lincoln was once doubted
to be, but only a person of noble simplicity, cautious but steadfast,
shrinking from none of the burdens that almost crushed him, profoundly
true to his faith in the people, while surveying the awful calamity of
the war with

"Anxious, pitying eyes,
As if he always listened to the sighs
Of the goaded world."

We have read Mr. Carpenter's book through with an interest chiefly due,
we believe, to the subject; for though the author had the faculty to
observe and to note characteristic and striking things, he has not the
literary art to present them adequately. His style is compact of the
manner of the local reporters and the Sunday-school books. If he depicts
a pathetic scene, he presently farces it by adding that "there was not a
dry eye among those that witnessed it," and goody-goody dwells in the
spirit and letter of all his attempts to portray the religious character
of the President. It is greatly to his credit, however, that his
observation is employed with discretion and delicacy; and as he rarely
lapses from good taste concerning things to be mentioned, we readily
forgive him his want of grace in recounting the