nd on a timely recognition of the influence of
passing events in shaping the features of events to come.

One secret of Mr. Lincoln's remarkable success in captivating the
popular mind is undoubtedly an unconsciousness of self which enables
him, though under the necessity of constantly using the capital _I_, to
do it without any suggestion of egotism. There is no single vowel
which men's mouths can pronounce with such difference of effect. That
which one shall hide away, as it were, behind the substance of his
discourse, or, if he bring it to the front, shall use merely to give an
agreeable accent of individuality to what he says, another shall make
an offensive challenge to the self-satisfaction of all his hearers, and
an unwarranted intrusion upon each man's sense of personal importance,
irritating every pore of his vanity, like a dry northeast wind, to a
goose-flesh of opposition and hostility. Mr. Lincoln has never studied
Quinctilian; but he has, in the earnest simplicity and unaffected
Americanism of his own character, one art of oratory worth all the
rest. He forgets himself so entirely in his object as to give his _I_
the sympathetic and persuasive effect of _We_ with the great body of
his countrymen. Homely, dispassionate, showing all the rough-edged
process of his thought as it goes along, yet arriving at his
conclusions with an honest kind of every-day logic, he is so eminently
our representative man, that, when he speaks, it seems as if the people
were listening to their own thinking aloud. The dignity of his thought
owes nothing to any ceremonial garb of words, but to the manly movement
that comes of settled purpose and an energy of reason that knows not
what rhetoric means. There has been nothing of Cleon, still less of
Strepsiades striving to underbid him in demagogism, to be found in the
public utterances of Mr. Lincoln. He has always addressed the
intelligence of men, never their prejudice, their passion, or their
ignorance.

On the day of his death, this simple Western attorney, who according to
one party was a vulgar joker, and whom the _doctrinaires_ among his own
supporters accused of wanting every element of statesmanship, was the
most absolute ruler in Christendom, and this solely by the hold his
good-humored sagacity had laid on the hearts and understandings of his
countrymen. Nor was this all, for it appeared that he had drawn the
great majority, not only of his fellow-citizens, but of