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was well stored with favourite passages1 such as the King's Speech in Hamlet (iii. 3), beginning

"O my offence is rank,"

and concluding with the great passage on repentance, and his own failure to repent; and Macbeth's

"Treason has done his worst" (iii. 2).

Himself an excellent reciter, he was deeply interested in dramatic representations, and we find him about this time corresponding with an actor who had recently played Falstaff in Washington. Some of the plays Lincoln read over and over again, not systematically, but sympathetically. Macbeth was his favourite; "I think nothing equals Macbeth. is wonderful," he wrote.

It

The letter got into print, and was sneered at by some superior persons. Lincoln wrote again, "Those comments constitute a fair specimen of what has occurred to me through life. I have endured a great deal of ridicule without much malice; and have 1 Among his favourite poems was Oliver Wendell Holmes's The Last Leaf, especially the verse

"The mossy marbles rest

On the lips that he has prest

In their bloom,

And the names he loved to hear

Have been carved for many a year

On the tomb."

Of this he said, "For pure pathos, in my judgment, there is nothing finer than those lines in the English language."

His predilection for the lines commencing

“Oh, why should the spirit of mortal be proud"

has already been referred to.

Among other works which left an impression on his mind were the Poems of Byron; and in another field, Bacon's Essays, and again, Chambers' Vestiges of Creation.

received a great deal of kindness, not quite free from ridicule. I am used to it."

It was about the same time too, that he wrote to Mrs Lincoln in homely mood. "Tell dear Tad, poor 'Nanny Goat' is lost, and Mrs Cuthbert and I are in distress about it. The day you left, Nanny was found resting herself and chewing her little cud on the middle of Tad's bed; but now she's gone! The gardener kept complaining that she destroyed the flowers [at the Soldiers' Home, Lincoln's summer house in the further suburbs], till it was concluded to bring her down to the White House. This was done, and the second day she had disappeared, and has not been heard of since."

The story of Abraham Lincoln would hardly be true to the man if it were not patched with the sublime and the ridiculous side by side. And so, against these passages in the lighter vein, we will set that most solemn and dignified of all his public utterances, the address at the dedication of the national cemetery on the field of Gettysburg on the 19th November.1

"Fourscore and seven years ago, our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battle-field of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field as a final

1 Referring to the unpopularity of the President among Washington politicians at this time, one of the most prominent Republicans said of his visit to Gettysburg, "Let the dead bury the dead."

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resting-place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live.

It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this. But, in a larger sense, we cannot dedicate we cannot consecrate-we cannot hallow this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us, the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us-that from these honoured dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion; that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain; that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom; and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth."

It seems strange that the beauty and power of this Address was not immediately acclaimed. Perhaps its effect was marred at the time of its delivery by the torrents of eloquence which flowed from other lips.

One of the President's party declares that Lincoln said to him, “Lamon, that speech won't scour ! It is a flat failure, and the people are disappointed." The same writer says that Seward also shared the feeling. However this may have been, that disappointment soon passed, and the only questions which are now raised about it refer to the origin of its concluding sentence. Lincoln himself once declared, "I am only

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