the burial service the "Second Inaugural" was read over his grave, nor could better words than his own have been chosen to honour one who "with malice toward none, with charity toward all, with firmness in the right as God gave him to see the right, had striven on to finish the work that he was in." In England, apart from more formal tokens of a late-learnt regard and an unfeigned regret, Punch embodied in verse of rare felicity the manly contrition of its editor for ignorant derision in past years; and Queen Victoria symbolised best of all, and most acceptably to Americans, the feeling of her people when she wrote to Mrs. Lincoln "as a widow to a widow." Nor, though the transactions in which he bore his part were but little understood in this country till they were half forgotten, has tradition ever failed to give him, by just instinct, his rank with the greatest of our race.

Many great deeds had been done in the war. The greatest was the keeping of the North together in an enterprise so arduous, and an enterprise for objects so confusedly related as the Union and freedom. Abraham Lincoln did this; nobody else could have done it; to do it he bore on his sole shoulders such a weight of care and pain as few other men have borne. When it was over it seemed to the people that he had all along been thinking their real thoughts for them; but they knew that this was because he had fearlessly thought for himself. He had been able to save the nation, partly because he saw that unity was not to be sought by the way of base concession. He had been able to free the slaves, partly because he would not hasten to this object at the sacrifice of what he thought a larger purpose. This most unrelenting enemy to the project of the Confederacy was the one man who had quite purged his heart and mind from hatred or even anger towards his fellowcountrymen of the South. That fact came to be seen in the South too, and generations in America are likely to remember it when all other features of his statecraft have grown indistinct. A thousand reminiscences ludicrous or pathetic, passing into myth but enshrining

hard fact, will prove to them that this great feature of his policy was a matter of more than policy. They will remember it as adding a peculiar lustre to the renovation of their national existence; as no small part of the glory, surpassing that of former wars, which has become the common heritage of North and South. For perhaps not many conquerors, and certainly few successful statesmen have escaped the tendency of power to harden or at least to narrow their human sympathies; but in this man a natural wealth of tender compassion became richer and more tender while in the stress of deadly conflict he developed an astounding strength.

Beyond his own country some of us recall his name as the greatest among those associated with the cause of popular government. He would have liked this tribute, and the element of truth in it is plain enough, yet it demands one final consideration. He accepted the institutions to which he was born, and he enjoyed them. His own intense experience of the weakness of democracy did not sour him, nor would any similar experience of later times have been likely to do so. Yet if he reflected much on forms of government it was with a dominant interest in something beyond them. For he was a citizen of that far country where there is neither aristocrat nor democrat. No political theory stands out from his words or actions; but they show a most unusual sense of the possible dignity of common men and common things. His humour rioted in comparisons between potent personages and Jim Jett's brother or old Judge Brown's drunken coachman, for the reason for which the rarely jesting Wordsworth found a hero in the "LeechGatherer" or in Nelson and a villain in Napoleon or in Peter Bell. He could use and respect and pardon and overrule his far more accomplished ministers because he stood up to them with no more fear or cringing, with no more dislike or envy or disrespect than he had felt when he stood up long before to Jack Armstrong. He faced the difficulties and terrors of his high office with that same mind with which he had paid his way as a poor man or navigated a boat in rapids or in floods. If he had a theory

of democracy it was contained in this condensed note which he wrote, perhaps as an autograph, a year or two before his Presidency: "As I would not be a slave, so I would not be a master. This expresses my idea of democracy. Whatever differs from this, to the extent of the difference, is no democracy.-A. LINCOLN."

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE

A COMPLETE bibliography of books dealing specially with Lincoln, and of books throwing important light upon his life or upon the history of the American Civil War, cannot be attempted here. The author aims only at mentioning the books which have been of greatest use to him and a few others to which reference ought obviously to be made.

The chief authorities for the life of Lincoln are :

"Abraham Lincoln: A History," by John G. Nicolay and John Hay (his private secretaries), in ten volumes: The Century Company, New York, and T. Fisher Unwin, London; "The Works of Abraham Lincoln " (i.e., speeches, letters, and State papers), in eight volumes: G. Putnam's Sons, London and New York; and, for his early life, "The Life of Abraham Lincoln," by Herndon and Weik: Appleton, London and New York.

There are numerous short biographies of Lincoln, but among these it is not invidious to mention as the best (expressing as it does the mature judgment of the highest authority) "A Short Life of Abraham Lincoln," by John G. Nicolay: The Century Company, New York.

The author may be allowed to refer, moreover, to the interest aroused in him as a boy by " Abraham Lincoln, by C. G. Leland, in the "New Plutarch Series ": Marcus Ward & Co., London; and to the light he has much later derived from "Abraham Lincoln," by John T. Morse, Junior: Houghton Mifflin Company, Boston, U.S.A.

Among studies of Lincoln, containing a wealth of illustrative stories, a very high place is due to "The True Abraham Lincoln," by William Eleroy Curtis: The J. B. Lippincott Company, Philadelphia and London.

For the history of America at the period concerned the