It is truly said that Lincoln lived through four long-suffering years—years of ill-fate, ill-feeling, and ill-report—and lived to hear "the hisses change to cheers, the taunts to tribute, the abuse to praise," and took both with the same unwavering mood. Unhappily, as we have seen, by the change in Punch's view not being expressed until Lincoln was dead, the tribute lost its grace.
The toll of great or eminent men taken by 1865 was heavy, and memorial verses abound. Cobden, successively eulogized as a Free-Trader and attacked and even execrated as a Pacificist, died in the spring, and Lord Palmerston, the greatest of the Elder Statesmen, in the autumn. As we have often had occasion to notice in this chronicle, Punch had alternated between admiration of Palmerston's nerve and dislike of his Parliamentary opportunism. But no jarring note is struck in his eulogy; there is nothing elegiac in the cheerful dactyls—after the model of Tom Moore—in which he pays homage to Palmerston's wisdom, his courage, and his humour, and skates over the thin ice of his masterly inactivity in the cause of Reform:—
We trusted his wisdom, but love drew us nearer
Than homage we owed to his statesmanly art,
For never was statesman to Englishmen dearer
Than he who had faith in the great English heart.
The frank merry laugh, and the honest eye filling
With mirth, and the jests that so rapidly fell,
Told out the State-secret that made us right willing
To follow his leading—he loved us all well.