In the New York World appeared the following just estimate of these two biographies:
"Mr. Ward H. Lamon is the author of one 'Life of Lincoln,' and Dr. J. G. Holland is the author of another. Mr. Lamon was the intimate personal and political friend of Mr. Lincoln, trusting and trusted, from the time of their joint practice in the Illinois Quarter Sessions to the moment of Mr. Lincoln's death at Washington. Dr. Holland was nothing to Mr. Lincoln—neither known nor knowing. Dr. Holland rushed his 'Life' from the press before the disfigured corpse was fairly out of sight, while the public mind lingered with horror over the details of the tragedy, and, excited by morbid curiosity, was willing to pay for its gratification. Mr. Lamon waited many years, until all adventitious interest had subsided, and then with incredible labor and pains, produced a volume founded upon materials which for their fulness, variety, and seeming authenticity are unrivaled in the history of biographies.
"Dr. Holland's single volume professed to cover the whole of Mr. Lincoln's career. Mr. Lamon's single volume was modestly confined to a part of it. Dr. Holland's was an easy, graceful, off-hand performance, having but the one slight demerit of being in all essential particulars untrue from beginning to end. Mr. Lamon's was a labored, cautious, and carefully verified narrative which seems to have been accepted by disinterested critics as entirely authentic.
"Dr. Holland would probably be very much shocked if anybody should ask him to bear false witness in favor of his neighbor in a court of justice, but he takes up his pen to make a record which he hopes and intends shall endure forever, and in that record deliberately bears false witness in favor of a public man whom he happened to admire, with no kind of offense to his serene and 'cultured' conscience. If this were all—if Dr. Holland merely asserted his own right to compose and publish elaborate fictions on historical subjects—we might comfort ourselves with the reflection that such literature is likely to be as evanescent as it is dishonest, and let him pass in silence. But this is not all. He maintains that it is everybody's duty to help him to deceive the public and to write down his more conscientious competitor. He turns up the nose of 'culture' and curls the lip of 'art' at Mr. Lamon's homely narrative of facts, and gravely insists that all other noses and all other lips shall be turned up and curled because his are. He implores the public, which he insulted and gulled with his own book, to damn Mr. Lamon's, and he puts his request on the very ground that Mr. Lamon has stupidly gone and narrated undeniable truths, whereby he has demolished an empty shrine that was profitable to many, and broken a painted idol that might have served for a god.
"The names of Holland and Lamon are not of themselves and by themselves illustrious; but starting from the title-pages of the two Lives of Lincoln, and representing, as they do, the two schools of biography writers, the one stands for a principle and the other for the want of it."
CHAPTER VIII. TESTIMONY OF HON. JOHN T. STUART AND COL. JAMES H. MATHENY
Testimony of Hon. John T. Stuart—Testimony of Col. James
H. Matheny—Stuart's Disclaimer—Matheny's Disclaimer—
Examination and Authorship of Disclaimers, Including the
Edwards and Lewis Letters.
Besides his own testimony concerning Lincoln's unbelief, Colonel Lamon cites the testimony of ten additional witnesses: Hon. Wm. H. Herndon, Hon. John T. Stuart, Col. James H. Matheny, Dr. C. H. Ray, Wm. H. Hannah, Esq, Mr. Jas. W. Keys, Hon. Jesse W. Fell, Col. John G. Nicolay, Hon. David Davis and Mrs. Mary Lincoln. The testimony of Mr. Herndon having already been presented, the testimony of Mr. Stuart and Colonel Matheny will next be given. This testimony was procured by Mr. Herndon for the purpose of refuting the erroneous statements of Dr. Holland.
Hon. John T. Stuart, who was for a time a member of Congress from Illinois, was the first law partner of Lincoln. He says: