In cold weather he used to wear a large grey shawl instead of an overcoat. One day, before he was made President, some friends were discussing Lincoln and Douglas, and comparing their heights. When Lincoln came into the room some one asked him, “How long ought a man’s legs to be?”
“Long enough to reach from his body to the ground,” said Lincoln coolly.
Lincoln might look uncouth or even grotesque, but he did not look weak: he was the most striking figure wherever he went. No one who saw him often, no one who went to him in trouble, or to ask his advice, thought long of his appearance. Those who had once felt the sympathy of his wonderful, sad eyes, thought of that only. Those who really knew him, knew him to be the best man they had ever met.
Lincoln was often profoundly sad, and then suddenly boisterously gay. He enjoyed a joke or a funny story immensely: he often used to shock thoughtless people by telling some comic story on what they thought an unsuitable occasion; but he told it so well that however much they might disapprove they were generally forced to laugh.
Always rather a dreamer, he was fond of poetry. He knew long passages of Shakespeare by heart, especially Hamlet, Macbeth, and Richard III. The Bible he had known from his childhood; of Burns he was very fond.
Lincoln’s rise to power, as even so short an account as this will have shown you, was not due to any extraordinary good fortune or any advantages at start. He taught himself all that he knew; he made himself what he was.
It was his character more than anything else that made him great. His early struggles had taught him that self-reliance which enabled him to persevere in a course which he thought right in spite of opposition, disloyalty, and abuse; they taught him the toleration which made him slow to judge others, generous to praise them, little apt to expect them to understand or praise him. He stood alone.
Not till he had gone did his people realise how much he had given them; how much they had lost in him. He gave them, indeed, the most priceless gift a patriot can give his country—the example of sincere, devoted, and unselfish service.
THE END
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