d it was really good fortune
that he passed through the hobbledehoy period in the presence of
audiences whose taste was no better than his own.

Occasionally amid the tedium of these high-flown commonplaces there
opens a fissure through which the inner spirit of the man looks out for
an instant. It is well known that Lincoln was politically ambitious; his
friends knew it, his biographers have said it, he himself avowed it.
Now and again, in these early days, when his horizon could hardly have
ranged beyond the state legislature and the lower house of Congress, he
uttered some sentences which betrayed longings of a high moral grade,
and indicated that office and power were already regarded by him as the
opportunities for great actions. Strenuous as ought to be the objection
to that tone in speaking of Lincoln which seems to proceed from beneath
the sounding-board of the pulpit, and which uses him as a Sunday-school
figure to edify a piously admiring world, yet it certainly seems a plain
fact that his day-dreams at this period foreshadowed the acts of his
later years, and that what he pleased himself with imagining was not the
acquirement of official position but the achievement of some great
benefit for mankind. He did not, of course, expect to do this as a
philanthropist; for he understood himself sufficiently to know that his
road lay in the public service. Accordingly he talks not as Clarkson or
Wilberforce, but as a public man, of "emancipating slaves," of
eliminating slavery and drunkenness from the land; at the same time he
speaks thus not as a politician shrewdly anticipating the coming popular
impulse, but as one desiring to stir that impulse. When he said, in his
manifesto in 1832, that he had "no other ambition so great as that of
being truly esteemed by his fellow-men," he uttered words which in the
mouths of most politicians have the irritating effect of the dreariest
and cheapest of platitudes; but he obviously uttered them with the
sincerity of a deep inward ambition, that kind of an ambition which is
often kept sacred from one's nearest intimates. Many side glimpses show
him in this light, and it seems to be the genuine and uncolored one.

In 1838 Lincoln was again elected a member of the lower house of the
legislature, and many are the amusing stories told of the canvass. It
was in this year that he made sudden onslaught on the demagogue Dick
Taylor, and opening with a sudden jerk the artful colonel's wai