taste for both; these
stimulated and educated the settlers in a way that only Americans can
appreciate. When Lincoln, as is soon to be seen, turned to them, he
turned to what then and there appeared the highest callings which could
tempt intellect and ambition.

The preeminently striking feature in Lincoln's nature--not a trait of
character, but a characteristic of the man--which is noteworthy in these
early days, and grew more so to the very latest, was the extraordinary
degree to which he always appeared to be in close and sympathetic touch
with the people, that is to say, the people in the mass wherein he was
imbedded, the social body amid which he dwelt, which pressed upon him on
all sides, which for him formed "the public." First this group or body
was only the population of the frontier settlement; then it widened to
include the State of Illinois; then it expanded to the population of the
entire North; and such had come to be the popular appreciation of this
remarkably developed quality that, at the time of his death, his
admirers even dared to believe that it would be able to make itself one
with all the heterogeneous, discordant, antagonistic elements which then
composed the very disunited United States. It is by reason of this
quality that it has seemed necessary to depict so far as possible that
peculiar, transitory phase of society which surrounded his early days.
This quality in him caused him to be exceptionally susceptible to the
peculiar influences of the people among whom his lot was cast. This
quality for a while prevented his differentiating himself from them,
prevented his accepting standards and purposes unlike theirs either in
speech or action, prevented his rising rapidly to a higher moral plane
than theirs. This quality kept him essentially one of them, until his
"people" and his "public" expanded beyond them. It has been the fashion
of his admirers to manifest an extreme distaste for a truthful
presentation of his earlier days. Some writers have passed very lightly
over them; others, stating plain facts with a formal accuracy, have used
their skill to give to the picture an untruthful miscoloring; two or
three, instinct with the spirit of Zola, have made their sketch with
plain unsparing realism in color as well as in lines, and so have
brought upon themselves abuse, and perhaps have deserved much of it, by
reason of a lack of skill in doing an unwelcome thing, or rather by
reason of overdoing it