that from these honored dead we take increased
devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of
devotion; that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have
died in vain; that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of
freedom; and that government of the people, by the people, for the
people, shall not perish from the earth." Here was eloquence of a
different sort from the sonorous perorations of Webster or the polished
climaxes of Everett. As we read the plain, strong language of this
brief classic, with its solemnity, its restraint, its "brave old wisdom
of sincerity," we seem to see the president's homely features
irradiated with the light of coming martyrdom--

"The kindly-earnest, brave, foreseeing man,
Sagacious, patient, dreading praise, not blame,
New birth of our new soil, the first American."

Within the past quarter of a century the popular school of American
humor has reached its culmination. Every man of genius who is a
humorist at all is so in a way peculiar to himself. There is no lack
of individuality in the humor of Irving and Hawthorne and the wit of
Holmes and Lowell, but although they are new in subject and application
they are not new in kind. Irving, as we have seen, was the literary
descendant of Addison. The character-sketches in _Bracebridge Hall_
are of the same family with Sir Roger de Coverley and the other figures
of the Spectator Club. _Knickerbocker's History of New York_, though
purely American in its matter, is not distinctly American in its
method, which is akin to the mock heroic of Fielding and the irony of
Swift in the _Voyage to Lilliput_. Irving's humor, like that of all
the great English humorists, had its root in the perception of
character--of the characteristic traits of men and classes of men, as
ground of amusement. It depended for its effect, therefore, upon its
truthfulness, its dramatic insight and sympathy, as did the humor of
Shakespeare, of Sterne, Lamb, and Thackeray. This perception of the
characteristic, when pushed to excess, issues in grotesque and
caricature, as in some of Dickens's inferior creations, which are
little more than personified single tricks of manner, speech, feature,
or dress. Hawthorne's rare humor differed from Irving's in temper but
not in substance, and belonged, like Irving's, to the English variety.
Dr. Holmes's more pronouncedly comic verse does not differ specifically
from the _facetiae