nch liberals brought the
medal to the American minister, to be sent to Mrs. Lincoln. "Tell
her," said Eugene Pelletan, "the heart of France is in that little
box." The inscription had a double sense; while honoring the dead
republican, it struck at the Empire: "Lincoln--the Honest Man;
abolished Slavery, reestablished the Union; Saved the Republic,
without veiling the Statue of Liberty."

Everywhere on the Continent the same swift apotheosis of the people's
hero was seen. An Austrian deputy said to the writer, "Among my people
his memory has already assumed superhuman proportions; he has become a
myth, a type of ideal democracy." Almost before the earth closed over
him he began to be the subject of fable. The Freemasons of Europe
generally regard him as one of them--his portrait in masonic garb is
often displayed; yet he was not one of that brotherhood. The
spiritualists claim him as their most illustrious adept, but he was
not a spiritualist; and there is hardly a sect in the Western world,
from the Calvinist to the atheist, but affects to believe he was of
their opinion.

A collection of the expressions of sympathy and condolence which came
to Washington from foreign governments, associations, and public
bodies of all sorts, was made by the State Department, and afterward
published by order of Congress. It forms a large quarto of a thousand
pages, and embraces the utterances of grief and regret from every
country under the sun, in almost every language spoken by man.

But admired and venerated as he was in Europe, he was best understood
and appreciated at home. It is not to be denied that in his case, as
in that of all heroic personages who occupy a great place in history,
a certain element of legend mingles with his righteous fame. He was a
man, in fact, especially liable to legend....

Because Lincoln kept himself in such constant sympathy with the common
people, whom he respected too highly to flatter or mislead, he was
rewarded by a reverence and a love hardly ever given to a human being.
Among the humble working people of the South whom he had made free
this veneration and affection easily passed into the supernatural. At
a religious meeting among the negroes of the Sea Islands a young man
exprest the wish that he might see Lincoln. A gray-headed negro
rebuked the rash aspiration: "No man see Linkum. Linkum walk as Jesus
walk; no man see Linkum."...

The quick instinct by which the world recognized him even