c account.
It was kept by others besides Mr. Rutledge; for a time by Henry
Onstott the cooper, and then by Nelson Alley, and possibly there were
other landlords; but nothing can be more certain than that Lincoln
was not one of them. The few surviving inhabitants of the vanished
village, and of the country round about, have a clear recollection of
Berry and Lincoln's store--of how it looked, and of what things were
sold in it; but not one has been found with the faintest remembrance
of a tavern kept by Lincoln, or by Berry, or by both. Stage passengers
jolting into New Salem sixty-two years ago must, if Lincoln was an
inn-keeper, have partaken of his hospitality by the score; but if they
did, they all died many, many years ago, or have all maintained an
unaccountable and most perplexing silence.--_J. McCan Davis._]

"'Your last suggestion,' said Mr. Lincoln, 'carries with it greater
weight than anything Mr. Hackett suggested, but the first is no reason
at all;' and after reading another passage, he said, 'This is not
withheld, and where it passes current there can be no reason for
withholding the other.'... And, as if feeling the impropriety of
preferring the player to the parson, [there was a clergyman in the
room] he turned to the chaplain and said: 'From your calling it is
probable that you do not know that the acting plays which people crowd
to hear are not always those planned by their reputed authors. Thus,
take the stage edition of "Richard III." It opens with a passage from
"Henry VI.," after which come portions of "Richard III.," then another
scene from "Henry VI.," and the finest soliloquy in the play, if we
may judge from the many quotations it furnishes, and the frequency
with which it is heard in amateur exhibitions, was never seen by
Shakespeare, but was written--was it not, Mr. McDonough?--after his
death, by Colley Cibber."

"Having disposed, for the present, of questions relating to the stage
editions of the plays, he recurred to his standard copy, and, to
the evident surprise of Mr. McDonough, read or repeated from memory
extracts from several of the plays, some of which embraced a number of
lines.

"It must not be supposed that Mr. Lincoln's poetical studies had
been confined to his plays. He interspersed his remarks with extracts
striking from their similarity to, or contrast with, something of
Shakespeare's, from Byron, Rogers, Campbell, Moore, and other English
poets."[1]

[Illustration: BERRY