utiny as few men have undergone.

Herndon's scrutiny does not reveal the current of his thoughts either
on life generally or on the political problem which hereafter was to
absorb him. It shows on the contrary, and the recollections of his
Presidency confirm it, that his thought on any important topic though
it might flash out without disguise in rare moments of intimacy,
usually remained long unexpressed. His great sociability had perhaps
even then a rather formidable side to it. He was not merely amusing
himself and other people, when he chatted and exchanged anecdotes far
into the night; there was an element, not ungenial, of purposeful study
in it all. He was building up his knowledge of ordinary human nature,
his insight into popular feeling, his rather slow but sure
comprehension of the individual men whom he did know. It astonished
the self-improving young Herndon that the serious books he read were
few and that he seldom seemed to read the whole of them--though with
the Bible, Shakespeare, and to a less extent Burns, he saturated his
mind. The few books and the great many men were part of one study. In
so far as his thought and study turned upon politics it seems to have
led him soon to the conclusion that he had for the present no part to
play that was worth playing. By 1854, as he said himself, "his
profession as a lawyer had almost superseded the thought of politics in
his mind." But it does not seem that the melancholy sense of some
great purpose unachieved or some great destiny awaiting him ever quite
left him. He must have felt that his chance of political fame was in
all appearance gone, and would have liked to win himself a considerable
position and a little (very little) money as a lawyer; but the study,
in the broadest sense, of which these years were full, evidently
contemplated a larger education of himself as a man than professional
keenness, or any such interest as he had in law, will explain.
Middle-aged and from his own point of view a failure, he was set upon
making himself a bigger man.

In some respects he let himself be. His exterior oddities never seem
to have toned down much; he could not be taught to introduce tidiness
or method into his office; nor did he make himself an exact lawyer; a
rough and ready familiarity with practice and a firm grasp of larger
principles of law contented him without any great apparatus of
learning. His method of study was as odd as anything else ab