las in 1855 and culminating in his prolonged duel with him in the
autumn of 1858. It is unnecessary here to follow the complexities,
especially in regard to the Dred Scott judgments, through which the
discussion wandered. It is now worth few men's while to do more than
glance at two or three of his speeches at that period; his speeches in
the formal Lincoln-Douglas debates, except the first, are not the best
of them. A scientific student of rhetoric, as the art by which man do
actually persuade crowds, might indeed do well to watch closely the use
by Douglas and Lincoln of their respective weapons, but for most of us
it is an unprofitable business to read reiterated argument, even though
in beautiful language, upon points of doubt that no longer trouble us.
Lincoln does not always show to advantage; later readers have found him
inferior in urbanity to Douglas, of whom he disapproved, while Douglas
probably disapproved of no man; his speeches are, of course, not free
either from unsound arguments or from the rough and tumble of popular
debate; occasionally he uses hackneyed phrases; but it is remarkable
that a hackneyed or a falsely sentimental phrase in Lincoln comes
always as a lapse and a surprise. Passages abound in these speeches
which to almost any literate taste are arresting for the simple beauty
of their English, a beauty characteristic of one who had learned to
reason with Euclid and learned to feel and to speak with the authors of
the Bible. And in their own kind they were a classic and probably
unsurpassed achievement. Though Lincoln had to deal with a single
issue demanding no great width of knowledge, it must be evident that
the passions aroused by it and the confused and shifting state of
public sentiment made his problem very subtle, and it was a rare
profundity and sincerity of thought which solved it in his own mind.
In expressing the result of thought so far deeper than that of most
men, he achieved a clearness of expression which very few writers, and
those among the greatest, have excelled. He once during the
Presidential election of 1856 wrote to a supporter of Fillmore to
persuade him of a proposition which must seem paradoxical to anyone not
deeply versed in American institutions, namely, that it was actually
against Fillmore's interest to gain votes from Fremont in Illinois. He
demonstrated his point, but he was not always judicious in his way of
addressing solemn strangers, and in his rura