at school,
who, if report be true, already knows much more than his father.'"

On the evening of February 27 a large and brilliant audience gathered at
Cooper Institute, to hear the famous Western orator. The scene was one
never to be forgotten by those who witnessed it. Upon the platform sat
many of the prominent men of the Republican party, and in the body of
the hall were many ladies. The meeting was presided over by the
distinguished citizen and poet William Cullen Bryant, of whom Mr.
Lincoln afterward said, "It was worth a journey to the East merely to
see such a man." The orator of the evening was introduced by Mr. Bryant
with some very complimentary allusions, especially to his controversy
with Douglas. "When Mr. Lincoln came on the platform and was introduced
by Mr. Bryant," says one who was present, "he seemed a giant in contrast
with him. His first sentence was delivered in a peculiarly high-keyed
voice, and disappointed us. In a short time the sharp points of his
address began to come, and he had not been speaking for half an hour
before his audience seemed wild with enthusiasm." Another account says:
"His manner was, to a New York audience, a very strange one, but it was
captivating. He held the vast meeting spell-bound, and as one by one
his oddly expressed but trenchant and convincing arguments confirmed the
soundness of his political conclusions, the house broke out in wild and
prolonged enthusiasm. I think I never saw an audience more thoroughly
carried away by an orator." This speech was full of trenchant passages,
which called forth tumultuous applause. The following is a specimen:

I defy anyone to show that any living man in the whole world ever
did, prior to the beginning of the present century (and I might
almost say prior to the beginning of the last half of the present
century), declare that, in his understanding, any proper division
of local from Federal authority, or any part of the Constitution,
forbade the Federal Government to control slavery in the Federal
territories. To those who now so declare, I give not only our
fathers who framed the government under which we live, but with
them all other living men within the century in which it was
framed, among whom to search, and they shall not be able to find
the evidence of a single man agreeing with them.

Referring to the South, and the growing political discontent in that
quarter, he s