n with a flourish:--

"'Now is the winter of our discontent
Made glorious summer by this sun of York,
And all the clouds that lowered upon our house,
In the deep bosom of the ocean buried.'

"'Now,' said he, 'this is all wrong. Richard, you remember, had been,
and was then plotting the destruction of his brothers, to make room
for himself. Outwardly, the most loyal to the newly crowned king,
secretly he could scarcely contain his impatience at the obstacles
still in the way of his own elevation. He appears upon the stage, just
after the crowning of Edward, burning with repressed hate and
jealousy. The prologue is the utterance of the most intense bitterness
and satire.' Then, unconsciously assuming the character, Mr. Lincoln
repeated, also from memory, Richard's soliloquy, rendering it with a
degree of force and power that made it seem like a new creation to me.
Though familiar with the passage from boyhood, I can truly say that
never till that moment had I fully appreciated its spirit. I could not
refrain from laying down my palette and brushes, and applauding
heartily upon his conclusion, saying, at the same time, half in
earnest, that I was not sure but that he had made a mistake in the
choice of a profession, considerably, as may be imagined, to his
amusement. Mr. Sinclair has since repeatedly said to me that he never
heard these choice passages of Shakspeare rendered with more effect by
the most famous of modern actors."

Lincoln's sense of the classic phrase seems to have been native with
him, for we find it in his earliest utterances. Such a phrase appears
in homely proverbial form in his first speech: "My politics are short
and sweet, like the old woman's dance." Impaired in rhythm of thought
and sound by an awkward, though logical, parenthetical expression,
another phrase stands out in a "spread-eagle" passage from his first
formal address, that on "The Perpetuation of Our Political
Institutions."

"All the armies of Europe, Asia, and Africa combined, with all the
treasure of earth (our own excepted) in its military chest, with a
Bonaparte for a commander, could not by force _take a drink from the
Ohio or make a track on the Blue Ridge_ in a trial of a thousand
years."

And in a eulogy on Washington, Lincoln early achieved a line which in
phonetic quality, rhetorical figure and rhythmic cadence is pure
poetry, though not of an exceptional order.

"I