almost precisely the style of his later years," it would be quite as
wrong to deny any likeness between the two. In the first place, we
have the same severely logical treatment of the subject matter, from
which Lincoln, a lawyer and public speaker, never departed. Lincoln's
grammar may not have been impeccable at this time, but his thinking
powers were already little short of masterly. This, then, is the first
element in the makeup of Lincoln's style, the ability to think straight
and consequently to write straight. His legal training, which was then
very meagre, cannot account for his logical thinking; it is more
correct to say that he later became a successful lawyer because of the
logical bent of his mind.

Closely connected with this early development of the form of thinking
was Lincoln's interest in words, and his desire always to use words
with a perfect understanding of their meaning. Even in his boyhood he
found pleasure in discovering the exact meaning of a new word and in
later life he was constantly adding to his verbal stores. Shortly
before his inauguration Lincoln remarked to a clergyman, who had asked
him how he had acquired his remarkable power of "putting things": "I
can say this, that among my earliest recollections I remember how, when
a mere child, I used to get irritated when anybody talked to me in a
way I could not understand. I don't think I ever got angry at anything
else in my life. But that always disturbed my temper, and has ever
since. I can remember going to my little bedroom, after hearing the
neighbors talk of an evening with my father, and spending no small part
of the night walking up and down, trying to make out what was the exact
meaning of their, to me, dark sayings."

In this first address we find no loose use of words. The character of
the address does not of course admit of ornament or figurative