all three elements were present. He had not the brilliance, either in
thought or word or act, that dazzles, nor the restless activity that
occasionally pushes to the front even persons with gifts not of the
first order. He was a patient, thoughtful, melancholy man, whose
intelligence, working sometimes slowly but always steadily and surely,
was capacious enough to embrace and vigorous enough to master the
incomparably difficult facts and problems he was called to deal with.
His executive talent showed itself not in sudden and startling strokes,
but in the calm serenity with which he formed his judgments and laid his
plans, in the undismayed firmness with which he adhered to them in the
face of popular clamour, of conflicting counsels from his advisers,
sometimes, even, of what others deemed all but hopeless failure. These
were the qualities needed in one who had to pilot the Republic through
the heaviest storm that had ever broken upon it. But the mainspring of
his power, and the truest evidence of his greatness, lay in the nobility
of his aims, in the fervour of his conviction, in the stainless
rectitude which guided his action and won for him the confidence of the
people. Without these things neither the vigour of his intellect nor the
firmness of his will would have availed.

There is a vulgar saying that all great men are unscrupulous. Of him it
may rather be said that the note of greatness we feel in his thinking
and his speech and his conduct had its source in the loftiness and
purity of his character. Lincoln's is one of the careers that refute
this imputation on human nature.

JAMES BRYCE


The following is a list of Lincoln's published works: