Some were, no doubt, a thousand years old, with just enough of verbal
varnish and alterations of names and date to make them new and crisp. By
virtue of the last named application, Lincoln was enabled to draw from
Balzac a 'droll story' and locating it 'in Egypt' (Southern Illinois)
or in Indiana, pass it off for a purely original conception. . . I have
seen Judge Treat, who was the very impersonation of gravity itself, sit
up till the last and laugh until, as he often expressed it, 'he almost
shook his ribs loose.' The next day he would ascend the bench and listen
to Lincoln in a murder trial with all the seeming severity of an English
judge in wig and gown."(5)

Lincoln enjoyed the life on the circuit. It was not that he was always
in a gale of spirits; a great deal of the time he brooded. His Homeric
nonsense alternated with fits of gloom. In spite of his late hours,
whether of study or of story-telling, he was an early riser. "He would
sit by the fire having uncovered the coals, and muse and ponder and
soliloquize."(6) Besides his favorite Shakespeare, he had a fondness for
poetry of a very different sort--Byron, for example. And he never tired
of a set of stanzas in the minor key beginning: "Oh, why should the
spirit of mortal be proud?"(7)

The hilarity of the circuit was not by any means the whole of its charm
for him. Part of that charm must have been the contrast with his recent
failure at Washington. This world he could master. Here his humor
increased his influence; and his influence grew rapidly. He was a
favorite of judges, jury and the bar. Then, too, it was a man's world.
Though Lincoln had a profound respect for women, he seems generally to
have been ill at ease in their company. In what his friends would have
called "general society" he did not shine. He was too awkward, too
downright, too lacking in the niceties. At home, though he now owned