Messrs. Hay and Nicolay, who were nearer to him and knew him better than any other men, say, "Nothing would more have amazed Mr. Lincoln than to hear himself called a man of letters; but this age had produced few greater writers. Emerson ranks him with Æsop; Montalembert commends his style as a model for princes. It is true that in his writing the range of subjects is not great. He was chiefly concerned with the political problems of the time and the moral considerations involved in them. But the range of treatment is remarkably wide, running from the wit, the gay humor, the florid eloquence of his stump speeches to the marvellous sententiousness and brevity of the address at Gettysburg and the sustained and lofty grandeur of his second inaugural; while many of his phrases have already passed into the daily use of mankind." But he made other speeches, equally admirable, and some of them unsurpassed by the greatest political or platform orators. Wendell Phillips, Henry Ward Beecher, Robert G. Ingersoll, James G. Blaine, Benjamin Harrison, and others who have gained fame for oratory have each given testimony for the simple yet sublime eloquence of the great master. Many critics consider Lincoln's Peoria speech of 1854 the ablest political argument ever delivered, and assert that no master of logic in the world could have answered it. One of its epigrams has been quoted thousands of times. "When the white man governs himself," he said, "that, I acknowledge, is self-government; but when the white man governs himself and another man besides, that I call despotism."