The most serious man in appearance in the United States, excepting none of the early Puritan divines, was probably the late President Lincoln. His visage was not only earnest and solemn but positively mournful whenever it was in repose. He was a debater of high order, he was a logician whom men who had held him in contempt for his homely ways and awkward manner learned to respect as soon as they crossed verbal swords with him, but Lincoln’s strongest argument was always a joke. He said and wrote many things which were grand in their day, but which seemed to have been entombed in printed pages and diplomatic papers, for one seldom hears them quoted now-a-days; yet his jokes still live. They are perennial, not merely those which were attributed to him, but those which he really made. “To clinch a point,” which was one of his own favorite expressions, he tried the patience of his Cabinet severely at times by persisting in joking upon serious subjects--matters of great moment at the time; and it is said upon good authority that once he opened the Cabinet meeting called specially with the hope of averting great disaster to the Union cause by reading the last printed letter of “Petroleum V. Nasby on the Democratic doings at Confederit X Roads, State ov Kentucky.” Before the meeting was over, however, Mr. Lincoln read his Emancipation Proclamation. While Mr. Seward, as able and adroit a man as ever held the portfolio of Secretary of State, would be wondering how to reply to an annoying committee or deputation which had come from some one of the Northern States to instruct the Government how to carry on the war, Mr. Lincoln was quietly constructing a little joke or recalling one from his past experiences which would be appropriate to the occasion, and after the joke was inflicted upon the committee Mr. Seward was sure to find that his own carefully prepared speech was entirely unnecessary.