It was my good fortune to have known Mr. Lincoln long and well,--so long and so intimately that as the shadows lengthen and the years recede I am more and more impressed by the rugged grandeur and nobility of his character, his strength of intellect, and his singular purity of heart. Surely I am the last man on earth to say or do aught in derogation of his matchless worth, or to tarnish the fair fame of him who was, during eighteen of the most eventful years of my life, a constant, considerate, and never-failing friend. The world has long since conceded that Abraham Lincoln was great in all the elements that go to make up human greatness. He had a stamp of originality entirely his own. With his unique individuality and his commanding intellect--at once strong, sagacious, and profoundly acute and critical--were associated a mental integrity and a moral purpose as firm as granite, a thorough knowledge of himself, and a modesty that scorned not only self-laudation but eulogy by others for fame or achievements not his own. An act accomplished by him, either in his character of a citizen or as a public servant, he regarded more as a duty discharged than as an achievement of which to be proud. He was charitable to a fault; and yet no man ever discriminated more narrowly in forming a judgment concerning the character, the acts, and the motives of other men, or had a keener appreciation of merit or demerit in others. With his characteristic honesty and simplicity we may well suppose, that, were he alive to-day, he would feel under little obligation to the swarm of fulsome eulogists who have made up a large part of the current chronicles of his life and public conduct by ascribing to him ornamental virtues which he never possessed, and motives, purposes, and achievements which he would promptly disown if he could now speak for himself. Discriminating observers and students of history have not failed to note the fact that the ceremony of Mr. Lincoln's apotheosis was not only planned but executed by men who were unfriendly to him while he lived, and that the deification took place with showy magnificence some time after the great man's lips were sealed in death. Men who had exhausted the resources of their skill and ingenuity in venomous detraction of the living Lincoln, especially during the last years of his life, were the first, when the assassin's bullet had closed the career of the great-hearted statesman, to undertake the self-imposed task of guarding his memory,--not as a human being endowed with a mighty intellect and extraordinary virtues, but as a god. In fact, the tragic death of Mr. Lincoln brought a more fearful panic to his former traducers than to his friends. The latter's legacy was deep sorrow and mourning; the former were left to the humiliating necessity of a change of base to place themselves _en rapport_ with the millions who mourned the loss of their greatest patriot and statesman.