Wonderful, too, his literary achievements. His great passages read like the Bible, and have almost the moral authority thereof. If preachers ever wear the old Bible out, Lincoln's Second Inaugural, and his speech at Gettysburg, and certain other passages, will furnish texts for another hundred years. One thing is certain,--if Chinese students in their universities two thousand years from now translate any oration out of the English language, as we now translate the speeches of Demosthenes, these Chinese students will translate Lincoln's speech at Gettysburg, and his Second Inaugural Address. Contrary to the usual idea, it may be confidently affirmed that Lincoln was a well equipped man, and had the best possible training for literary style. During the plastic years of memory, Lincoln had three books to study, and two of these are the finest models for style in all literature,--King James' Version of the Bible, and Bunyan's "Pilgrim's Progress." These are the world's great literary masterpieces, these are the wells of English, pure and undefiled. Upon these two books Robert Burns was reared. To the fact that his mother made him commit to memory forty chapters of the Bible before he was seven years old, John Ruskin attributed his mastery in English style. Second rate men know something about everything. Lincoln was a first rate man who knew everything about some one thing. If you want to make a versatile man, turn a boy loose in a library. If you want a boy to have the note of distinction upon his pages, lock him out of a library, and send him into solitude, with the English Bible, with John Bunyan, and with AEsop's Fables, and let him take these three books into his intellect, as he takes meat and bread into the rich blood of the physical system.