After the return of Mr. Lincoln to New York from the East, where he had made several speeches, he said to me: “I have seen what all the New York papers said about that thing of mine in the Cooper Institute, with the exception of the New York _Evening Post_, and I would like to know what Mr. Bryant thought of it”; and he then added: “It is worth a visit from Springfield, Illinois, to New York to make the acquaintance of such a man as William Cullen Bryant.” At Mr. Lincoln’s request I sent him a copy of the _Evening Post_, with a notice of his lecture. Raymond and the _Times_, when the Republican national convention met in Chicago on May 16, 1860, were ardently for Seward--indeed, Thurlow Weed and Raymond were Seward’s chief lieutenants there. Greeley, had he been able to make the nomination himself, would have chosen Bates of Missouri first, and anybody to beat Seward second. Bryant, up to the time of the Cooper Union speech, had supported Chase for the nomination, but he knew that his chances were slight and he now leaned toward Lincoln--for he also was anxious to see Seward beaten. The _Evening Post’s_ dislike of Seward dated from 1853, when it had declared (Nov. 2) that his friends in the Whig Party and a Democratic faction had formed a corrupt combination to plunder the State treasury through contracts. Its bitterness against him had steadily increased during the years of his close association with the political boss, Thurlow Weed. No one believed that Seward was dishonest, but thousands thought that Weed’s methods were detestable, and that Seward’s intimacy with men who schemed for public grants was altogether too close. References to the connection between “Seward’s chances” and “New York street railroads” had become common in 1859. Bryant wrote his associate Bigelow on Dec. 14 that, much as Seward had been hurt by the misconstruction of his phrase “the irrepressible conflict,” he had been damaged more in New York by something else. “I mean the project of Thurlow Weed to give charters for a set of city railways, for which those who receive them are to furnish a fund of from four to six hundred thousand dollars, to be expended for the Republican cause in the next Presidential election.” He added on Feb. 20: