His good feeling was not only personal, but national. He had no prejudice against any race or potentate. And his democracy was of a practical, rather than of a demonstrative, nature. He was not Marat, but Moreau--not Paine and Jefferson; but Franklin. His domestic life was like a parlor of night-time, lit by the equal grate of his genial and uniform kindness. Young Thaddy played with him upon the carpet; Robert came home from the war and talked to his father as to a school-mate, he was to Mrs. Lincoln as chivalrous on the last day of his life as when he courted her. I have somewhere seen a picture of Henry IV. of France, riding his babies on his back: that was the President. So dwelt the citizen who is gone--a model in character if not in ceremony, for good men to come who will take his place in the same White House, and find their generation comparing them to the man thought worthy of assassination. I am glad to sit here in his chair, where he has bent so often,--in the atmosphere of the household he purified, in the sight of the green grass and the blue river he hallowed by gazing upon, in the very centre of the nation he preserved for the people, and close the list of bloody deeds, of desperate fights of swift expiations, of renowned obsequies of which I have written, by inditing at his table the goodness of his life and the eternity of his memory. LETTER VIII. THE TRIAL. Washington, May 26. The most exciting trial of our times has obtained a very meager commemoration in all but its literal features. The evidence adduced in the course of it, has been too faithfully reported, through its far-fetched and monotonous irregularities, but nobody realizes the extraordinary scene from which so many columns emanate, either by aid of the reporters' scanty descriptions, or by the purblind sketches of the artists. Now that the evidence is growing vapid, and the obstinacy of the military commission has lost its coarse zest, we may find enough readers to warrant a fuller sketch of the conspirators' prison. About a mile below Washington, where the high Potomac Bluffs meet the marshy border of the Eastern branch, stands the United States arsenal, a series of long, mathematically uninteresting brick buildings, with a broad lawn behind them, open to the water, and level military plazas, on which are piled pyramids of shell and ball, among acres of cannon and cannon-carriages, and caissons. A high wall, reaching circularly around these buildings, shows above it, as one looks from Washington, the barred windows of an older and more gloomy structure than the rest, which forms the city front of the group of which it is the principal. This was a penitentiary, but, long ago added to the arsenal, it has been re-transformed to a court-room and jail, and in its third, or uppermost story, the Military Commission is sitting.