Some writers, and more orators, have professed to see in the character of Lincoln a perfect balancing of all desirable qualities. Bishop Fowler, in what was perhaps the most widely popular of all popular orations on Lincoln, attributed his own inability to analyze the character of Lincoln to its perfect sphericity, a consistency such that any attempt to consider any quality by itself met the counterbalancing consideration of all the other qualities. But the antitheses in Lincoln's character were not those of a perfect consistency.[27] They were of a sort which puzzled those who knew him best, and were most easily explained by those who gave least study to the man himself and most to their own theories of what a man like Mr. Lincoln must have been. Of these sharp antitheses in Lincoln's character, Col. Clark E. Carr, who knew him well, said in an address which I heard: "Abraham Lincoln was the drollest man I ever saw. "He could make a cat laugh. Never was another man so vivacious; never have I seen another who provoked so much mirth, and who entered into rollicking fun with such glee. He was the most comical and jocose of human beings, laughing with the same zest at his own jokes as at those of others. I did not wonder that, while actively engaged in party politics, his opponents who had seen him in these moods called Abraham Lincoln a clown and an ape. "Abraham Lincoln was the most serious man I ever saw. "When I heard him protest against blighting our new territories with the curse of human slavery, in his debates with Senator Douglas, no man could have been more in earnest, none more serious. In his analysis of legal problems, whether in the practice of his profession or in the consideration of State papers, he became wholly absorbed in his subject. Sometimes he lapsed into reverie and communed with his own thoughts, noting nothing that was going on about him until aroused, when perhaps he would enter into a discussion of the subject that had occupied his mind, or perhaps break out into laughter and tell a joke or story that set the table in a roar.