Abraham Lincoln
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popular image of an impossible He, in whose plastic hands the
submissive destinies of mankind become as wax, and to whose
commanding necessity the toughest facts yield with the graceful
pliancy of fiction; but in real life we commonly find that the men
who control circumstances, as it is called, are those who have
learned to allow for the influence of their eddies, and have the nerve
to turn them to account at the happy instant. Mr. Lincoln's perilous
task has been to carry a rather shaky raft through the rapids,
making fast the unrulier logs as he could snatch opportunity, and
the country is to be congratulated that he did not think it his duty to
run straight at all hazards, but cautiously to assure himself with his
setting-pole where the main current was, and keep steadily to that.
He is still in wild water, but we have faith that his skill and sureness
of eye will bring him out right at last.

A curious, and, as we think, not inapt parallel, might be drawn
between Mr. Lincoln and one of the most striking figures in modern
history,--Henry IV. of France. The career of the latter may be more
picturesque, as that of a daring captain always is; but in all its
vicissitudes there is nothing more romantic than that sudden
change, as by a rub of Aladdin's lamp, from the attorney's office in a
country town of Illinois to the helm of a great nation in times like
these. The analogy between the characters and circumstances of
the two men is in many respects singularly close. Succeeding to a
rebellion rather than a crown, Henry's chief material dependence
was the Huguenot party, whose doctrines sat upon him with a
looseness distasteful certainly, if not suspicious, to the more
fanatical among them. King only in name over the greater part of
France, and with his capital barred against him, it yet gradually
became clear to the more far-seeing even of the Catholic party that
he was the only centre of order and legitimate authority round
which France could reorganize itself. While preachers who held the
divine right of kings made the churches of Paris ring with
declamations in favor of democracy rather than submit to the