W. H. Herndon, for more than twenty years the law partner of Mr. Lincoln, delivered an address in Springfield, Illinois, upon the life and character of the lamented President, which for subtle analysis has few equals in biographical literature. The following are excerpts:

"Mr. Lincoln's perceptions were slow, cold, and exact. Everything came to him in its precise shape and colour. To some men the world of matter and of man comes ornamented with beauty, life, and action, and hence more or less false and inexact. No lurking illusion or other error, false in itself, and clad for the moment in robes of splendour, ever passed undetected or unchallenged over the threshold of his mind—that point that divides vision from the realm and home of thought."

"Names to him were nothing, and titles naught—assumption always standing back abashed at his cold, intellectual glare. Neither his perceptions nor intellectual vision were perverted, distorted, or diseased. He saw all things through a perfect, mental lens. There was no diffraction or refraction there. He was not impulsive, fanciful, or imaginative, but calm and precise. He threw his whole mental light around the object, and, in time, substance and quality stood apart; form and colour took their appropriate places, and all was clear and exact in his mind. In his mental view he crushed the unreal, the inexact, the hollow, and the sham.... To some minds the world is all life, a soul beneath the material; but to Mr. Lincoln no life was individual or universal that did not manifest itself to him. His mind was his standard. His perceptions were cool, persistent, pitiless in pursuit of the truth. No error went undetected and no falsehood unexposed if he once was aroused in search of truth.