outwork would necessarily fall.  He could hardly be called very learned in his profession, and yet he rarely tried a cause without fully understanding the law applicable to it.  I have no hesitation in saying he was one of the ablest lawyers I have ever known.  If he was forcible before the jury he was equally so with the court.  He detected with unerring sagacity the marked points of his opponents’ arguments, and pressed his own views with overwhelming force.  His efforts were quite unequal, and it may have been that he would not on some occasions strike one as at all remarkable; but let him be thoroughly aroused, let him feel that he was right and that some great principle was involved in his case, and he would come out with an earnestness of conviction, a power of argument, and a wealth of illustration, that I have never seen surpassed....  Simple in his habits, without pretensions of any kind, and distrustful of himself, he was willing to yield precedence and place to others, when he ought to have claimed them for himself.  He rarely, if ever, sought office except at the urgent solicitations of his friends.  In substantiation of this, I may be permitted to relate an incident which now occurs to me.  Prior to his nomination for the Presidency, and, indeed, when his name was first mentioned in connection with that high office, I broached the subject upon the occasion of meeting him here.  His response was, ‘I hope they will select some abler man than myself.’”

Mr. C.S.  Parks, a lawyer associated with Lincoln for some years, furnishes the following testimony concerning his more prominent qualities:  “I have often said that for a man who was for a quarter of a century both a lawyer and a politician he was the most honest man I ever knew.  He was not only morally honest, but intellectually so.  He could not reason falsely; if he attempted it, he failed.  In politics he would never try to mislead.  At the bar, when he thought he was wrong, he was the weakest lawyer I ever saw.”

Hon. David Davis, afterwards Associate Justice U.S.  Supreme Court and U.S.  Senator, presided over the Eighth Judicial Circuit of Illinois during the remaining years of Lincoln’s practice at the bar.  He was united to Lincoln in close bonds of friendship, and year after year travelled with him over the circuit, put up with him at the same hotels, and often occupied the same room with him.  “This simple life,” says Judge Davis, “Mr. Lincoln loved, preferring it to the practice of the law in the city.  In all the elements that constitute the great lawyer, he had few equals.  He seized the strong points of a cause, and presented them with clearness and great compactness.  He read law-books but little, except when the cause in hand made it necessary; yet he was unusually self-reliant, depending on his own resources, and rarely consulting his brother lawyers either on the management of his case or the legal questions involved.  He was the fairest and most accommodating of practitioners, granting all favors which he could do consistently with his duty to his client, and rarely availing himself of an unwary oversight of his adversary.  He hated wrong and oppression everywhere, and many a man, whose fraudulent conduct was undergoing review in a court of justice, has withered under his terrific indignation and rebuke.”