public service.  But he had no gift of rapid perception and no instinctive tact or prudence in regard to the very numerous and very various men with whom he had slight dealings on which he could bestow no thought.  This is common with men who have risen from poverty; if they have not become hard and suspicious, they are generally obtuse to the minor indications by which shrewd men of education know the impostor, and they are perversely indulgent to little meannesses in their fellows which they are incapable of committing themselves.  In Lincoln this was aggravated by an immense good-nature—­as he confessed, he could hardly say “no";—­it was an obstinate good-nature, which found a naughty pleasure in refusing to be corrected; and if it should happen that the object of his weak benevolence had given him personal cause of offence, the good-nature became more incorrigible than ever.  Moreover, Lincoln’s strength was a slow strength, shown most in matters in which elementary principles of right or the concentration of intense thought guided him.  Where minor and more subtle principles of conduct should have come in, on questions which had not come within the range of his reflection so far and to which, amidst his heavy duties, he could not spare much cogitation, he would not always show acute perception, and, which is far worse, he would often show weakness of will.  The present instance may be ever so trifling, yet it does relate to the indistinct and dangerous borderland of political corruption.  It need arouse no very serious suspicions.  Mr. Herndon, whose pertinacious researches unearthed that Kansas gentleman’s correspondence, and who is keenly censorious of Lincoln’s fault, in the upshot trusts and reveres Lincoln.  And the massive testimony of his keenest critics to his honesty quite decides the matter.  But Lincoln had lived in a simple Western town, not in one of the already polluted great cities; he was a poor man himself and took the fact that wealth was used against him as a part of the inevitable drawbacks of his lot; and it is certain that he did not clearly take account of the whole business of corruption and jobbery as a hideous and growing peril to America.  It is certain too that he lacked the delicate perception of propriety in such matters, or the strict resolution in adhering to it on small occasions, which might have been possessed by a far less honest man.  The severest criticisms which Lincoln afterwards incurred were directed to the appointments which he made; we shall see hereafter that he had very solid reasons for his general conduct in such matters; but it cannot be said with conviction that he had that horror of appointment on other grounds than merit which enlightens, though it does not always govern, more educated statesmen.  His administration would have been more successful, and the legacy he left to American public life more bountiful, if his traditions, or the length of his day’s work, had allowed him to be more careful in these things.