Abraham Lincoln, by Paul Raymond Audibert, Paris.

Additional information on Audibert pending.

Abraham Lincoln, Sixteenth President of the United States, Born Hardin County, Ky., February 12,1809, died Washington, D. C., April 15, 1865. The following is excerpted from the coverleaf of the engraving:

"All the country waited***to see what Mr. Lincoln***would do. Men noted the sad and anxious eyes of the new president; noted also, with a certain misgiving, his gaunt and uncouth figure, as a man too new, too raw, too awkward, too unschooled in affairs for the terrible responsibilities and tangled perplexities of the great office he undertook. They did not know the mastery of the man, they did not see that the straight fibre of this new timber was needed to bear the strain of affairs grown exigent beyond all human reckonings. There was the roughness of the frontier upon him. His plain clothes being unthought of on his big, angular frame; he broke often, in the midst of mighty affairs of state, into broad and boisterous humor; he moved and did the things assigned him with a sort of careless heaviness, as if disinclined to action, and struck some fastidious men as hardly more than a shrewd, good natured rustic. But there had been a singular gift of insight in him for a lad. He had been bred in straitened, almost abject poverty; his shiftless father had moved from place to place in search of support and shelter for his growing family, and had nowhere got for them more than a bare subsistence; and yet this lad had made even that life yield him more than other boys got from a formal schooling. He matured as slowly as another, his life quietly kept pace with the simiple folk who were his neighbors, no vital sign of his special gifts giving noticeable prophecy of what he was to be; but there came a fervor of mastery into his mind, nevertheless, he took pains to get to the heart of what others about him half understood, he used his wits for argument and observation as another lad might have used them for play, and made the use of words, the exact speech which hit his meaning always in the center, his method of analysis. And so his mind had filled, as each item of his experience made its record, as each glimpse of the world came to him. He had made a career for himself in his State which culminated in his debate with Senator Douglas, to which all the country paused to listen; and he was ready to be President by the time he became President."

"His breeding among plain people like himself, accustomed to respect law with simplicity and obey it without subtlety, gave him the direct vision which politicians lacked. He revered the Constitution, had sworn to preserve and defend it, and would not "take an oath to get power and break the oath in using that power," but he viewed his duty in the large, and declared it his conviction that it would be breaking that oath, and not keeping it, if, "to save slavery or any minor matter," he should "permit the wreck of government, country, and Constitution all together." He sought to combine conciliation with this clear purpose to preserve the Union, but while those about him swung from this measure to that and were weak in their excitement he was only patient and watchful, waiting for opinion and the right day of action."--WOODROW WILSON, in A History of the American People, Harper & Bros.