Abraham Lincoln | Page 7

is the only being who has time enough; but a prudent man, who knows
how to seize occasion, can commonly make a shift to find as much as
he needs. Mr. Lincoln, as it seems to us in reviewing his career, though
we have sometimes in our impatience thought otherwise, has always
waited, as a wise man should, till the right moment brought up all his

reserves. *Semper nocuit differre paratis,*(2) is a sound axiom, but the
really efficacious man will also be sure to know when he is *not* ready,
and be firm against all persuasion and reproach till he is.
(1) Time and I. Cardinal Mazarin was prime-minister of Louis XIV. of
France. Time, Mazarin said, was his prime-minister. (2) It is always
bad for those who are ready to put off action.
One would be apt to think, from some of the criticisms made on Mr.
Lincoln's course by those who mainly agree with him in principle, that
the chief object of a statesman should be rather to proclaim his
adhesion to certain doctrines, than to achieve their triumph by quietly
accomplishing his ends. In our opinion, there is no more unsafe
politician than a conscientiously rigid *doctrinaire,* nothing more sure
to end in disaster than a theoretic scheme of policy that admits of no
pliability for contingencies. True, there is a 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 heretic
dog of Bearnois,(1)--much as our *soi-disant* Democrats have lately
been preaching the divine right of slavery, and denouncing the heresies
of the Declaration of Independence,-- Henry bore both parties in hand
till he was convinced that only one course of action could possibly
combine his own interests and those of France. Meanwhile the
Protestants believed somewhat doubtfully that he was theirs, the
Catholics hoped somewhat doubtfully that he would be theirs, and
Henry himself turned aside remonstrance, advice and curiosity alike
with a jest or a proverb (if a little *high,* he liked them none the
worse), joking continually as his manner was. We have seen Mr.
Lincoln contemptuously compared to Sancho Panza by persons
incapable of appreciating one of the deepest pieces of wisdom in the
profoundest romance ever written; namely, that, while Don Quixote
was incomparable in theoretic and ideal statesmanship, Sancho, with
his stock of proverbs, the ready money of human experience, made the
best possible practical governor. Henry IV. was as full of wise saws
and modern instances as Mr. Lincoln, but beneath all this was the
thoughtful, practical, humane, and thoroughly earnest man, around
whom the fragments of France were to gather themselves till