The Sun.
London, England, 1863-04-25 00:00:00

PRESIDENT LINCOLN,

If you take the stook English caricature of the typical
Yankee, you have the likeness of the President. To say
that he is ugly is nothing : to add that his figure is gro-
tesque is to convey no adequate impression. Fancy a man
six-foot high, and thin out of proportion, with long bony
arms and legs, which, somehow, seem to be always in the
way, with large rugged hands, which grasp you like a vice
when shaking yours, with a long scraggy neck, and a chest
tco narrow for the great arms hanging by its side; add to
this figure, a head cocoa• nut shaped and somewhat too small
for such a stature, covered with rough, uncombed and un-
combatable lank dark hair, that stands cut in everey direc-
tion at once; a face furrowed, wrinkled, and indented, as
though it had been scarred by vitriol ; a high narrow fore-
head ; and, sunk deep beneath bushy eyebrows, two
bright, somewhat dreamy eyes, that seemed to gaze
through you without looking at you; a few irregular
blotches of black bristly hair in the place where beard
and whiskers ought to grow; a close-8, t, thin-lipped
stern mouth, with two rows of large white teeth; and a
nose and ears, which have been taken by mistake from
a head of twice the size. Clothe this figure, then, in a long,
tight, badly-fitting suit of black, creased, soiled, and puck-
ered up at every salient point of the figure—and every point
of this figure is salient—put on large, ill-fitting boots,
gloves too long for the long bony figgers, and a fluffy hat,
covered to the top with dusty, puffy crape; and then add
to all this an air of strength, physical as well b s moral,
and a strange look of dignity coupled with all this gro-
tesqueness, and you will have the impression left upon
me by Abraham Lincoln. You would never say he was a
gentleman ; you would still less say he was not one. There
are are some women about whom no one ever thinks in
connf ction with beauty, one way or the other —and there
are men to whom the epithet of " gentlemanlike" or " un-
gentlemanlike" appears utterly incongruous, and of such
the President is one. Still there is about him a complete

absence of pretension, and an evident desire to be courte(ms
to everybody, which is the essence, if not the outward form,
of high-breeding. There is a softness, too, about his smile.
and a sparkle of dry humour about his eye which redeem

the expression of his face, and remind me more of the late
Dr. Arnold, as a child's recollection recalls him to me, than

any other face I can call to memory.

Of Mr. Lincoln'sfacetice several amusing specimens

-
are given immediately after the above very curious

description of the personal aspect of this Man o
Mark— that "first-rate second-rate man," as Wendel

Phillips wittily called him! It is characteristically
said of Mr. Lincoln by our author, while giving a
few selected specimens of his comicality, that the
wit betrayed by him through many of these anec-

dotes, is, oftener than one would with, too Aristo-
phanic for quotation ! " He is a humorist," however,
Mr. Dicey says emphatically, " not a buffoon."
Of Wendell Phillips, whose name we have just
mentioned, our author gives us a copious report
of a speech he himself had the gratification of bear-
ing him deliver in his character as the Great Anti-
Slavery Orator. One fragmentary pss
this oration we are tempted to give as affording a
mere passing flavour or whiff from thea ‘a‘gfeasto of
reason and flow of sonl"--the speech itself in its
entirety or in its integrity ! It is where the
Orator exclaims to his Northern audience at 'Wash.

ington—
holitionist, I have no great interest in
" I repeat,
as; an
ntaake no interest in the choice of paths by
thi,.
war_that .61
Government shall lead us, because, as far as I
which the tudy events and results, I honesty believe
am able to
whatever this convulsion does, or fails to do, one thing
prevent its doing, and th-t is, shaking
nthoamt:no.Parot
off the chains yt'ecvaenry negro on the continent. Ido not
mean that any man intends it, for I don't care what man
intends. When a person gets into the rapids of N agara it
doesn't matter much what he intends ; he will go over."
It Mr. Dicey shows himself—as he indubitably do, a
—singularly skilful as a reporter of men's words,
and as a describer of their outward appearance, no
less than occasionally also as a delineator of their
inner temperaments and idiocycracies—it may be as
well to afford our readers likewise some notion of
his aptitude as a depicter of scenes and places, in
one word, as a topographer. Here then is hismar-
vellously clever little outline of the," Empire City,"