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

PRESIDENT LINCOLN.

If you take the stock Engtish 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, unoombed and un-
combatable lank dark hair, that stands out 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-stt, 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-fit ing 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 as 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
corm' ction with beauty, one way or the other—and there
are men to whom the epithet of " gentlemanlike" or " un-
gentlemanlike" appears utterly incongruou., and of such
the President is one. Still there is about him a complete
absence of pretension, and an evident desire to be courteous
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 of
Mark—that "first-rate second-rate man," as Wendell
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 wish, too Aristo-
phanic for quotation ! " He is a humorist," however,
Mr. Dicey says emphatically, " not
Of Wendell Phillips, whose name we have
gratification of bear-
mentioned, our author gives us . copious report
of a speech he himself had the groastitile
Great Anti-
ing him deliver in his charactl
passage from
Slavery Orator. One fragmentary
tfgrivme as affording
oamf
isinetueigr—ittyl7 spletet itself in its
thise re orationpa s s
in
gw efiaarreo
otre
rp„
vrdh
itffo
where the
entirety reason andor
as fa r
a sbinyl
iOngrattoonrexclaiars to his Northern audience at Wash-
flionwiotsf
„ I repeat, as an abolitionist, I have no groat interest
this war—that is, I take no interest inust,hbeecchaouiscee,ofpaths
teoGsotvuedrynmevenent
events
ssbaaulld lead us,
I honestlyd believe
tawhmhaticawhbhltehatever this convulsion does, or faailesdtoth do, one thing.
no man, no party, can prrieevgernut ietsndothinege,
ne;:l.tt.is,ishdaokninogt
of
eavneriyntends
meanoff t h et
hcahta ianyns
intends. When a person it, for I doonn'tti aroef
Nwhat man
gets into the rapidsc gara it
doesn't matter much what he intends ; he will go over."n
If Mr. Dicey shows himself—as he indubitably do's
—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 his mar-
vellously clever little outline of the "Empire City,"
across the ocean—that is, of the far famed--

CITY OF NEW YORE.
The Island of Manhattan, on which New York is placed,
is very like the shape of a sole. Now, if you suppose that
the skeleton of a sole had a network of cross-bones, parallel
as well as perpendicular to the backbone, you will have an
enact idea of the plan of New York. The backbone is

t Broadway; the parallel cross-bones aro the avenues, num-
bered from east to west ; and the bones at right angles to
the spines are the streets, numbered consecutively from the
sole's mouth to its tail. This arithmetical nomenclature of
the streets, which seems so barbarous to us in Europe, is
really of great practical couvenierice. Tho system is not
perfect, because the streets in the old part of the town ht.va
names of their own; bat still it is sufficiently so, to enable
anyone to tell, given the name of a street, whereabouts it
is situated, and how to get to it. The corner end of the
island, corresponding► to the sole's mouth, is the commercial
part, the city of New York, of which Wall-street is the
Cornhill. Broadway is the great thoroughfare, where all
the chief shops and stores are situated; and Fifth Avenue,
with the streets running across it, is the fashionable quar-
ter, the resort of the Upper Ten Thousand, the Belgravia
of the town. Across the middle of the island stretches the
Central Park, and beyond that are large, streggiling suburbs,
whose streets stand high up in the multiplication table, and
which threaten, in a few years, if New York should grow
at its present rate, to c/rer the whole island of Manhattan.
Across the Hudson and the East River, which join at the
city end of the island, lie the great suburbs of Jersey City
and Brooklyn—Birkenheads, so to speak, to the New World
Liverpool. So much for the topography of New York.

The volumes under notice are inscribed 'oy their
writer, " by permission," he tells us, to no less for •
midable a reader of any man's lucubrations, than—
JOHN STUART MILL, perhaps the most philosophic
mind of our age. There is courage in such a dedi-
cation—but, in keeping with it, there is a courage of
thought and of expression apparent to us, again and
yet again, throughout the whole of Mr. Dicey's
manfully outspoken volumes. We read them even.
where they are the most directly opposed to our
own views, with that especial satisfaction
with which we all turn to the examination.
of the writings of a man who is really himself in
earnest. Before closing our remarks upon Mr.
Dicey it is but justice to him to observe that he is
not less of an Englishman in his views, because, in
one sense, he is more of a cosmopolite.

Dr. Samuel Butler's Atlas of Modern Geography.
A New Edition. 33 Maps. Longman and Co.

We are never 'surprised at the announcement of
another New Edition of the compact and admira-
ble little Atlas of Modern Geography, for which
so many English students have so long stood in-
debted to the skill and the research of the late
Bishop of Lichfield. But—even in these days of
cheapne.ss and enterprise—we are, for once, surprised
by certain peculiarities noticeable in the entirely
New Edition of the work but just now issued from
the press by the Messrs. Longman. While very
considerably improved, it is, at the same time,
wonderfully cheapened. Containing three and
thirty full coloured maps, carefully engraved
on steel by Mr. Edward Weller, a Fellow of
the Royal Geographical Society, a draughtsman
well up to his work—this royal quarto atlas by the
late Bishop of Lichfield, Dr. Samuel Butler—pre-
viously head master of Shrewsbury School, com-
prises withinit several additional maps never be-
fore published; being, besides that, minutely cor-
reeled throughout "from the Government surveys'
58 well as "from the most recent authentic sources of
information." The whole -work, moreover, has been
edited by the author's son, the present rector of
Langan, the Rev. Thomas Butler, M.A., F.R.G.S.
As evidence of the care taken with each division of
the work as it passed through the hands of the en.
graver it may be sufficient to observe that the
discoveries of Livingstone, Burton, Speke, Barth, and
others were very cautiously taken into account in
the map of the continent of Africa. This Modern
Atlas (now costing no more than half a guinea) is
in a manner perfected as a book for instant refer-
ence by an Index wonderfullycopious when viewed
in connection with the moderate dimensions of the
volume and the scale upon which the maps con-
tained within it have been drawn.

Herbert Fry's Shilling Gutde to the London
Charities. Pp. 174. Robert Hardwicke.

Remembering the dictum of the Prince of the
Apostles about charity covering a multitude of sins,
one cannot, while looking over the pages of this
most affecting catalogue of the abundant charities
of London--one cannot but think, with a
sense of awe and of hope of the charity that may
literally be "covering " or overshadowing the
sins of the Great City. It is a wonderful
catalogue. Though merely a list of names
and dates, and addresses, and objects, and
incomes—it is pleasant reading, for all that. We
have a feeling of obligation towards Mr. Fry for
the industry with which he has compiled these
useful and consolatory particulars. It is a shilling's
worth of information well worthy of the careful
study of the benevolent.