Abraham Lincoln quarterly. [Vol. 3, no. 2]

84 ABRAHAM LINCOLN QUARTERLY
respondent in Washington called it both "singular" and
"pathetic;" the paper itself editorially (and, in my judgment,
quite wrongly) called the diction "Cromwellian;y" and said
it breathed "a spirit very different from the usual unearnest
utterances of successful politicians." Richard Holt Hutton,
editor of the friendly Spectator, which I have already mentioned, naturally went into more enthusiastic praise:
We cannot read it without a renewed conviction that it is the
noblest political document known to history.... Certainly
none written in a period of passionate conflict ever so completely
excluded the partiality of victorious factions, and breathed so
pure a strain of mingled justice and mercy.
Perhaps this is the place to talk of British opinions on
Lincoln's oratory. Up to Lincoln's time Englishmen had become accustomed to the old Northern and Southern type of
well-padded, sonorous American oratory, heavy with Latinized words. Lincoln spoke not Cromwellian English, but
mainly Elizabethan; the good old Anglo-Saxon tongue in
which the Bible was done into English. Lincoln's famous
letter to Horace Greeley on the issue of slavery, already mentioned, could have come straight from the epistles of the
Apostle Paul to the Romans or the Hebrews. Perhaps it did.
The Bible was one of the books Lincoln first possessed, read
and learned almost by heart; and no man reared on the Bible
and Shakespeare need fear for his mastery of "our sweet English tongue." As Lincoln's speeches gradually seeped across
the Atlantic into the conscience and consciousness of the
British people, it was deep calling unto deep. Their language
was instantly understanded of the people, whereas that of
a Palmerston or a Russell frequently was not!
But do not think that the British workers alone perceived
this in Lincoln's oratory. In 1913, delivering the Rede Lecture at Cambridge University, Lord Curzon, a Tory if there
ever was one, selected three examples for the prize of modern