The prevalence of profane swearing among the soldiers was rebuked in the same order; and he said: “The discipline and character of the national forces should not suffer, nor the cause they defend be imperilled by the profanation of the day or name of the most high.” And he enforced the order by the example of Washington, saying:—“At this time of public distress, adopting the words of Washington in 1776, ‘men may find enough to do in the service of God and their country without abandoning themselves to vice and immorality.’ The first general order issued by the Father of his Country after the Declaration of Independence indicates the spirit in which our institutions were founded and should ever be defended: ‘The General hopes and trusts that every officer and man will endeavour to live and act as becomes a Christian soldier defending the dearest rights and liberties of his country.” ’

Intemperance in the army he deeply deplored. Both by word and pen he sought to expose the perils of drinking habits among officers and privates, especially the former. His own example enforced his counsels with great power. For he continued to be the same uncompromising teetotaller at Washington that he had been elsewhere. The White House was run upon teetotal principles, as strictly so as his humble home in Springfield. In Washington circles, where the wine cup went round, he was always passed by out of respect to his temperance principles. At one time a delegation of the Sons of Temperance waited on him. In his reply he said: “When I was a young man, long ago, before the Sons of Temperance, as an organization, had an existence, I, in my humble way, made temperance speeches; and I think I can say that my example has never belied the position I then took.” And when he read a petition from the women of Massachusetts, praying for the suppression of intemperance in the army, he exclaimed: “Dear, good souls! if they only knew how much I have tried to remedy this great evil, they would be rejoiced.”

Notwithstanding his great weight of labours for the country, President Lincoln did not wholly neglect literary studies. He found necessary recreation in his books, and both poetry and prose often brought relief to him in seasons of depression and exhaustion. A California lady, who, with several other women, visited the cemetery at the Soldiers’ Home in company with Mr. Lincoln, writes:—

“While we stood in the soft evening air, watching the faint trembling of the long tendrils of waving willow, and feeling the dewy coolness that was flung out by the old oaks above us, Mr. Lincoln joined us, and stood silent, too, taking in the scene.

he said softly.

“There was something so touching in the picture opened before us,—the nameless graves, the solemn quiet, the tender twilight air, but more particularly our own feminine disposition to be easily melted, I suppose,—that it made us cry as if we stood beside the tomb of our own dead, and gave point to the lines he quoted:—

One day he surprised some of his most intimate friends by his very just, discriminating remarks upon some of the plays of Shakespeare.

“There is one passage in the play of ‘Hamlet,’ ” he said, “which is very apt to be slurred over by the actor, or omitted altogether, which seems to me the choicest of the play. It is the soliloquy of the king, after the murder. It always struck me as one of the finest touches in the world.”

Then, with still more surprise, his friends witnessed his truly dramatic exhibition of the scene, as he recited the whole passage of nearly forty lines, beginning:—