Mr. Choate, the American Ambassador, delivered a lecture on Abraham
Lincoln before the Edinburgh Philosophical Institution on Tuesday. Not the least interesting part of the address was that in which Mr. Choate described the in- effaceable impression left on his own mind by the "grand simplicities" of Lincoln's style and the earnest and sincere purity of his utterances. While in other steps he shared the credit with his generals and advisers, the emancipation pro- clamation was entirely his own in conception and execution. His attitude to the Southerners, whom he never would allow to be called "rebels" in his presence, was well summed up in Mr. Choate's peroration. " When he died by the madman's hand in the supreme hour of victory, the vanquished lost their best friend and the human race one of its noblest examples; and all the friends of freedom and justice, in whose cause he lived and died, joined hands as mourners at his grave." Lord Rosebery, who presided, defined Lincoln's strength as resting on two rooks—" the bedrock of unflinch- ing principle and the bedrock of illimitable common-sense"— and noted, as a distinctive feature dissociating him from all other great men of history, his habit of speaking in parables, his happy use, to soften crises, of an inexhaustible fund of humorous anecdotes.
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