Andrew Johnson, by Lloyd Paul Stryker (Macmillian, 25s.), succeeded Lincoln
as President of the United States. A terrible predicament for any man ! The most interesting part of this long and detailed eulogy or, should we rather say, vindication of a well-hated man lies in the portraits both verbal and pictorial of the friends and foes whom Johnson served or was up against." The whole personnel of the North and South War is brought before us. What wonderful men they were and what arresting faces they had ! " Every man," we read, " is responsible for his face after fifty," and as we look through these portraits we cannot but feel how many men nomiadays wear masks. Too much of a long book is taken up with the evanescent political disputes which raged round Johnson's futile impeachment. He himself remains from first to last a strange, rough character. His father, who was policeman and sexton in a village in North Carolina, died when his son was four years old. His mother could give him no schooling ; he went to work for a tailor when he was ten, still unable to read. A kind-hearted man used to come to distract the bored young apprentices as they sat at work by reading aloud the lives and speeches of British statesmen. This was Johnson's introduction to knowledge. At nineteen he married a girl of seventeen, and she taught him to write and to sum. She lived to see him President of the United States, and her death broke his heart.