Page:Life and Works of Abraham Lincoln, v1.djvu/77

Rh infare. To this great social demonstration Abraham was not invited, although every other young person in the neighborhood, including his own sister, was. And he took a terrible social revenge, for he put in commission his heaviest batteries of wit and satire, and churned up a social convulsion whose effects remained, like festering sores, for a long time thereafter. Lincoln certainly wielded a free lance in those days. An exuberance of animal spirits had to be worked off in some way, and Lincoln was the Douglas Jerrold and Sydney Smith, combined, of the neighborhood about Gentryville.

The satirical element clove to him through life, though he suppressed it generally in his responsible years. I have known him, however, in the privacy of a judicial circle (but very rarely) to impale an object disagreeable to him on a sarcastic lance quite as effectually, and in better style than in his youthful days.

Although there was little in common between Lincoln and his father, yet they were alike in possessing prodigious strength. The stories which are told of Abraham's power in this line are doubtless exaggerated, but the fact remains that in all the fights in which either he or his father engaged, they prevailed every time, and that Abraham was especially sought for when feats of muscle were in demand.

Abraham did, indeed, venture beyond his own bailiwick both in the moral and physical world. Thus he wrote an elaborate essay on "Our Government," when he was but a little turned of seventeen years old, in which he betrayed a knowledge which could hardly be deemed indigenous to Gentryville. He also wrote an article on