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Book, page 121 / 313 Elector and threw himself with ardor into the canvass, traversing a great part of the State and speaking with remarkable effect. Only one of the speeches he made during the year has been preserved entire: this was an address delivered in Springfield as one of a series--a sort of oratorical tournament participated in by Douglas, Calhoun, Lamborn, and Thomas on the part of the Democrats, and Logan, Baker, Browning, and Lincoln on the part of the Whigs. The discussion began with great enthusiasm and with crowded houses, but by the time it came to Lincoln's duty to close the debate the fickle public had tired of the intellectual jousts, and he spoke to a comparatively thin house. But his speech was considered the best of the series, and there was such a demand for it that he wrote it out, and it was printed and circulated in the spring as a campaign document. [Illustration: GLOBE TAVERN, SPRINGFIELD, WHERE LINCOLN LIVED AFTER HIS MARRIAGE.] It was a remarkable speech in many respects--and in none more than in this, that it represented the highest expression of what might be called his "first manner." It was the most important and the last speech of its class which he ever delivered--not destitute of sound and close reasoning, yet filled with boisterous fun and florid rhetoric. It was, in short, a rattling stump speech of the kind then universally popular in the West, and which is still considered a very high grade of eloquence in the South. But it is of no kindred with his inaugural addresses, and resembles the Gettysburg speech no more than "The Comedy of Errors" resembles "Hamlet." One or two extracts will give some idea of its humorous satire and its lurid fervor. Attacking the corruptions and defalcations of the Administration party he said: "Mr. Lamborn insists that the difference between the Van Buren party and the Whigs is that, although the former sometimes err in practice they are always correct in principle, whereas the latter are wrong in principle; and the better to impress this proposition he uses a figurative expression in these words, 'The Democrats are vulnerable in the heel, but they are sound in the heart and head.' The first branch of the figure--that is, the Democrats are vulnerable in the heel--I admit is not merely figuratively but literally true. Who that looks but for a moment at their Swartwouts, their Prices, their Harringtons, and their hundreds of others scampering away with the public money to Texas, to Europe, and to every spot of the earth where a villain may
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