From the hour Abraham Lincoln crossed the threshold of the White House to the hour he went thence to his death, there was not a moment when he did not dominate the political and military situation and his official subordinates.

He said he was as good a rebel as lived, that he was only waiting for his wound to heal to get back into the Confederate Army, and that if they wanted to hang him for a spy to go ahead.

They brought some “red licker” and I asked for some sugar for a toddy, not failing to cite the familiar Sut Lovingood saying that “there were about seventeen round the door who said they’d take sugar in their’n.” The drink warmed me to my…

If you carry him off a prisoner he will be exchanged back into the fighting line, and we make nothing by it.

Directly he came out and said: “I may be doing wrong, and don’t feel entirely sure of my ground, but I am going to let you gentlemen go.

Alike in winter fog and summer haze, I grew to know and love it, and those that may be called its dramatis personae, especially its tatterdemalions, the long procession led by Jack Sheppard, Dick Turpin and Jonathan Wild the Great.

Politics and journalism knocked literature sky high, and the novel—it was entitled “One Story’s Good Till Another Is Told”—was laid by and quite forgotten.

Whatever may be thought of them on this side of the Atlantic, their success in England was undeniable.

There did seem something both audacious and grotesque in this ruthless Yankee poking in among the revered antiquities of Britain, so that the beef-eating British themselves could not restrain their laughter.

He had a great respect for scholarly culture and personal respectability, and thought that if he could get time and health he might do something “in the genteel comedy line.” He had a humorous novel in view, and a series of more aspiring…

The first money he made was applied to the purchase of the old family homestead in Maine, which he presented to his mother.

Thus, at the outset of a career from which much was to be expected, a man, possessed of rare and original qualities of head and heart, sank out of the sphere in which at that time he was the most prominent figure.

The literary and artistic instinct which attained its fruition in him had percolated through the veins of a long line of silent singers, of poets and painters, unborn to the world of expression till he arrived upon the scene.

But, I tell you what, if you’ll put up five hundred dollars I’ll put up five hundred more, we’ll fetch our chap across and set him in as a claimant, and, my word for it, Kenealy’s fat boy won’t be a marker to him!

He had loved me, but had always feared that I would end by disgracing the family—being hanged or something—but the “work’us,” that was beyond him; he had not thought it would come to that.

Some one has called him “The Lincoln of letters.” That is striking, suggestive and apposite.

So inded he was; yet on his feet and in action singularly impressive, and, when he chose, altogether the statesman and orator.

Everybody got drunk,” I once heard him say, referring to the beginning of the Texas revolution, as he gave a side-splitting picture of that bloody episode, “and I realized that somebody must get sober and keep sober.

Not until I threatened to turn Texas over to England did I finally succeed.

In the Senate, Chandler was a match for Toombs; and in the House, Thaddeus Stevens for Keitt and Lamar.

But a few years later she made her banter good and lived to see her husband President of the United States and with him to occupy the White House at Washington.

Jackson, a prisoner of war, was liberated, a lad of sixteen, from the British pen at Charleston, without a relative, a friend or a dollar in the world, having to make his way upward through the most aristocratic community of the country…

Why, general,” I said, “I am an outlawed man: I do not agree with your politics.

That bread cast upon the waters—“‘dough’ put out at usance,” as Joseph Jefferson used to phrase it—shall return after many days has been I dare say discovered by most persons who have perpetrated acts of kindness, conscious or unconscious.

Lord!” cried the most delightful of liars, “How this world is given to lying.” Yea, and how exigency quickens invention and promotes deceit.