Lincoln, it is true, was a professional politician, and not an intellectual; but he was not a mere politician. Poorly schooled (by his own definition) and too poor in his youth to afford either college training or even the law-office tutoring which educated most of his fellow lawyers in the 1830s and 1840s, he was gifted with an amazingly retentive memory and a passion for reading and learning. “A capacity, and taste, for reading, gives access to whatever has already been discovered by others,” Lincoln