[Extract from the West Surrey Times, Saturday, April 29, 1865.]
Abraham Lincoln, the kind and good President of the United States, has been assassinated, and amongst ail the news of startling import which reaches us this week—the death of the amiable Czarowitz of Russia, the uncertain state of the health of the king of the Belgians, the assassination of the assistant secretary of the Russian legation at Paris, the capitulation of his army by General Lee, and the confession of the murder of her little brother, five years ago, by Constance Kent—that is the one subject which engrosses public attention and occupies the minds of all thinking men. A full account, so far as it has yet reached us, of the assassinatin of the President will be found in another column. Let us briefly recapitulate a few of (he events which have been hurrying forward with such terrific rapidity in the United States within the last few weeks, and drop a tear to the memory of a man who, in circumstances of unparalleled difficulty, did as much for his country as any of his predecessors in the high office which he held—Washington or Adams, Jefferson or Madison, Monroe or Quincy Adams, Jackson or Van Buren, Harrison or Tyler, Polk or Taylor, Fillmore, Pierce, or Buchanan; and these names constitute the whole of the [Page 418] men who have presided over the United States of North America since their government was fairly established on its present basis in 1789.
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Lincoln was, withal, so good a man; his country looked to him so earnestly in her hour of need; his patriotism was so great; his honesty so sterling; his clemency so marked; his piety so pure; his firmness so inexhaustible, that none but miscreants such as these could have entertained for a moment the atrocious idea of a crime like this. In the magnificent language of Macbeth, when soliloquizing upon the proposed murder of the gentle Duncan—