New York in 1853, and Mr. Phelps preserves the inscription upon his monument at Cypress Hills Cemetery, which was evidently his own composition: "From his cradle he was a scholar; exceedingly wise, fair-spoken, and persuading; lofty and sour to them that loved him not, but to those men that sought him sweet as summer." [Illustration: ANDREW JACKSON ALLEN.] Apropos of Allen's association with Edwin Forrest, and of Smith's assertion that Allen sang the first negro song ever sung on the American stage, it may not be out of place here to quote W. R. Alger's _Life of Forrest_. Speaking of Forrest's early and checkered experiences as a strolling player in the far West, Mr. Alger says that perhaps the most surprising fact connected with this portion of his career is "that he was the first actor who ever represented on the stage the Southern plantation negro with all his peculiarities of dress, gait, accent, dialect, and manner." In 1823, at the Globe Theatre, Cincinnati, Ohio, under the management of "Sol" Smith, Forrest did play a negro in a farce by Smith, called _The Tailor in Distress_, singing and dancing, and winning the compliment from a veritable black in his audience that he was "nigger all ober!" Lawrence Barrett, in his _Life of Forrest_, quotes the bill of this evening, which shows Forrest as a modern dandy in the first play, as Cuffee, a Kentucky negro, in the second, and as Sancho Panza in the pantomime of _Don Quixote_, which closed the evening's entertainment. Forrest was by no means the only eminent American actor who hid his light behind a black mask. "Sol" Smith himself relates how he became a supernumerary at the Green Street Theatre, in Albany, in his fourteenth year, playing one of the blood-thirsty associates of _Three-fingered Jack_ with a preternaturally smutty face, which he forgot to wash one eventful night, to the astonishment of his own family, who forced him to retire for a time to private life. At Vauxhall Garden, in the Bowery, a little south of and nearly opposite the site of Cooper Institute, a young lad named Bernard Flaherty, born in Cork, Ireland, is said to have sung negro songs and to have danced negro dances in 1838 to help support a widowed mother, who lived to see him carried to an honored grave in 1876, mourned by the theatre-going population of the whole country. In 1840, as Barney Williams, he made a palpable hit in the character of Pat Rooney, in _The Omnibus_, at the Franklin Theatre, New York. He certainly played "darky parts," such as they were, for a number of years before and after that date; and he is perhaps the one man upon the American stage with whom anything like negro minstrelsy will never be associated, not so much because of his high rank in his profession as on account of the Hibernian style of his later-day performances, and of the strong accent which always clung to him, and which suggested his native city rather than the cork he used to burn to color his face.