In the distinguishing peculiarities of his structure and strain Edwin Forrest was one of those extraordinary men who seem to spring up rarely here and there, as if without ancestors, direct from some original mould of nature, and constitute a breed apart by themselves. Alexander, Cæsar, Demosthenes, Mirabeau, Chatham, Napoleon, draw their volitions from such an unsounded reservoir of power, have such latent resources of intuition, can strike such all-staggering blows, that common men, appalled before their mysteriousness, instinctively revere and obey. In the primeval time such men loomed with the overshadowing port of deities and were worshipped as avatars from a higher world. One of this class of men has, if we may use the figure, a sphere so dense and vast that the lighter and lesser spheres of those around him give way on contact with his firmer and weightier gravitation. Wherever he goes he is treated as a natural king. He carries his royal credentials in the intrinsic rank of his organism. There is in his nervous system, resulting from the free connection and uninterrupted interplay of all its parts, a centralized unity, a slowly swaying equilibrium, which fills him with the sense of a saturating drench of power. His consciousness seems to float on his surcharged ganglia in an intoxicating dreaminess of balanced force, which, by the transcendent fearlessness and endurance it imparts, lifts him out of the category of common men. The dynamic charge in his nervous centres is so deep and intense that it produces a chronic exaltation above fear into complacency, and raises him towards the eternal ether, among the topmost heads of our race. Each of these men in his turn draws from his admiring votaries the frequent sigh of regret that nature made but one such and then broke the die. This high gift, this unimpartable superiority, is a secret safely veiled from vulgar eyes. Fine spirits recognize its occult signals in the pervasive rhythm of the spinal cord, the steadiness of the eye, the enormous potency of function, the willowy massiveness of bearing, and a certain mystic languor whose sleeping surface can with swift and equal ease emit the soft gleams of love to delight or flash the forked bolts of terror to destroy. This gift, as terrible as charming, varies with the temperament and habits of its possessor. In Coleridge its profuse electricity was steeped in metaphysical poppy and mandragora. In our American Samuel Adams it was gathered in a battery that discharged the most formidable shocks of revolutionary eloquence. In Sargent S. Prentiss, one of the most imperial personalities this continent has known, it stood at a great height, but his body was too much for his brain, and, as in a thousand other melancholy examples of splendid genius ruined, the authentic divinity continually gave way to its maudlin counterfeit. Where the spell of this supernal inspiration has been inbreathed, unless it