Another cause in Forrest of offence and numerous dislike was the pronounced distinctiveness of his character, his marked and independent manhood. Most people are of the conventional type in personality and manners, each one as the rest are. And their likings are confined to those of their own stamp. A man of fresh and decisive originality, who is and appears just what God and nature have made him, who thinks for himself, speaks for himself, acts himself out with freedom and power, disturbs and repels them. He irritates their prejudices by violating their standards. His frank and flexible spontaneity, his uncovered impulsive revelation of his feelings, and fearless choice of what he will do or will not do, imply a tacit contempt for their meek conformities and spirit of routine. Thus their self-esteem is hurt and they are made angry. Forrest was a man of this kind, not addicted to swear in the polished phrase of the magistrate, but in his own honest vernacular. The true theory of republican America is that the people should _not_ be cast in the monotonous moulds of certain classes or types, the national character a fixed repetition, but that every citizen should be in himself a priest and a king before God, with his own form and color and relish of individuality unrepressed by any foreign dictation. This democratic idea was well realized in Edwin Forrest. It made him all his life a touchstone of hostility to those whose social subserviency it rebuked or whose aristocratic prejudices it set bristling.