Still further, he incurred the special resentment of that class of newspaper critics who expected to receive tribute from those whom they condescended to praise. Many of these writers for the press have been so accustomed to be courted, flattered, compensated, that they have come to regard a failure on the part of a public performer to propitiate their good graces in advance by suppliant attentions, and to acknowledge them afterwards by thanks if not by rewards, as just cause for turning their pens against the delinquent. Forrest was always too honest and too proud to stoop to anything of this kind. He strove to do the best justice in his power to the characters he impersonated, and would then leave the verdict to the instincts of the public and the unbiassed judgments of competent critics. The utter falsity, unfairness, shallowness, and absurdity which so often marked the dramatic critiques of the press, a large proportion of which were written by persons not only notoriously prejudiced and unprincipled but also ignorant of the elementary principles of criticism, early disgusted and angered him to such a degree that he would have nothing whatever to do with this class of writers, but turned from them with disdain. They knew his feeling, and they sought their revenge by every sort of exaggeration and caricature. With artifices of misrepresentation, burlesque, elaborate assault, and incidental jeer, they racked their ingenuity to lessen his reputation and make him wince. They succeeded better in the latter than in the former.