One of the first characters in which Forrest enjoyed great popularity was that of Rolla, the Peruvian hero. The play of "The Spaniards in Peru," by Kotzebue, as rewritten by Sheridan from a paraphrase in English, was for a long time a favorite with the public. It brought the adventurers and wonderful achievements of the most romantic kingdom in Christendom into picturesque combination with the strange scenes, simplicity, and superstition of the newly-discovered transatlantic world, and was full of music, pomp, pictures, poetic situations, and processions. In literary style, the knowing critics call it tawdry and bombastic; in ethical tone, sentimental and inflated. But the average audiences, especially of a former generation, were not fastidious censors. They went to the theatre less to judge and sneer than to be moved with sympathy, enjoyment, and admiration. And they found this play rich in strong appeals to the better instincts of their moral nature. What the blasé found turgid, affected, or ludicrous, the unsophisticated felt to be eloquent, poetic, and noble. For the fair appreciation of a piece of acting, assuredly this latter point of view is preferable to the former; for tragedy is a form of poetry, and has as one of its purest functions the revelation of the moral ingredients of man, lifted, enlarged, and glorified in its mirror of art. Rolla is depicted as simple, grand, a nobleman of nature, frank, ardent, impulsive, magnanimous,--his own truth and heroism investing him with an invisible robe and crown of royalty. It was a rôle precisely adapted to the young tragedian whose own soul it so well reflected. Endowed with all the chivalrous sentiments, expansive and kindling, uncurbed by the nil admirari standards of fashionable breeding, he could fill up every extravagant phrase of the part without any feeling of extravagance.