The Damon of Forrest perhaps surpassed, in popular effect, all his other early performances. The romantic story of the devotion of the ancient Greek pair of friends, as narrated by Valerius Maximus, has had a diffusion in literature and produced an impression on the imaginations of men almost without a parallel. This is because it appeals so penetratingly to a sentiment so deep and universal. Above the mere materialized instincts of life there is hardly a feeling of the human heart so profound and vivid as the craving for a genuine, tender, and inviolable friendship. After all the disappointments of experience, after all the hardening results of custom, strife, and fraud, this desire still remains alive, however thrust back and hidden. Remove the disguises and pretences, even of the aged and worldly-minded, and it is surprising in the souls of how many of them the spring of this baffled yet importunate desire will be found running and murmuring in careful concealment. In the hurry and worry of our practical age, so crowded with toil, rivalry, and distraction, the sentiment is less gratified in real life than ever, a fact which in many cases only makes the ideal still more attractive. Accordingly, when the sacred old tale of the Pythagorean friends was wrought into a play by Banim and Shiel, it struck the taste of the public at once. The play, too, had exceptional rhetorical merit, and was constructed with a simple plot, marked by a constant movement full of moral force and pathos.