One more element or feature in this life, of public interest, of attraction and value for biographic use, is its strictly American character. All the outlines and setting of Forrest's career, the quality and smack of his sentiments, the mould and course of his thoughts, the style of his art, were distinctly American. His immediate descent, on both sides, from European immigrants suggests the lesson of the mixture in our nationality, the providential place and purpose of the great world-gathering of nationalities and races in our republic. His personal prejudice against foreigners, with his personal indebtedness to the teachings and examples of foreigners,--Pilmore, Wilson, Cooper, Conway, Kean,--brings up the question of the just feelings which ought to subsist between our native-born and our naturalized citizens; that true spirit of human catholicity which should blend them all in a patriotism identical at last with universal philanthropy and scorning to harbor any schismatic dislikes. And then his intimate relations, at critical periods of his life, with the most marked specimens of our Western and Southern civilization, bring upon the biographic scene many illustrations of those unique American characters, having scarcely prototypes or antitypes, which have passed away forever with the state of society that produced them. His experience arched from 1806 to 1872, a period perhaps more momentous in its events, discoveries, inventions, and prophetic preparations than any other of the same length since history began. He saw his country expand from seventeen States to thirty-seven, and from a population of six millions to one of forty millions, with its flag floating in every wind under heaven. Washington, indeed, and Franklin, were dead when the life of Forrest began; but Jefferson, Adams, Madison, Marshall, and a throng of the Revolutionary worthies were still on the stage. When he died, every one of the second great cluster of illustrious Americans, grouped in the national memory, with Clay, Calhoun, Webster, Irving, Cooper, and Channing in the centre, was gone; and even the third brilliant company, Emerson, Hawthorne, Bryant, Bancroft, and their peers, was already broken and faltering under the blows of death and decay. During this time his heart-strings stretched out to embrace, the vascular web of his proud sympathies was woven over, every successive State and Territory added to our domain, till, in his later age, his enraptured eyes drank in the wondrous loveliness of the landscapes of California. By his constant travels and sojourns in all parts of the land, by his acquaintance with innumerable persons representing all classes and sections, by the various relationships of his profession with literature, the press, and the general public, there are suggestive associations, for more than fifty years, between his person, his spirit, his fortunes, and everything that is most