Every attempt to secure an autobiography having failed, the author of the present work was led, under the circumstances before stated, and with the promise that every facility should be afforded him, to assume the task. In the first conversation held with him on the undertaking, Forrest said, "Tell the truth frankly. Let there be no whitewashing. Show me just as I have been and am." As he thus spoke, he took down from a shelf of his library the first volume of the "Memoirs of Bannister the Comedian," by John Adolphus, and read, in rich sweet tones mellowed by the echoes of his heart, the opening paragraph, which is as follows: "A friendship of many years' duration, terminated only by his death, impels me to lay before the public a memoir of the life of the late John Bannister. In executing this task I am exempted from the difficulties that so frequently beset the author of a friendly biographical essay: I have no vices to conceal, no faults to palliate, no contradictions to reconcile, no ambiguities of conduct to explain. I purpose to narrate the life of a man whose characteristic integrity and buoyant benevolence were always apparent in his simulated characters, and who in real life proved that those exhibitions were not assumed for the mere purposes of his profession, but that his great success in his difficult career arose in no small degree from that truth and sincerity which diffused their influence over the personages he represented." As the admiring cadence of his voice died sadly away, he laid down the volume and said to his auditor, "For your sake, in the work on which you have entered, I wish it were with me as it was with Bannister. But it is otherwise. My faults are many, and I deserve much blame. Yet, after every confession and every regret, I feel before God that I have been a man more sinned against than sinning; and, if the whole truth be told, I am perfectly willing to bear all the censure, all the condemnation, that justly belongs to me. Therefore use no disguising varnish, but let the facts stand forth." Such were the words of Forrest himself; and in their spirit the author will proceed, sparing no pains to learn the truth, neither holding back or trimming down foibles and vices nor magnifying virtues, recording his own honest convictions without fear or favor, hoping to produce as the result a book which shall do justice to its subject, and contain enough substantial worth and interest to repay the attention its readers may bestow on it. The work will be written more from the stage point of view than from the pulpit point of view, but most of all from that popularized academic or philosophic point of view which surveys the whole field of human life in a spirit at once of scientific appreciation, poetic sympathy, and impartial criticism.