The order is given to fire upon him; and he replies, "Do so. I am weary of the world; for ye are dwellers in it. I would not turn on my heel to save my life." They shoot, and he staggers, but in his dying agonies launches on them his awful malediction: "My curses on ye, white men! May the Great Spirit curse ye when he speaks in his war-voice from the clouds! May his words be like the forked lightnings, to blast and desolate! May the loud winds and the fierce red flames be loosed in vengeance upon ye, tigers! May the angry Spirit of the Waters in his wrath sweep over your dwellings! May your graves and the graves of your children be in the path where the red man shall tread, and may the wolf and the panther howl over your fleshless bones! I go. My fathers beckon from the green lakes and the broad hills. The Great Spirit calls me. I go,--but the curses of Metamora stay with the white men!" He crawls painfully to the bodies of his wife and child, and, in a vain effort to kiss them, expires, with his last gasp mixing the words, "I die--my wife, my queen--my Nahmeokee!" SPARTACUS. [Illustration: F. Halpin EDWIN FORREST AS THE GLADIATOR.] "The Gladiator," written by Robert Montgomery Bird, was another prize-play, in which Forrest acquired a popularity which, if less general, was more intense, than that secured for his Metamora. If the admiration and applause given to it were drawn less universally from men and women, from old and young, they were more fervent and sustained, being fed by those elementary instincts which are strongest in the robust multitude. The Spartacus of Forrest was more abused and satirized by hostile critics than any of his other parts, because it was the most "physical" and "melodramatic" of them all. Muscular exertion and ferocious passion were carried to their greatest pitch in it, though neither of these was displayed in a degree beyond sincerity and fitness or the demands of the given situations on the given embodiment of the character. There are actual types of men and actual scenes of life which are transcendently "physical" and "melodramatic." No actor can truly represent such specimens of human nature and such conjunctures of human history _without_ being highly "physical" and profoundly "melodramatic." Is it not the office of the player, the very aim of his art, correctly to depict the truth of man and life? And, recollecting what sort of a person the veritable Thracian gladiator was, and what sort of a part he played, one may well ask how he can be justly impersonated on the stage if _not_ invested with the attributes of brawny muscularity, terrific indignation, stentorian speech, and merciless revenge. Forrest was blamed and ridiculed by a coterie because he did exactly what, as an artist cast in such a rôle, he ought to do, and any deviation from which would have been a gross violation of propriety. He simply exhibited tremendous mental and physical realities with tremendous mental and physical realism.