The play of "The Gladiator" is founded on that dark and frightful episode in the history of Rome, the famous servile war headed by the gladiators under the lead of Spartacus. Our sympathies are skilfully enlisted on the side of the insurgents, who are goaded to their desperate enterprise by insufferable wrongs and cruelties. It abounds in pictures of insolent tyranny on one side, and with eloquent denunciation and fearless resistance on the other, and the chief character is a powerful presentation of a deep and generous manhood, outraged in every fibre, lashed to fury by his injuries, and, after superhuman efforts of revenge, expiring in monumental despair and appeal to the gods. The horrors of oppression, the irrepressible dignity of human nature, the reckless luxury of the rulers, the suffering of the slaves, the revolting arrogance of despotism, and the burning passion of liberty, are set against one another; and all through it the mighty figure of Spartacus is made to fill the central place. It was just the part for a democrat, who, despising what is factitious, gloried in the ineradicable attributes of free manhood; and Forrest made the most of it. For instance, it is easy for those who knew him to imagine the energy and relish with which he would utter the following lines when he came to them in his part: "I thank the gods, I am barbarian; For I can better teach the grace-begot And heaven-supported masters of the earth, How a mere dweller of a desert rock Can bow their crowned heads to his chariot-wheels. Man is heaven's work, and beggars' brats may herit A soul to mount them up the steeps of fortune, With regal necks to be their stepping-blocks."