The substance of the honest objections made to his acting may be designated as ascribing to it two faults, an excess and a defect. The excess was too much display of physical and spiritual force in the expression of contemptuous or revengeful and destructive passion. There was a basis for this charge, though the accusation was grossly exaggerated. The muscular and passional strength and intensity of Forrest, both by constitution and by culture, were so much beyond those of ordinary men that a manifestation of them which was entirely natural and within the bounds to him often seemed to them a huge extravagance, a wilful overdoing for the sake of making a sensation. In him it was perfectly genuine and not immoderate by the tests of nature, while to them it appeared far to transgress the modest limits of truth. Of course such explosions repelled and pained, sometimes revolted, the sensibilities of the delicate and fastidious, while the more ungirdled and terrific they were, so much the greater was the pleased and wondering approval of those whose sympathies were stormed and self-surrendered. Such was the histrionic fault of excess in Forrest, if it may not rather be called the fault of those whose natures were keyed so much below his that they could not come into tune with him. The defect corresponding to this excess was lack of _souplesse_, physical and spiritual mobility. He was unquestionably deficient, when tried by a severe standard, in bright, alert, expectant, rich freedom of play in nerves and faculties. His disposition was comparatively obstinate in its pertinacity, and his body adhesive in its heaviness. This gave him the ponderous weight of unity, the antique port of the gods, but it robbed him in a degree of that supreme grace which is the ability to compass the largest effects of impression with the smallest expenditure of energy. It cannot be denied that he needed exactly what Garrick had in such perfection, namely, that detached personality, that quicksilver liberty and rapidity of motion, which made the great English actor such a memorable paragon of variety and charm. Yet, when these abatements are all allowed, enough remains amply to justify his large historic claim in the honest massiveness and glow of his delineations, set off alike by the imposing physique fit to take the club and pose for a Farnesian Hercules, by a studious and manly art unmarred with any insincere trickery, and by a powerful mellow voice of vast compass and flexible intonation, whose declamation, modelled on nature, and without theatrical affectation, ever did full justice to noble thoughts and beautiful words.