Holley urged Forrest to curb his taste for comic and farcical parts and as soon as possible to cease appearing in such characters. He strove to impress on him a deeper sense of his fitness for the highest walks of tragedy, and explained to him most eloquently the noble qualities the enactment of such parts both required and cultivated in the performer, as well as the valuable lessons they taught to the spectator. He also dwelt at length on the true principle of the dramatic art, which he maintained to be not merely to hold the mirror up to crude nature, but to give a choice and refined presentation of the truth. Nature, he said, is reality, but art is ideality. The actor is not to reflect all the direct and unrelieved facts of nature, but to present a selective and softened or intensified reflection of them. Art plays the tune of nature, he held, but with variations. He uttered these and other thoughts with such remarkable grace and precision that Forrest said the conversation made an epoch in his mind, although he differed from him in opinion, then and always holding that the purpose of acting was to show the exact truth of nature. Holley was right; and it is notable that his youthful auditor in rejecting the view he advocated accurately marked his own central defect not less than his most conspicuous merit as an actor. Closing their season at Lexington, February 22d, 1823, the company started across the country for Cincinnati, the women with the theatrical paraphernalia in covered wagons, the men on horseback. Their good humor and abundant faculty for finding or making enjoyment in everything stood them in hand during the journey, which their rude accommodations and the wintry weather would otherwise have made cheerless enough. They opened in Cincinnati, in the old Columbia Street Theatre, on the evening of March 6th, 1823. The play was The Soldier's Daughter. Forrest, who lacked just three days of being seventeen years old, was assigned the humble part of Malfort, a serious walking gentleman. His range of casts during this season was extremely varied, reaching from the heights of dire tragedy to the level of ridiculous pantomime. He danced in the then popular ballet of Little Red Riding-Hood. He often sang comic songs between the plays. Eberle, who was a good violinist, on one occasion appeared as an old broken soldier with a wooden leg and a fiddle, accompanied by Forrest as his daughter in a ragged female dress. The father fiddled, the daughter sang with laughable pathos,-- "Oh, cruel was my parients, as tored my love from me; And cruel was the great big ship as tooked him off to sea; And cruel was the capitaine and the boswain and the men, As didn't care a fardin if we never met agen." (Tears.)