[Illustration: ÆT 65 ] LIFE OF EDWIN FORREST, THE AMERICAN TRAGEDIAN. BY WILLIAM ROUNSEVILLE ALGER. “All the world’s a stage, And all the men and women merely players.” VOLUME II. PHILADELPHIA: J. B. LIPPINCOTT & CO. 1877. Copyright, 1877, by J. B. LIPPINCOTT & CO. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ CHAPTER XIV. NEWSPAPER ESTIMATES.—ELEMENTS OF THE DRAMATIC ART, AND ITS TRUE STANDARD OF CRITICISM. The newspaper in some countries has been a crime and in others a luxury. In all civilized countries it has now become a necessity. With us it is a duty. It is often corrupted and degraded into a nuisance. It ought to be cleansed and exalted into a pure benefaction, a circulating medium of intelligence and good will alone. Certainly it is far from being that at the present time. It is true that our newspapers are an invaluable and indispensable protection against all other tyrannies and social abuses; and their fierce vanity, self-interest, and hostile watchfulness of one another keep their common arrogance and encroachments pretty well in check. If they were of one mind and interest we should be helplessly in their power. From the great evils which so seriously alloy the immense benefits of the press, Forrest suffered much in the latter half of his life. The abuse he met irritated his temper, and left a chronic resentment in his mind. Two specimens of this abuse will show something of the nettling wrongs he encountered. A Philadelphia newspaper stigmatized him in the most offensive terms as a drunkard. Now it was a moral glory of Forrest that, despite the temptations to which his professional career exposed him, he was never intoxicated in his life. The newspaper in question, threatened with a libel suit, withdrew its words with an abject apology,—a poor satisfaction for the pain and injury it had inflicted.