There is no candid criticism in such effusions of obvious prepossession and satire. They show no reference to a fixed standard, no sincere devotion to the interests of truth and art; but a desire to awaken laughter, a purpose to make the player appear ridiculous and the writer appear witty. The same may be said of the following examples, wherein amusing or malignant ridicule takes the place of fair and intelligent judgment. Such writers care not what their victims suffer, or what justice suffers, so long as they can succeed in gaining attention and raising a laugh. They feel with the English critic who excoriated Payne for his Macbeth, “No matter if the labor we delight in physics Payne, it _pays_ us.” First. “Mr. Forrest’s personation of the Broker of Bogota is feeble and uninteresting. Contrasted with his _Othello_, it has the advantage which the Stupid has over the Outrageous. _Febro_ may be compared to one of those intolerable bores who prose and prose, with sublime contempt of all that is interesting, for hours. _Othello_ is like one of those social torments who destroy your peace of mind with incessant and furious attacks. The bore is the negative of Good; his opposite is the affirmative of Evil.” Second. “We can account for the popularity which Forrest enjoys as the greatest master of the Epigastric School of Acting on no other hypothesis than that of the innate depravity of human taste. Like the vicious propensity in mankind to chew tobacco and drink whisky, the majority of men have a depraved appetite for this false and outrageous caricature of human nature which Mr. Forrest calls acting. Our strictures apply in a lesser degree to the stage delineations of all tragedians. They are all false, and Forrest is only a little more so. His particular excellence seems to lie in his extraordinary power of pumping up rage from his epigastrium, and expectorating it upon his audience, through the interstices of his set teeth. Other tragedians equal him in their facial contortions, and in the power of converting their chests into an immense bellows violently worked. His great rival, McKean Buchanan, excels Mr. Forrest in this department of high art, but fails in the epigastric power. Mr. Forrest may well claim to stand at the head of the Epigastric School. He does not underestimate the value of epilepsy in delineation, and ‘chaws,’ tears, rends, and foams at the mouth quite as artistically as the best of his rivals; but he especially cultivates his epigastrium. We do not want Mr. Forrest to die soon. But when he _does_ pass away, we have a physiological and anatomical curiosity which we would be pleased to have gratified at the expense of a _post mortem_ on the great tragedian. We have a grave suspicion that, deep down in his stomach, beneath the liver and other less important viscera, he has concealed additional vocal apparatus, by means of which he is enabled to produce those diabolical _tremolo_ sounds which have so