Gabriel Harrison was another actor on whom the personality and the playing of Forrest took the deepest effect. He was a long time on the stage, and, though he afterwards became an author, a teacher, and a painter, he never abated the intense fervor of his enthusiasm for the dramatic art. His “Life of John Howard Payne,” and his “Hundred Years of the Dramatic and Lyric Stage in Brooklyn,” show him to be a man of much more than common intelligence and culture. He knew Forrest well for many years, and cherished the warmest friendship for him as a man whose nature he found noble and whose intercourse charming. The last Thanksgiving Day that Forrest had on earth, Harrison, by invitation, spent with him alone in his Broad Street mansion, enjoying a day of frank and memorable reminiscences, delicious effusions of mind and heart and soul. Harrison, writing to the biographer of his friend in protest against the epithet melodramatic, records his estimate thus: “Are the wonderful figures of Michael Angelo melodramatic because they are so strongly outlined? Is Niagara unnatural and full of trick because it is mighty and thunders so in its fall? When I looked at it, its sublimity made me feel as if I were looking God in the face; and I have never thought that God was melodramatic. I have seen Forrest act more than four hundred times. I have sat at his feet as a pupil artist learning of a master artist. In all his chief rôles I have studied him with the most earnest carefulness, from his _tout ensemble_ to the minutest particulars of look, tone, posture, and motion. And I say that without doubt he was the most honest, finished, and powerful actor that ever lived. Whenever I saw him act I used to feel with exultation how perfectly grand God had made him. How grand a form! how grand a mind! how grand a heart! how grand a voice! how grand a flood of passion, sweeping all these to their mark in perfect unison! My memory of him is so worshipful and affectionate, and so full of regret that I can see him no more, that my tears are blotting the leaf on which I write.” One further incident in the life of Forrest will also serve to illustrate his feeling towards the _personnel_ of his profession. It is not without an element of romantic interest. It will fitly close the treatment of this part of the subject. At the end of the war he received a letter from a granddaughter of that Joseph Jefferson whose memory he had always cherished so tenderly. Residing in the South, the fortunes of war had reduced her to poverty, and she asked him to lend her a hundred dollars to meet her immediate necessities. With joyous alacrity he forwarded the amount, and deemed the ministration a great privilege. The sequel of the good deed will please every one who reads it. It need only be said that at the date of the ensuing correspondence Forrest had just been bereaved of his last sister, Eleonora: “PHILADELPHIA, June 13th, 1871.