As the years passed on, Forrest came to take an ever keener interest in accumulating wealth. A good deal of his time and thought was devoted to the nursing of his earnings. He showed great shrewdness in his investments, which, with scarcely a single exception, turned out profitably. He was prudent and thrifty in his ways, but not parsimonious or mean. He lived in a handsome, generous style, without ostentation or extravagance, keeping plenty of servants, horses, and carriages, and a table generous in wholesome fare but sparing of luxuries. This love of money, and pleasure in amassing it, though it became a passion, as, with his bitter early experience of poverty and constant lessons of the evils of improvidence, it was natural that it should, did not become a vice or a disease; for it never prevented his full and ready response to every claim on his conscience or on his sympathy. And within this limit the love of accumulation is more to be praised than blamed. In final refutation of the gross injustice which so often during his life charged upon him the vice of a grasping penuriousness, a few specimens of his deeds of public spirit and benevolence—not a list, but a few specimens— may fitly be recorded here. To the fund in aid of the Democratic campaign which resulted in the election of Buchanan as President he sent his check for one thousand dollars. He gave the like sum to the first great meeting in Philadelphia at the outbreak of the war for the defence of the Union. In 1867, when the South was in such distress from the effects of the war, he gave five hundred dollars to the treasurer of a fund in their behalf, saying, “God only knows the whole suffering of our Southern brethren. Let us do all we can to relieve them, not stopping to question what is _constitutional_; for charity itself fulfils the law.” He subscribed five hundred dollars towards the relief of the sufferers by the great Chicago fire in 1871. The ship “Edwin Forrest” being in distress on the coast, the towboat “Ajax,” from New York, went to her assistance, having on board three pilots. The “Ajax” was never heard of afterwards. To the widows of the three lost pilots Forrest, unsolicited, sent one thousand dollars each. On two separate occasions he is known to have sent contributions of five hundred dollars to the Masonic Charity Fund of the New York Grand Lodge. These acts, which were not exceptional, but in keeping with his nature and habit, are not the acts of an unclean slave of avarice. The jealousy too often felt towards the rich too often incites groundless fault-finding.