“DEAR SIR,—Being one of the small army of boys called after you, I should feel happy to receive some token from my illustrious namesake, if nothing more than his autograph. Hoping to see you before you leave the stage, “I am respectfully yours, “EDWIN FORREST MOORE.” Seven different dramatic associations, composed of amateurs and professionals, were formed in the cities of Portland, Boston, New York, and elsewhere, bearing his name. And the notices of him in the newspapers were to be reckoned by thousands, ranging all the way from majestic eulogium to gross vituperation. Portraits of him, paintings, engravings, photographs, in his own individuality and in his chief impersonations, were multiplied in many quarters. Numerous plaster casts of him, four or five busts in marble, and one full-length statue of surpassing grandeur, were taken. Many celebrated artists studied him, from Gilbert Stuart, whose Washington stands supremely immortal in American portraiture, to William Page, whose lovingly elaborated Shakspeare may become so in creative portraiture. Page has depicted Forrest in the role of Spartacus. He shows him at that moment of the scene in the amphitheatre where he utters the words which he never spoke without moving the audience to repeated bursts of applause: “Let them come in: we are armed!” The last portrait ever painted by the dying Stuart was of Forrest, then in his youth and only just beginning to become famous. Forrest used often to speak of his sitting to Stuart, whose strong fiery soul was enclosed in a frame then tottering and tremulous with age. “He was an old white lion,” said Forrest, “and so blind that I had to tell him the color of my eyes and of my hair. By sudden efforts of will he _threw_ the lines and bits of color on the canvas, and every stroke was speech.” Of the likenesses of Forrest published in this volume, the frontispiece is engraved from a daguerreotype of him at the age of forty-six; the succeeding one is from a painting by Samuel Lawrence, and shows him as he was at twenty-eight; the last one is from a photograph taken when he was in his sixty-seventh year. The illustrations of him in dramatic characters are from photographs made after he had passed sixty and had suffered partial paralysis. They do no justice to him as he appeared in his perfect meridian. Of all the expressions of admiration, affection, pleasure, called forth by a professional artist, of all the forms or signals of fame, perhaps none is more flattering or more delightful to the recipient than the tributary verses evoked from souls endowed with the poetic faculty. As such natures are finer and higher than others, their homage is proportionally more precious. During his life more than fifty poems addressed to Forrest were published, and gave him a great deal of pure pleasure. A few specimens of these offerings may properly find a place here.