To a man of his keen feeling and proud self-respect it must have been a torture to read the studiously belittling estimates, the satires, the insults, the slanderous caricatures continually published in the newspapers under the name of criticism. No wonder they stirred his rage and poisoned his repose, as they wounded his heart, offended his conscience, and made him sometimes shrink from social intercourse and sicken of the world. One critic says, “He is an injury to the stage. He has established a bad school for the young actors who are all imitating him. He has a contempt for genius and a disrelish for literature.” Against this extract, pasted in one of his scrap-books, Forrest had written, “Oh! oh!” A second writes, “It is impossible for us to admit that a man of Mr. Forrest’s intelligence can take pleasure in making of himself a silly spectacle for the amusement of the ignorant and the sorrow and pity of the educated. We prefer to believe that it is even a greater pain for him to play Metamora than it is for us to see him play it. In that case, how great must be his anguish!” A third philosophizes thus on his playing: “The best performances of Mr. Forrest are those tame readings of ordinary authors which offer no opportunity for enormous blunders. In the flat, dreary regions of the commonplace he walks firmly. But he climbs painfully up Shakspeare as a blind man would climb a mountain, continually tumbling over precipices without seeming to know it. He shocks our sensibilities, astonishes our judgment, bewilders and offends us; and this is at least excitement, if not entertainment. But his Brutus is a remarkably stupid performance. The only way in which he can redeem its stupidity is to make it worse; and if he wants to do this he must inspire it with the spirit of his Hamlet or his Othello.” A fourth makes malicious sport at his expense in this manner: “Mr. Forrest excels every tragedian we remember in one grand achievement. He can snort better than any man on the stage. It is an accomplishment which must have cost him much labor, and of which he is doubtless proud, for he introduces it whenever he gets a chance. His snort in Hamlet is tremendous; but that dying, swan-like note, which closes the career of the Gladiator, is unparalleled in the whole history of his sonorous and tragic nose. It must be heard, not described. We can only say that when he staggers in, with twenty mortal murders on his crown, with a face hideous with gore, and falls dying on the stage, he sounds a long, trumpet-like wail of dissolution, which is the most supernaturally appalling sound we ever heard from any nose, either of man or brute.” And a fifth caps the climax by calling him “A herculean murderer of Shakspeare!” So did a critic say of Garrick, on the eve of his retirement, “His voice is hoarse and hollow, his dimples are furrows, his neck hideous, his lips ugly, especially the upper one, which is raised all at once like a turgid piece of leather.” “He is a