The newspaper attack from which he suffered the most was so peculiar in some of its features as to demand mention. In 1855 a series of elaborate critiques on his chief rôles appeared in a leading metropolitan journal. They were so scholarly, careful, and strong in their analysis of the plays, and so cutting in their strictures on the player, that they attracted wide attention and did him much damage. Now, two hands were concerned in these articles. The learning, thought, and eloquence were furnished by a German of uncommon scholarship and talent, who deeply felt the power and merit of Forrest as an actor and considered him a man of accomplished dramatic genius. The articles, as he wrote them, were then padded with demeaning epithets and scurrilous estimates of Forrest by one who was filled with prejudices theoretical and personal. Could Forrest have totally disregarded the articles, fortified in a magnanimous serenity, it had been well. He could not do it. He took them home with extreme pain and with extreme wrath, intensely resenting their injustice and their unkindness. This is a specimen of what is inflicted and suffered in the battle of public life. It tempts one to say, Blessed is the man who escapes all publicity, and lives and loves and dies happily in private! No doubt, however, it is best to say, with the grand old Faliero,— “I will be what I should be, or be nothing.” His long, crowded experience of unfairness and unkindness deposited in Forrest a burning grudge against the world, a fierce animosity towards his injurers, an angry recoil of self-esteem, and a morbid exaggeration of the real vices of society. In one of his letters to a friend he writes, “This human life is a wretched failure, and the sooner annihilation comes to it the better.” An old poet makes one of his characters who had been deeply wronged say,— “I will instruct my sorrows to be proud, For grief is proud and makes his owner stout.”