Oakes rejected the proposition, though keenly feeling how generous and beautiful it was. Argument and persuasion from friendly lips, however, at length overcame his repugnance, and the noble kindness—so uncommon and exemplary among friends in our hard grasping time—was finally as gratefully accepted as it was gladly bestowed. This gift was the most effective stroke of _real_ acting that ever came from the genius of the player. Taken in connection with his traits of generous sweetness and his clouded passages of ferocious hate, it reveals a character like one of those barbaric kings who loom gigantic on the screen of the past, dusky and explosive with the ground passions of nature, but wearing a coronet of royal virtues and blazing all over with the jewelry of splendid deeds. It shows in him such a spirit in daily life as would enable him to utter on the stage with no knocking rebuke of memory the proud words of the noble Roman:— “When Marcus Brutus grows so covetous To lock his rascal counters from his friends, Be ready, gods, with all your thunderbolts, Dash him to pieces.” To anticipate here the sequel and earthly close of the friendship of Forrest and Oakes would be to detract too much from the proper interest of the last chapter of this biography. The story may well be left for the present as it stands at this point, where a half-century of unfaltering love and service was repaid not only by a heart full of gratitude but also with a munificent material Philadelphia, there to effect a settlement of such comforting means as shall make the residue of your life glide on in ceaseless ease. When the hand that wrote these tender words had been nigh four years mouldering in the tomb the survivor was heard to say, “Every year, every month, every day, I more and more appreciate his noble qualities and miss more and more his precious companionship. And I would, were it in my power, bring him back from the grave to be with me as long as I am to stay.”