Substantially intellectual, impassioned, profoundly ambitious, with flaming physical energies, with a very imperfect education, and few social advantages, Forrest was early thrown into the company of men who had great natural force of mind, and were frank and generous, but comparatively unpolished in taste and reckless in habits, leading a life of free amusement, conviviality, and passion often exploding in frenzied jealousies, rages, duels, deaths. He resisted the temptations that would have proved fatal to him, as they did to so many of his fellows, kept his self-respect, and faithfully studied and aspired to something better. He was exposed to the widest extremes of praise and abuse,— petted without bounds and assailed without measure. He kept his head unturned by either extravagance, though not uninjured, and swiftly sprang into a vast and intense popularity. But under the circumstances of the case—his burning impulsiveness and exuberant energy and lack of early culture, his tempestuous associates, and the general rawness or sensational eagerness of our population at that time—he would have been a miracle if his acting had not been marred with faults, if he had not been extravagant in displays of muscle and voice, if he had not been in some degree what his hostile critics called a melodramatic actor. Yet even then there were excellences in his playing, virtues of sincerity, truthfulness, intelligence, electric strokes of fine feeling, exquisite touches of beauty, confluences of light and shade, sustained unity of design, which justified the admiration and gave ground for the excessive eulogies he received. In melodrama the action is more physical than mental, the exertions of the actor blows of artifice to produce an effect rather than strokes of art to reveal truth. But in this sense Forrest always, even in his crudest day, was more tragic than melodramatic, his efforts explosions of the soul through the senses rather than convulsions of the muscles,—vents of the mind and glimpses of the spirit rather than contortions of the person, limbs, voice, and face. And he went steadily on, reading the best books, studying himself and other men, scrutinizing the unconscious acting of all kinds of persons in every diversity of situation, sedulously trying to correct errors, outgrow faults, gain deeper insight, and secure a fuller and finer mastery of the resources of his art.