“This is one reason why he is so very monotonous. Another and a deeper reason is that the man himself is nothing but a monotone. No man on the stage has a more strongly marked individuality than Mr. Forrest; once seen, he cannot be easily forgotten, nor can his performances ever be confused in memory with those of others. Yet this individuality is a prison-house to him; he cannot escape from it. He is forced, in spite of himself, to play every character in exactly the same way. He develops _Spartacus_ by the identical methods he employs in _Hamlet_; his _Lear_ and his _Claude Melnotte_ are made impressive, not by different styles. He has but one style. He is Edwin Forrest in everything; and, worse than this, he seems to care nothing for the best character he plays in comparison with his own success. Egotism is a marked peculiarity of his acting; he seems to say to the audience, not, ‘How fine is this character! how great was the author!’ but ever, ‘How finely _I_ play it! am I not the greatest actor you ever saw?’ “Of course this strong personality is sometimes to Mr. Forrest an advantage. There are _rôles_ which are adapted to his powers,—such as _Virginius_, _Damon_, and _Spartacus_. These he plays well because they do not require of him the transcendent power of genius,—the imagination which enables a man to penetrate the motives of a being foreign to himself, and to re-create in his own living nature the beauty and the passion of a dream. These he plays well because he finds in them something of himself. And even in Shaksperian characters, which are alien to his nature, he occasionally meets a passage which he _can_ feel, and which he therefore expresses; and these moments of earnestness, occurring suddenly in the midst of long scenes of artificiality and dulness, are like flashes of lightning in a black midnight: while they last they are bright, but when they are gone they make the darkness deeper.” The two brief notices that succeed appeared at the same time and in the same city in two opposed newspapers. The contrast is amusing, and it is easy to see how little impartial critical judgment went to the composition of either of them, as well as how bewildering they must have been to the reader who was seeking from the judgment of the press to form a dispassionate opinion on the merits of the actor: