Nature is truth in itself. But it is the ideal operation of truth that constitutes art. Acting, like all art, is truth seen not in itself, but reflected in man. It should not exhibit unmodified nature directly. It should hold up the mirror of the human soul and reveal nature as reflected there. It is a Claude Lorraine mirror of intellectual sympathy, softening, shading, toning,—just as Shakspeare says, begetting a temperance which gives smoothness to everything seen. The fights of the gladiators and the butcheries of the victims in the Roman amphitheatre were not acting, but reality. The splendor of art was trodden into the mire of fact. The error, the defect, the exaggeration in the acting of Forrest, so far as such existed, was that sometimes excess of nature prevented perfection of art. If certainly a glorious fault, it was no less clearly a fault. But as he advanced in years this fault diminished, and the polish of art removed the crudeness of nature. Step by step the tricks into which he had been betrayed revealed themselves to him as distasteful tricks, and the sturdy impetuous honesty of his character made him repudiate them. Too often in his earlier Lear he gave the impression that he was buffeting fate and fortune instead of being buffeted by them; but slowly the spiritual element predominated over the physical one, until the embodiment stood alone in its balanced and massive combination of sublimated truth, epic simplicity, exquisite tenderness, and tragic strength. So his young Damon was greatly a performance of captivating points and electrical transitions, stirring the audience to fever-heats of fear and transport. No one who saw his wonderful burst of passion when he learned that his slave had slain the horse that was to carry him to the rescue of his friend and hostage—no one who saw his reappearance before the block, stained and smeared with sweat and dust, crazed and worn, yet sustained by a terrible nervous energy—could say that in any class of passion he ever witnessed a truer or a grander thing. But the conception was rather of a hot-blooded knight of the age of chivalry than of a contemplative, resolute, symmetrical Greek senator. Gradually, however, the maturing mind of the actor lessened the mere tumult of sensational excitement, and increased and co-ordinated the mental and moral qualities into a classical and climacteric harmony. One of the most striking evidences of the progressive artistic improvement of Forrest was the change in his delivery of the celebrated lament of Othello, “Farewell the tranquil mind.” He used, speaking it in a kind of musical recitative, to utter the words “neighing steed” in equine tones, imitate the shrillness of “the shrill trump,” give a deep boom to the phrase “spirit-stirring drum,” and swell and rattle his voice to portray “the engines whose rude throats the immortal Jove’s dread clamors counterfeit.” He learned to see that however effective this might be as