“Having within the present year closely criticised Edwin Forrest’s performances during a long engagement, we do not intend to bore our readers with repetitions of what we have said. Mr. Forrest will go through his programme like a machine, and like most machines it may be discovered that his powers have suffered somewhat by wear and tear. He has long since passed the point of improvement. Fully settled in his own conceit that his personations are the most wonderful that the world ever saw, his only care will be to heighten defects which he considers beauties, and to dwell with increased tenderness upon each fault. There are some mothers who give their hearts to their puny, deformed, and bad- tempered children, to the neglect of others who are handsome, gentle, and intelligent. Mr. Forrest is an admirer of this policy. He slights his better qualities in acting, and dandles his absurdities with more than just parental fondness. His faults are inveterate; his beauties daily grow homely. It would be supererogation to expose at length those vices and stage tricks which have already been freely cauterized.” “During the week Mr. Forrest has been performing the characters of _Richelieu_, _Damon_, _Richard_, and _Hamlet_. At each representation the invariable compliment of a crowded house has been paid him. With the advance of every year this actor seems to grow greater. The intellectuality of his acting becomes more and more apparent. The experience of years is now devoted to his art; a lifetime is concentrated upon the development of his transcendent genius. Mr. Forrest has shaped the colossal block of crude genius into wonderful statues of natural and lovely proportions. No intelligent praise can be extravagant which extols the exceeding beauty of the conceptions of this wonderful artist. We can scarcely think of Mr. Forrest’s fame as otherwise than increasing. It throws around his name a luminous halo, whose brightness and extent the progress of years will only intensify and enlarge.” One more specimen will suffice. It is from the pen of an anonymous English critic: “If Forrest is not in a paroxysm, he is a mere wicker idol; huge to the eye, but _full of emptiness_,—a gigantic vacuum. His distortions of character are monstrous; the athletic, muscular vigor of his Lear is a positive libel upon consistency and truth. Spartacus was made for him, and he for Spartacus; the athlete is everlastingly present in all his personations. His ravings in Othello, in Macbeth, and in Richard the Third are orgasms of vigorous commonplace.