If the voice is the soul of the drama, facial expression is its life. In the latter as in the former Forrest had remarkable power and skill, yet fell short of the perfection of the few supreme masters. He stood at the head of the Natural School whose representatives achieve everything that can be done by a genuine inspiration and laborious study, but not everything that can be done by these conjoined with that learned and disciplined art which is the highest fruit of science applied in a systematic drill. Imitatively and impulsively, with careful study of nature in others, and with sincere excitement of his own faculties of thought and feeling, he practised faithfully to acquire mobility of feature and a facile command of every sort of passional expression. He succeeded in a very uncommon yet clearly limited degree. The familiar states of vernacular humanity when existing in their extremest degrees of intensity and breadth he could express with a fidelity and vigor possible to but few. His organic portraitures of the staple passions of man were exact in detail and stereoscopic in outline,—breathing sculptures, speaking pictures. Pre-eminently was this true in regard to the basic attributes and ground passions of our nature. His Gladiator in his palmiest day of vital strength was something never surpassed in its kind. Every stroke touched the raw of the truth, and it was sublime in its terribleness. At one moment he stood among his enemies like a column of rock among dashing waves; at another moment the storm of passion shook him as an oak is shaken by the hurricane. And when brought to bay his action was a living revelation, never to be forgotten, of a dread historic type of man,—the tense muscles, the distended neck, the obstructed breath, the swollen arteries and veins, the rigid jaws, the orbs now rolling like the dilated and blazing eyes of a leopard, now white and set like the ferocious deathly eyes of a bull, while smothered passion seemed to threaten an actual explosion of the whole frame. It was fearful, but it was great. It was nature at first hand. And he could paint with the same clear accuracy the sweeter and nobler phases of human nature and the higher and grander elements of experience. His expressions of domestic affection, friendship, honesty, honor, patriotism, compassion, valor, fortitude, meditation, wonder, sorrow, resignation, were marked by a delicate finish and a pronounced distinctness of truth seldom equalled. For example, when in Virginius he said to his motherless daughter, “I never saw you look so like your mother in all my life,” the pensive and effusive tenderness of his look and speech irresistibly drew tears. When he said to her, “So, thou art Claudius’s slave!” the combination in his utterance of love for her and ironic scorn for the tyrant was a stroke of art subtile and effective beyond description. And when, in his subsequent madness, he exhibited