“When Mr. Forrest represents terror, his knees shake, his hands vibrate, his chest heaves, his throat swells, and his muscles project as if he were under the influence of a galvanic battery or his whole frame put in motion by a machine. He always appears anxious to show the toughness of his sinews, the cast-iron capabilities of his body, and the prodigious muscularity of his legs, which really haunt the spectator’s eyes like huge, grim-looking spectres, appearing too monstrous for realities, as they certainly are for the dignified grace of tragedy. He delights to represent physical agony with the most revolting exaggerations. When he dies, he likes that the audience should hear the rattles in his throat, and will, no doubt, some day have a bladder of pig’s blood concealed under his doublet, that, when stabbed, the tragic crimson may stream upon the stage, and thus give him the opportunity of representing death, in the words of his admirers, _to the life_. “Perhaps no stronger test of Mr. Forrest’s want of intellectual power as an actor can be given than his slow, drawling, whining mode of delivering the speech to the senate, in the play of Othello. No schoolboy could do it worse, and though in the more energetic scenes there is a certain mechanical skill and seeming reality of passion, yet the charm which this might be calculated to produce is lost by the closeness of resemblance to a well-remembered original. It is almost frightfully vigorous, and though there are some touches of true energy, this is much too boisterous, coarse, and unrelieved by those delicate inflections which so eloquently express true feeling to obtain for it that meed of praise only due to the efforts of original genius. There is much art and much skill in Mr. Forrest’s acting; but its grand defect is the general absence of truth.” The medley of praise and abuse, the hodge-podge of incongruous opinions, seen in the foregoing illustrations of newspaper criticism, arose far less from any contradiction of excellences and faults in the acting of Forrest than from the prejudices and ignorance of the writers. A large proportion of those writers were obstinately prepossessed or corruptly interested, and few of them had any distinct appreciation of the constituent elements of the dramatic art. Destitute of the true standard of criticism, the final canon of authority, their judgments were at the mercy of impulse and chance influences.