An American critic wrote thus of the Nancy Sykes of Charlotte Cushman: “Miss Cushman’s performance is of the Anatomical Museum style. Her effects are thrilling and vulgar. Her poses are awkward, and her pictures unfinished and coarse in outline. She has an unpleasantly pre- raphaelite death scene, and is dragged off, stiff and stark, when all the characters express their internal satisfaction at the circumstance by smiling, shaking hands, and joining in a feeble chorus. The secret of her attraction is vigor. The masses like vigor. If they can have a little art with it, very well. But vigor they must have.” Of late it has been the fashion to extol Miss Cushman as the queenly mistress of all the dignities and refinements of the dramatic profession; but the foregoing notice is exactly of a piece with the treatment visited upon Forrest for many years by the vulgar coteries of criticism, whose aim was not justice and usefulness but effect upon the prejudiced and the careless. Even the quiet and gentlemanly Edwin Booth has been as unsparingly assailed as he has been lavishly praised. An insidious article on him, entitled “The Machine-Actor,” called him a “self-acting dramatic machine warranted;” and while admitting, with great generosity, that “he was not wholly destitute of dramatic ability,” attributed his success and reputation chiefly to extraneous conditions, in especial the shrewdness of “his managing agent, who judiciously prepared his houses for him, and pecuniarily and personally appreciated the power of the press and conciliated the critics.” The two following notices of Mr. Booth’s Melnotte—the first obviously by a critic who had, the second by one who had not, been “conciliated”—are quite as absurd in their contradiction as those so often composed on Forrest: “On Monday evening last we enjoyed the first opportunity of seeing Mr. Edwin Booth in the character of _Claude Melnotte_, in the ‘Lady of Lyons.’ Our impressions of Mr. Booth in the part may be briefly summed up in saying that he is one of the very best _Claudes_ we have ever seen,—scholarly, sustained, and forcibly reticent at all points,—not so youthful in his make-up as to suggest the enthusiastic boy of Bulwer’s drama, but in all other regards the very ideal of the character. His marvellously melodious voice sounds to peculiar advantage in the rich prose-poetry of the more sentimental passages, and in the passages of sterner interest the latent strength of the tragedian comes nobly into play. Booth’s _Claude_ is an unqualified success, and its first rendering was witnessed by an audience brilliant in number and intelligence and markedly enthusiastic in their reception of the best points.”