The one thing to be demanded of every actor is that he shall conceive his part with distinctness and represent it coherently. No actor can be considered meritorious who has not a full and vivid conception of his rôle and does not present a consistent living picture of it. But, this essential condition met, there may be much truth and great merit in many different conceptions and renderings of the same rôle. Then the degree of intellectuality, nobleness, beauty, and charm, or of raw passion and material power, in any stated performance is a fair subject for critical discussion, and will depend on the quality of the actor. But the critic should be as large and generous as God and nature in his standard, and not set up a factitious limit of puling feebleness and refuse to pardon anything that goes beyond it. He must remember that a great deal ought to be pardoned to honest and genuine genius when it electrifyingly exhibits to the crowd of tame and commonplace natures a character whose scale of power is incomparably grander than their own. It is ever one of the most imposing and benign elements in the mission of the stage to show to average men, through magnificent examples of depth of passion, force of will, strength of muscle, compass of voice, and organic play of revelation, how much wider than they had known is the gamut of humanity, how much more intense and exquisite its love, how much more blasting its wrath, more awful its sorrow, more hideous its crime and revenge, more godlike its saintliness and heroism. It is not to be pretended that Forrest had ever made the systematic analysis of the dramatic art sketched above. But when it was submitted to him he instantly appreciated it with enthusiasm; for he was experimentally familiar with all the rudiments of it. He was all his life an earnest student of human nature, in literature, in social intercourse, in his own consciousness, and in the critical practice of his profession. In fixing his rank as an actor the only question is how far he had the ability to represent in action what he unquestionably had the ability to appreciate in conception. While some of his admirers have eulogized him as the greatest tragedian that ever lived, some of his detractors have denounced him as one of the worst. The truth, of course, lies between these extremes. His excellences were of the most distinguished kind, but the limitations of his excellence were obvious to the judicious and sometimes repulsive to the fastidious.