“Every actor has some particular excellence, which stamps his style in everything he does. This in Forrest is the ever visible manliness of spirit, and love of equality and liberty, which place his Damon, Spartacus, Brutus, and all characters of a like nature so far above the reach of other actors. He is always the _true man_, casting defiance in the face of tyranny; his hand always open to the grasp of a friend, resolute, generous, and faithful. This spirit is something which every true heart, be its owner rich or poor, learned or unlearned, will always acknowledge and worship as the noblest attribute of man; and here is the real secret of Forrest’s success. The unlettered cannot but admire him for this feature, while to those who can appreciate artistic finish and detail, his acting must be an inexhaustible source of pleasure. After he has gone the stage will feel his worth. Who has not wept over the last act of Brutus? Who has not felt his ‘seated heart knock at his ribs’ while listening to the tragedian’s astonishing delivery in the third act of Damon and Pythias? Who that has ever heard him exclaim in the last act of the Gladiator, ‘There are no gods in heaven!’ can accuse him of being coarse or vulgar? Indeed, it may be said of his acting in many characters (as a Shaksperian commentator has said of Lear), ‘The genius of antiquity bows before it, and moderns gaze upon it with awe.’” The strong proclivity of professional artists to jealousy is as proverbial as the tendency of the critic to attack and belittle. Forrest suffered much from both. His imperious independence, not less than his great success, provoked it, and he was maligned, spattered, and backbitten sufficiently from the stage as well as from the office. If in this respect he was an exception, it was merely in degree. The mortified and envious actors of Drury Lane discussing Kean in the greenroom, one of them sneeringly remarked, “They say he is a good harlequin.” “Yes,” retorted honest Jack Bannister, “an extraordinary one; for he has leaped over all your heads.” But the other side of this view was also true, and Forrest numbered his most enthusiastic admirers in the dramatic profession itself in all its ranks. They paid him many tributes from first to last, on which he justly set the highest value. For when the player is intelligent and candid, his special experience makes him the most competent critic of a player. The extent to which the peculiar style of Forrest took effect in producing imitators, conscious and unconscious,—who often, it is true, unhappily, copied his least praiseworthy points,—was a vast and unquestionable testimonial to his original power. And in here leaving the subject of criticism, it is enough, passing over the recorded praises of his genius by many leading American actors, to set down the deliberate estimate of James E. Murdock, himself a player of uncommon merit, as well as a man of refined scholarly culture.