There is no art which more needs to be criticised than that of criticism itself, because there is none which requires in its votary such varied knowledge and cultivation, and such integrity of mind and purity of motive; because, furthermore, no other art is exposed to such subtle temptations of prejudice and vanity. The critic, in assuming to be a judge, is no exception to other writers. Like them he reveals and betrays himself in what he writes. In dissecting others he lays his own soul bare. In consciously judging them he pronounces unconscious judgment on himself,—in the tenderness or the insensibility, the generosity and candor or the meanness and spite, the knowledge and beauty or the ignorance and foulness, which he expresses. The pen of a base, vindictive critic is a stiletto, a fang, or an anal gland. The pen of a competent and genial critic is the wand of an intellectual Midas turning everything it touches to gold. For such a critic has the true standard of judgment in his knowledge, and, whatever the merit or demerit of the work he estimates, as he points out its conformity with that standard or its departure from it his lucid illustration is always full of instruction and help. But the great majority of those journalists who presume to print their estimates of histrionic performances are profoundly ignorant of the elements of the dramatic art. Thus, having no knowledge of the real standard of judgment by which all impersonations should be tested, they cannot fairly criticise the artists who appear before them for a verdict. Instead of criticising or even justly describing them they victimize them. They use them as the stalking-horses of their own presumption or caprice, prejudice or interest. Unable to write with intelligent candor on the subject which they profess to treat, they employ it only as a text whereon to append whatever they think they can make effective in displaying their own abilities or amusing their readers. The unfittedness of such critics for their task is sufficiently proved by the chief attributes of their writing, namely, prejudice, absurd extravagance, reckless caprice, ridiculous assumption of superiority, violent efforts to lug in every irrelevant matter which they can in any way associate with the topic to enhance the effect they wish to produce regardless of justice or propriety. A few specimens of these various kinds of criticism will be found full of curious interest and suggestiveness, while they will illustrate something of what the proud and sensitive nature of Forrest had to undergo at the hands of his admirers and his contemners.