One enthusiastic worshipper, in the year 1826, overflowed in the following style: “In the Iron Chest, on Thursday evening last, Mr. Forrest established a name and a fame which, should he die to-morrow, would give him a niche in the temple of renown to endure uncrumbled in the decay of ages!” Another one wrote thus: “In his Richard, Macbeth, Lear, and Othello, Mr. Forrest displays abilities and accomplishments which, for power and finish, we do not believe have ever been at all approached by any other actor that ever stepped upon the stage. The range of his delicate and varied by-play and the terrific energy of his explosions of naked passion leave the very greatest of his predecessors far in the rear and deep in the shade!” Such slopping eulogy defeats its own purpose. For want of discrimination its exaggerations are unmeaning and powerless. To be thus bedaubed and plastered with praise mortifies the actor, and injures him with the judicious, though springing from a generous sensibility and most kindly meant. This style of praise, however, is quite exceptional. The general run of critics have altogether too much knowingness and vanity for it. Their cue is to depreciate and detract, to satirize and belittle, so as either directly or indirectly to imply the superiority of their own knowledge and taste. Your ordinary critic is nothing if not superior to the artist he assumes to estimate. The publicity and admiration enjoyed by the performer seem to taunt the critic with his own obscurity and neglect, and he seeks an ignoble gratification in denying the merit of what he really envies. This base animus of the baser members of a properly high and useful literary guild betrays itself in many ways. For example, one of this sort, sneering at the idea of applauding the genius of an actor, characterized dramatists as “the class of men who administer in the most humiliating of all forms to the amusement of a large and mixed assembly.” It needs no more than his own words to place Pecksniff before us in full life.