Edwin Forrest was a tragedian of great natural force and genius, endowed with a wonderful voice and a magnificent physique. But he was a man of passionate and overbearing temper; his education was defective, his language and manners sometimes offensively coarse, and he had little relish for intellectual society. He does not appear, however, to have felt any objection to his wife’s hospitalities, or to have suspected any impropriety in her receiving her friends, during his frequent absences from home on professional engagements, until long after other causes of estrangement had arisen between them. At Cincinnati, in the spring of 1848, he thought that he had discovered evidence of a guilty intimacy between Mrs. Forrest and an actor named Jamieson; and although she solemnly protested her innocence and her husband agreed to accept her oath, his jealousy smouldered and occasionally broke out in scenes of violence. At length, in April, 1849, they agreed to separate. Mrs. Forrest made her home for a time with Mr. and Mrs. Parke Godwin, and Forrest took up his residence in Philadelphia, where in February, 1850, he made an application for divorce to the Pennsylvania legislature, based upon affidavits, charging his wife with adultery. This application was ultimately denied, but meanwhile the lady’s friends in New York had taken the matter up. She had the sympathy and moral support of such men as William C. Bryant and his son-in-law, Mr. Parke Godwin, and Dr. Orville Dewey, the eminent Unitarian divine. Up to this time Forrest had not implicated Willis in his charges, but hearing that he was among those who were taking sides with Mrs. Forrest, he had stopped him in the street one day in January, 1850, and warned him against intermeddling between him and his wife, denouncing her unfaithfulness in the strongest terms. Willis replied that he did not believe a word of the slanders against her. The next day Mrs. Willis received an anonymous letter, accusing her husband of criminal relations with Mrs. Forrest. On March 28th the “Herald” published extracts from the evidence on which Forrest had based his application to the Pennsylvania legislature, which compromised, among others, Mr. Richard Willis. This drew from his brother a letter of explanation, printed in the “Herald” of the following day.