made parties to the accusations against her. Alger, in his big “Life of Edwin Forrest,” after acknowledging that “the innocence of Mrs. Forrest is publicly accredited, and is not here impugned;” that she “was believed by her intimate and most honored friends to be innocent, was vindicated by a jury after a most searching trial, and is now living in modest and blameless retirement,” simply urges in Forrest’s behalf that he honestly believed himself a wronged man, and acted with his usual fury and unforgivingness upon that conviction. Willis and his brother were both among the witnesses for the plaintiff on the trial, and both, of course, denied peremptorily the charges against them. But the one circumstance which more than all else influenced the decision of the jury was the constant presence in court of Mrs. N. P. Willis, side by side with Mrs. Forrest, and the brave, clear, and simple way in which she testified in her friend’s behalf. No one could believe that a spirited and refined lady, like Mrs. Willis, would have consented, for an instant, to put herself into such a position, without a full assurance of her husband’s innocence; and no one who listened to her testimony could have thought her a woman likely to be deceived. John Van Buren, who was Forrest’s lawyer in all these cases, was quite generally censured for the needlessly abusive way in which he handled the witnesses for the other side. In the trial of the assault and battery case, “Willis _v._ Forrest,” his personalities went so far beyond the limits usually set to the licensed insolence of the bar, that on the termination of the suit Willis, who was about starting on a trip to the South, and had learned from an item in the “Herald” that Van Buren was going South too, sent him a letter demanding an apology. In case he should decline to make such apology, the letter proposed a hostile meeting at Charleston or any other convenient point in the Southern States. This note the recipient returned (after carefully making a copy of it) with a short reply, describing it as a “silly and scurrilous communication.” This it certainly was not, but, on the other hand, a very dignified and gentlemanly letter; rather too long, it must be owned, for on these occasions Willis’s pen generally ran away with him. However, on the receipt of this answer to it, which was forwarded to him at the South, he replied with sufficient brevity: “I now pronounce you a coward, as well as a proper companion for the blackguards whose attorneyship constitutes your career.”