When in the fullest glory of his strength and his fame Forrest bought a farm and quite made up his mind to retire from the stage forever. While under this impulse he played a parting engagement in New Orleans. Called out after the play, he said, among other things, “The bell which tolled the fall of the curtain also announced my final departure from among you. I have chosen a pursuit congenial to my feelings,—that pursuit which the immortal Washington pronounced one of the most noble and useful ever followed by man,—the tilling of the soil. And now, ladies and gentlemen, I have to say that little word which must so often be said in this sad, bright world,—farewell.” The purpose, however, passed away with its now forgotten cause. Again he seriously thought for a little time, when a nomination to Congress was pressed on him, of exchanging his dramatic career for a political one. This idea, too, on careful reflection he rejected. And once more, when depressed and embittered by his domestic trouble, and sick of appearing before the public, he was for a season strongly tempted to say he would never again enter the theatre as a player. With these three brief and fitful exceptions he never entertained any design of abandoning the practice of his profession, until a shattering illness in the spring of 1872 compelled him to take the step. Then he took the step quietly, with no public announcement.

Thus the dramatic seasons of the five years preceding his death found the veteran still in harness, working vigorously as of old in the art of which he had ever been so fond and so proud. His earnings during each of these seasons were between twenty-five and forty thousand dollars, and the applause given to his performances and the friendly and flattering personal attentions paid him were almost everywhere very marked. He had no reason to feel that he was lingering superfluous on the stage. Many, it is true, asked why, with his great wealth, his satiation of fame, his literary taste, his growing infirmity of lameness, he did not give up this drudgery and enjoy the luxury of his home in leisure and dignity. There were two chief reasons why he persisted in his vocation. No doubt the large sum of ready money he earned by it was welcome to him, because while his fortune was great it was mostly unproductive and a burden of taxes. No doubt, also, he well relished the admiration and applause he drew; for the habit of enjoying this had become a second nature with him. Neither of these considerations, however, was it which caused him to undergo the toil and hardship of his profession to the last. His real motives were stronger. The first was the sincere conviction that it was better for the preservation of his health and faculties, his interest and zest in life and the world, to keep at his wonted task. He feared that a withdrawal of this spur and stimulus would the sooner dull his powers, stagnate him, and break him down. He often asserted this. For example, in 1871 he wrote thus, after speaking of what he had suffered from severe journeyings, extreme cold, poor food, many vexations, and a fall over a balustrade so terrible that it would have killed him had it not been for his professional practice in falling: “This is very hard work; but it is best to do it, as it prevents both physical and mental rust, which is a sore decayer of body and soul.”

But the most effectual motive in keeping him on the stage was a real professional enthusiasm, an intense love of his art for its own sake. He felt that he was still improving in his best parts, in everything except mere material power, giving expression to his refining conceptions with a greater delicacy and subtilty, a more minute truthfulness and finish. He keenly enjoyed his own applause of his own best performances. This was a satisfaction to him beyond anything which the critics or the public could bestow or withhold. It was a luxury he was not willing to forego. He was a great artist still delighting himself with touching and tinting his favorite pictures, still loyal to truth and nature, and feeling the joy of a devotee as he placed now a more delicate shade here or a more ethereal light there, producing a higher harmony of tone, a greater convergence of effects in a finer unity of the whole. Even had this been an illusion with him, it would have been touching and noble. But it was a reality. His Richelieu and Lear were never rendered by him with such entire artistic beauty and grandeur as the last times he played them. In the thoughts of those who knew that as he went over the country in his later years the plaudits of the audiences and the approvals of critics were insignificant to him in comparison with his own judgment and feeling, and that he deeply relished the minutely earnest and natural truth and power and rounded skill of his own chosen portrayals of human nature, the fact lent an extreme interest and dignity to his character. This unaffected enthusiasm of the old artist, this intrinsic delight in his work, was a sublime reward for his long-continued conscientious devotion, and an example which his professional followers in future time should thoughtfully heed. He wrote to a friend from Washington near the close of his career, “Last night I played Lear in a cold house, with a wretched support, and to a sparse and undemonstrative audience. But I think I never in my life more thoroughly enjoyed any performance of mine, because I really believed, and do believe so now, that I never before in my life played the part so well. For forty years I have studied and acted Lear. I have studied the part in the closet, in the street, on the stage, in lunatic asylums all over the world, and I hold that next to God, Shakspeare comprehended the mind of man. Now I would like to have had my representation of the character last night photographed to the minutest particular. Then next to the creation of the part I would not barter the fame of its representation.” This, written to a bosom friend from whom he kept back nothing, when the shadow of the grave was approaching, was not egotism or vanity. It was truth and sincerity, and its meaning is glorious. What a man works for with downright and persevering honesty, that, and the satisfaction or the retribution of it, he shall at last have. And there is only one thing of which no artist can ever tire,—merit. The passion for mere fame grows weak and cold, and, under its prostituted accompaniments, dies out in disgust; but the zeal and the joy of a passion for excellence keep fresh and increase to the end.

Aside from that self-rewarding love of his art and delight in exercising it and improving in it, of which no invidious influence could rob him, Forrest continued still to be followed by the same extremes of praise and abuse to which he had ever been accustomed. But one grateful form of compliment and eulogy became more frequent towards the close. He was in the frequent receipt of letters, drawn up and signed by large numbers of the leading citizens of important towns, urging him to pay them a visit and gratify them with another, perhaps a final, opportunity of witnessing some of his most celebrated impersonations. Among his papers were found, carefully labelled, autograph letters of this description from New Orleans, Savannah, Cincinnati, Louisville, Detroit, Troy, and other cities,—flattering testimonials to his celebrity and the interest felt in him. These dignified and disinterested demonstrations were fitted to offset and soothe the wounds continually inflicted on his proud sensibility by many vulgar persons who chanced to have access to newspapers for the expression of their frivolity, malignity, or envy. For detraction is the shadow flung before and behind as the sun of fame journeys through the empyrean. To illustrate the scurrilous treatment Forrest had to bear, even in his old age, from heartless ribalds, it is needful only to set a few characteristic examples in contrast with his real character. His professional and personal character, in the spirit and aim of his public life, is justly indicated in this brief newspaper editorial:

“In the line of heroic characters—such as Brutus, Virginius, Tell—Mr. Forrest has had no rival in this country. He is himself rich in the generous, manly qualities fitted for such grand ideal parts. The old-time favorite plays of the heroic and romantic school, like Damon and Pythias, are well-nigh banished from the stage. The materialistic tendencies and aspirations of this intensely practical age disqualify most audiences for seeing with the zest of their fathers a play so purely poetic and imaginative as the immortal tale of the Pythagorean friends. That Mr. Forrest, almost alone among his contemporaries, should cling to this style of plays with such true enthusiasm is evidence of the fidelity with which he seeks purity rather than attractiveness in the models of his art. His name has never been identified with a single one of the meretricious innovations which have within the past two decades so lowered the dignity of the drama. Every play associated with his person has some noble hero as its central figure, and some sublime moral quality and lesson in the unravelling of its plot. And his unwavering seriousness of purpose in everything he plays cannot be questioned, whatever else may be questioned.”

The above estimate is sustained by the unconscious betrayal, the latent implications, in the following speech made by Forrest himself when called out after a performance:

“Ladies and Gentlemen,—For this and for the many tokens of your kind approbation, I return you my sincere and heartfelt acknowledgments. It is a source of peculiar gratification to me to perceive that the drama is yet, with you, a subject of consideration. Permit me to express my conviction that it is, in one form or another, whether for good or for evil, intimately blended with our social institutions. It is for you, then, to give it the necessary and appropriate direction. If it be left in charge of the bad and the dissolute, the consequences will be deplorable; but if the fostering protection of the wise and the good be extended to it, the result cannot but tend to the advancement of morals and the intellectual improvement of the community. It is indeed the true province of the drama

What a descent from the above level to the ridicule, insult, and misrepresentation in notices like the succeeding:

“Forrest reminded us of the Butcher of Chandos, and his rendition of the fifth act was reminiscent of the wild madness, the ungovernable bellowings and fierce snortings of a short-horned bull chased by a score of terriers. He raved, and rumbled, and snorted, and paused, gathering wind for a fresh start, as if the ghost of Shakspeare were whispering in his ear,

We are fearful that the more he studies and improves his part the worse it will be.”

“Last night we went with great expectations to the Academy of Music to see Forrest. We were never so astonished as to witness there the most successful practical imposition ever played on the public. Manager Leake has got Old Brown the hatter there, with his white head blacked, playing leading parts under the assumed name of Edwin Forrest.”

“Mr. Forrest dragged his weary performances out to empty boxes last week. Save in his voice, which still soars, crackles, rumbles, grumbles, growls and hisses, as in his younger days, this great actor is but a dreary echo of his former self. Appropriately may he exclaim,—

and it would be well if, like the heroic Moor, he would bid farewell to the bustling world by an abrupt retirement from the stage, instead of inflicting nightly stabs upon his high reputation and wounding his old-time friends by his attempts to soar into the sublime regions of tragedy.”

“The interest that still crowds the theatre whenever Mr. Forrest appears is less admiration of his present power than curiosity to see a gigantic ruin.”

“The intellectual portion of the community never thoroughly appreciated the style of histrionic gymnastics which our great tragedian has introduced; the ponderous tenderness and gladiatorial grace of his conceptions, though excellent in their way, had never any charm for people of delicate nerves, who delight not in viewing experiments in spasmodic contortion, or delineations of violent death, evidently after studies from nature in the slaughterhouse! But lately the faithful themselves are tiring of it.”

The man with a thin and acid nature who aspires to be an author or an artist, and cannot succeed, sometimes becomes a spiteful critic. The only pity is that he should usually find it so easy to get an organ for his spites. Would-be genius hates and criticises, actual genius loves and creates. The former enviously despises those who succeed where he has failed, the latter generously admires all true merit.

And now it will be a relief to turn from such criticisms to facts. The season of 1871 was marked by an experience altogether memorable in the professional history of Forrest, his last engagement in New York, where he played for twenty nights in February at the Fourteenth Street Theatre, sustaining only the two roles of Lear and Richelieu. These were his two best parts, and being characters of old men his cruel sciatica scarcely interfered with his rendering of them. One or two newspaper writers complained, as if it were a crime in the actor and a personal offence to them, that “when Forrest came this season to New York he neglected, and apparently with a purpose, the usual precautions of metropolitan managers, and seemed to avoid all the modern appliances of success, either from a contempt for the appliances or from indifference as to the result.” They did not seem once to suspect that his scorn for every species of bribery or meretricious advertising, his frank and careless trust in simple truth, was, considering the corrupt custom of the times, in the highest degree honorable to him and exemplary for others. It was always his way to make a plain announcement of his appearance, and then let the verdict be what it might, with no interference of his.

There was no popular rush to see him now. In the crowd of new excitements and the quick forgetfulness belonging to our day, the curiosity about him and the interest in him had largely passed away. But the old friends who rallied at his name, and the respectable numbers of cultivated people who were glad of a chance to see the most historic celebrity of the American stage before it should be too late, were unanimous in their enthusiastic admiration. They declared with one voice that his playing was filled with wonderful power in general and with wonderful felicities in detail. That metropolitan press, too, from which he had so long received not only unjust depreciation, but wrong and contumely, spoke of him and his performances now in a very different tone. Its voice appeared a kindly response to what he had privately written to his friend Oakes: “Well, I am here, here in New York once more, and on Monday next begin again my professional labor,—labors begun more than forty years ago in the same city. What changes since then in men and things! Will any one of that great and enthusiastic audience which greeted my efforts as a boy, be here on Monday evening next to witness the matured performance of the man? If so, how I should like to hear from his own lips if the promises of spring-time have been entirely fulfilled by the fruits of the autumn of life!” Without any notable exception, extreme praise was lavished on his acting, and his name was treated with a tenderness and a respect akin to reverence. It seemed as though the writers felt some premonition of the near farewell and the endless exit, and were moved to be just and kind. The late amends touched the heart of the old player deeply. It was a comfort to him to be thus appreciated in the city of his greatest pride ere he ceased acting, and to have the estimates of his friends endorsed in elaborate critiques from the pens of the best dramatic censors, William Winter, Henry Sedley, John S. Moray, and others. It is due to him and to them that some specimens of these notices be preserved here. Space will allow but a few extracts from the leading articles:

“Edwin Forrest, the actor, who is identified with much that is intellectual, picturesque, and magnificently energetic in the history of the American stage, is again before the New York public. His reappearance is deeply interesting upon several accounts. His reputation, far from being confined to the United States, extends wherever the language of Shakspeare is spoken, and to a great many countries where translations have rendered that poet’s meanings known. His name has grown with the name of the American people, and has greatened with the increasing greatness of the country. At home and abroad he is recognized as the superbly unique representative of several characters whose creators owe their inspiration to the genius of American history. No other actor has presented Americans with such powerful and original conceptions of King Lear, Coriolanus, and Macbeth. No other unites such grand physical forces with such intellectual vigor and delicacy. His hand has an infinity of tints at its command, and his tenderest touches are never weak. He is, therefore, deservedly and almost universally considered as the fair representative of what Americans have most reason to be proud of in the history of their stage. He is not a weak copyist of foreign originalities and of schools of the past. His virtues and his vices, dramatically speaking, are his own. His genius is thoroughly self-responsible, and his strong, conscious, and magnificent repose is resplendently suggestive of the degree in which the great actor rates, and has a right to rate himself.”

“Mr. Forrest can indeed be now admired more than he ever was before; for his magnificent and picturesque energies are now chastened and restrained by great intellectual culture, and softened by the presence of that tender glow which varied experience is pretty sure to ultimately lend. One strives in vain to recall the name of any other actor, either in this country or in England, who possesses such immense physical energies under such perfect subservience to the intellect. We insist more particularly upon this point, because it is one upon which even the admirers of Mr. Forrest are not apt to dwell. There is a very large class of people who are so absorbed in the generous breadth, the brilliant coloring, and the large treatment of Mr. Forrest’s favorite themes, that they neglect to give him credit for intellectual niceties and delicate emotional distinctions. They vulgarly admire merely the large style and heroic presence of the man, and the rich reverberations of a voice that all the demands of the entire gamut of passion have not yet perceptibly worn, and they omit to give him that intellectual appreciation which is very decidedly his due. In no other character which he is fond of playing are all these qualifications so harmoniously united as in Lear. In no other character are the distinctive qualities of Mr. Forrest’s genius so beautifully blended and played. Those who have been familiar with his rendering of this character in the days that are past will take a curious pleasure in accompanying him from scene to scene, and from act to act, and in remarking how true he remains to the ideal of his younger years, and how powerful he is in expressing that ideal. It is a rare thing for an actor to awaken in a later generation the same quality and degree of delight that he awoke in his own. It is a rare thing for him to be as youthful in his maturity as he was mature in his youth, and to thus succeed in delighting those who measure by a standard more exacting and severe than the standard was which the public, in an earlier age of American dramatic art, was fond of applying. Mr. Forrest has passed these tests. We do not care for the ignorant sarcasm of those who claim that the ‘school’ he represents is a ‘physical’ school. It is a school wherein Mr. Forrest is supreme master, and where an unrivalled voice and physique are made absolutely subservient to intellectual expression.”

“Never were plaudits better deserved by any actor in any age than those which have been showered down upon Forrest during the past week. His conception and his rendering of King Lear were alike magnificent. In his prime, when theatres were crowded by the brightest and fairest of America, who listened spell-bound to the favorite of the hour, he never played this character half so well. The idiosyncrasy of his nature forbade it. The fierce ungovernable fire within him could not be restrained within the limits of the rÔle. Forrest could never modulate the transport of his feelings. He leaped at once from a calm and even tenor to the full violence of frenzied anger. There was no crescendo, no gradation. He was so fully possessed of his rÔle that he threw aside every consideration of different circumstances which the case suggested. He was for the moment Lear, but not Shakspeare’s old man: he was Forrest’s Lear. Hence the fire of furious anger and the decrepitude of age were alike exaggerated. But these things have passed away. Age has tamed the lion-like excesses of the royal Forrest, and his impersonation of King Lear is now absolutely faultless. Seeing and hearing him under the disadvantages of a mangled text, a poor company, a miserable mise en scÈne, and a thin house, the visitor must still be impressed by the one grand central figure, so eloquent, so strong, so sweet in gentlest pathos. There is an unconscious reproach in the manner in which he bows his head to the shouts of applause. He is the King Lear of the American stage; he gave to his children, the public, all that he had, and now they have deserted him. They have crowned a new king before whom they bow, and the old man eloquent is cheered by few voices. The consciousness of his royal nature supports him. He knows that while he lives there can be no other head of the American stage; but still he is deserted and alone. That some such feeling overpowered him when the flats parted, and the audience, seeing the king on his throne, cheered him, there can be little doubt. He bowed his head slightly in response to the acclamations of those scantily-filled seats. But throughout the play there was an added dignity of sorrow, which showed that the neglect of the public had wounded him. He knew his fate. He recognized that he was a discrowned king, and that the fickle public had crowned another not worthy of sovereignty and having no sceptre of true genius. The play went on and he became absorbed in his rÔle, forgetting in the delirium of his art that his house was nearly empty. Had there been but five there, he would have played it. For to him acting is existence, and the histrionic fire in his bosom can never be quenched save with life. Actors may come and actors may go, but it will be centuries before a Lear arises like unto this man Forrest, whom the public seems to have so nearly forgotten.”

“The curtain rose a few minutes after eight, and the cold air issuing from the stage threw a chill over the audience. But when at last the scene opened and revealed Lear on his throne, the old form in its Jove-like grandeur, the quiet eye that spoke of worlds of reserved power, brought back the memories of old, and round after round of applause stopped the utterance of the opening words. There was such a heartiness of admiring welcome about the thing, so much of the old feeling of theatrical enthusiasm, that Forrest felt for once compelled to stand up, and, with a bend of his leonine head, acknowledge the welcome. He tested the love of his daughters; he gave away his kingdom, taking, as he gave it, the sympathies of the audience. He called on the eldest, and was taunted; he lost his ill-controlled temper, and finally, goaded till his whole frame seemed about to shatter, he invoked the curse of heaven. As he spoke, you could hear all over the house that hissing of breath drawn through the teeth which sudden pain causes, and when the curtain fell people looked into each other’s eyes in silence. Then you would hear, ‘That is acting.’ ‘It is awful!’ Then suddenly rose bravos, not your petty clapping of hands, but shouts from boxes and orchestra, and they came in volleys. The old king tottered calmly out before the curtain, looked around slowly, and bowed back. But there was now in that quiet eye a suppressed gleam in which those nearest the stage could read as in a book the pride and gratification of genius enjoying the effect of its power.”

“With the drawbacks of ordinary scenery and a wretched support, Forrest gives us a Richelieu which at the close of the fourth act nightly draws forth a perfect whirlwind of applause, and brings the veteran before the curtain amidst a wild cry of enthusiasm which must stir old memories in his bosom. His genius spreads an electric glow through the house and carries the sympathies by storm.”

“Mr. Forrest’s reading of Richelieu is remarkable for its firmness and intelligibility of purpose, for its singular pathos, for its often unaffected melody of elocution, and—in this point approaching his Lear—for its revelation, at intervals, of unmistakable subtlety of thought. Like his Lear, too, the part is embroidered over with those swift touches of electricity that gild and enrich the underlying fabric which might otherwise appear too weighty and sombre.”

“The actor who would vitalize this part has no common work to perform. It is incumbent upon him to make martial heroism visible through a veil of intellectual finesse, and to indicate the natural soldier-like qualities of the man projecting through that smoothness and dissimulation which the ambition of the statesman rendered expedient. It is necessary for him to develop so that they may be perceived by the audience those characteristics which Bulwer has unfolded in the play through the instrumentality of long soliloquies that are necessarily omitted upon the stage, and unless this is done by the actor the character is deprived of that subtlety and force and that human complexity of motive which Bulwer, in spite of his artificiality and conceits, contrives to make apparent.”

“This, however, is the task which Mr. Forrest performs to perfection. Not being a purely intellectual character, Richelieu demands in the delineation all those aids which are desirable from Mr. Forrest’s august physique and wonderfully rich voice. A just discrimination compels us to own that beside this representation that of Mr. Booth appears faint and pale. A film seems to cover it; whereas the representation of Mr. Forrest gathers color and strength from the contrast. As a piece of mere elocution Mr. Forrest’s reading is exquisitely beautiful, the ear floating upon the profound and varied music of its cadences. But, flawlessly exquisite as are these graces of enunciation, they are, after all, merely channels in which the spirit of the entire interpretation runs. The most cultured man in the audience which last night filled the Fourteenth Street Theatre might have closely followed every line which the actor enunciated, without being able to perceive wherein it could be more heavily freighted with significance.”

But perhaps the most gratifying testimony borne at this time to the natural power and artistic genius and skill of Forrest was the following eloquent article by Mr. Winter, whose repeated previous notices of the actor had been unfavorable and severe, but who, irresistibly moved, now showed himself as magnanimous as he was conscientious:

“Probably the public does not quite yet appreciate either the value of its opportunity or the importance of improving it. Two facts, therefore, ought to be strongly stated: one, that Mr. Forrest’s personation of Lear is an extraordinary work of art; the other, that, in the natural order of things, it must soon pass forever away from the stage. Those who see it now will enjoy a luxury and a benefit. Those who miss seeing it now will sow the seed of a possible future regret. We have not in times past been accustomed to extol, without considerable qualification, the acting of Mr. Forrest. This was natural, and it was right. An unpleasant physical element—the substitution of muscle for brain and of force for feeling—has usually tainted his performances. That element has been substantially discarded from his Lear. We have seen him play the part when he was no more than a strong, resolute, robustious man in a state of inconsequent delirium. The form of the work, of course, was always definite. Strength of purpose in Mr. Forrest’s acting always went hand in hand with strength of person. He was never vague. He knew his intent, and he was absolutely master of the means that were needful to fulfil it. Precision, directness, culminating movement, and physical magnetism were his weapons; and he used them with a firm hand. Self-distrust never depressed him. Vacillation never defeated his purpose. It was the triumph of enormous and overwhelming individuality. Lear could not be seen, because Mr. Forrest stood before him and eclipsed him.

“All that is greatly modified. Time and suffering seem to have done their work. It is no secret that Mr. Forrest has passed through a great deal of trouble. It is no secret that he is an old man. We do not touch upon these facts in a spirit of heartlessness or flippancy. But what we wish to indicate is that natural causes have wrought a remarkable change in Mr. Forrest’s acting, judged, as we now have the opportunity of judging it, by his thrilling delineation of the tremendous agonies and the ineffably pathetic madness of Shakspeare’s Lear. In form his performance is neither more nor less distinct than it was of old. Almost every condition of symmetry is satisfied in this respect. The port is kingly; the movement is grand; the transitions are natural; the delivery is resonant; the intellect is potential; the manifestations of madness are accurate; the method is precise. But, beyond all this, there is now a spiritual quality such as we have not seen before in this extremely familiar work. Here and there, indeed, the actor uses his ancient snort, or mouths a line for the sake of certain words that intoxicate his imagination by their sound and movement. Here and there, also, he becomes suddenly and inexplicably prosaic in his rendering of meanings. But these defects are slight in contrast with the numberless beauties that surround and overshadow them. We have paid to this personation the involuntary and sincere tribute of tears. We cannot, and would not desire to, withhold from it the merited recognition of critical praise. Description it can scarcely be said to require. Were we to describe it in detail, however, we should dwell, with some prolixity of remark, upon the altitude of imaginative abstraction which Mr. Forrest attains in the mad scenes. Shakspeare’s Lear is a person with the most tremulously tender heart and the most delicately sensitive and poetical mind possible to mortal man, and his true grandeur appears in his overthrow, which is pathetic for that reason. The shattered fragments of the column reveal its past magnificence. No man can play Lear in these scenes so as to satisfy, even approximately, the ideal inspired by Shakspeare’s text unless he knows, whether by intuition or by experience, the vanity, the mutability, the hollowness of this world. The deepest deep of philosophy is sounded here, and the loftiest height of pathos is attained. It is high praise to say that Mr. Forrest, whether consciously or unconsciously, interprets these portions of the tragedy in such a manner as frequently to enthrall the imagination and melt the heart. The miserable desolation of a noble and tender nature scathed and blasted by physical decay and by unnatural cruelty looks out of his eyes and speaks in his voice. This may be only the successful simulation of practised art; but, whatever it be, its power and beauty and emotional influence are signal and irresistible.”

The New York “Courier” said, in a striking editorial, “The engagement of Edwin Forrest at the Fourteenth Street Theatre, and the praises lavished on him by the whole press of this city, afford us an opportunity to make a little contribution to the truth of history.” The “Courier,” after maintaining that Forrest had always been a great actor, and that the total change of tone in the press was not so much owing to his improvement as to the fact that time had softened and removed the prejudices of his judges, continues,—

“When Edwin Forrest, who might have been called at the time the American boy tragedian, was playing at the Old Bowery, and Edmund Kean at the Old Park, there was a little society of gentlemen in this city, who were passionate admirers of the drama. Young in years, they were already ripe in scholarship and profound as well as independent critics. Amongst them, and constantly associating together, were Anthony L. Robertson, afterwards Vice-Chancellor; John Nathan, afterwards law partner with Secretary Fish; John Lawrence; John K. Keese, better known as ‘Kinney Keese,’ the wittiest and most learned of book auctioneers, whose mind was a Bodleian Library and whose tongue a telegraph battery of joke and repartee, and a dozen others,—all since eminent at the bar, in literature, or in national politics. Their little semi-social, semi-literary society was known as ‘The Column,’ and subsisted for many years. During the rival engagements of Kean and Forrest these gentlemen went backwards and forwards between the ‘Park’ and the ‘Bowery,’ and after witnessing the ‘Lear’ of the greatest of English actors since Garrick, and the Lear of Forrest, unanimously decided, upon the most careful and critical discussion, that, great as Kean was, Forrest was THE Lear. Unhappily he was only an American boy, and American actors were not then the fashion. It was in the days of Anglomania, and the fashion was to pooh-pooh everything that had not graduated at Covent Garden or Drury Lane and lacked the full diploma of cockney approbation. Forrest, both as man and actor, was a full-blooded American and a sturdy Democrat,—two fearful crimes at a time when art was measured wholly by an English standard and politics reduced criticism to almost as despicable servility as they do now. Happily for the impartiality of discussion in art we have outlived the period of Anglomania, and are rather virtuously proud than otherwise of anything genuinely American. And this Edwin Forrest is. His career, too, is a fine example at once of personal devotion to art, and of ‘the sober second thought of the people,’ which all the critics failed to alter. For, even when the latter were most mad against him, he always drew crowds, and we may say safely, by the power of native genius, supported only by an iron will, he has shone for fifty years, with increasing lustre, as a star in the dramatic firmament. William Leggett of the Evening Post, who was a power in New York politics and loved Forrest as a brother, tried to draw him, in his early manhood, into politics. Had the latter consented to abandon his profession, he might have commanded, at that time, any nomination in the gift of the New York Democracy, and risen to the highest political employments in the State. But he had chosen art as a mistress, and refused to abandon her for the colder but equally exacting idol of the mind,—political ambition. It is to this refusal we owe the fact that our stage is still graced by the greatest actor America has ever produced.”

The dramatic season of 1871–72 gave an astonishing proof of the vital endurance and popular attractiveness of the veteran player, then in his sixty-sixth year. Between October 1st and April 4th he travelled over seven thousand miles, acted in fifty-two different places, one hundred and twenty-eight nights, and received the sum of $39,675.47. He began at the Walnut Street Theatre, Philadelphia, proceeded to Columbus and Cincinnati, and then appeared in regular succession at New Orleans, Galveston, Houston, Nashville, Omaha, and Kansas City. At Kansas City excursionists were brought by railroad from the distance of a hundred and fifty miles, at three dollars each the round trip. From this place his series of engagements took him to Saint Louis, Quincy, Pittsburg, Cleveland, Buffalo, Detroit, Rochester, Syracuse, Utica, Troy, and Albany. From Albany he journeyed to Boston, where he opened an engagement at the Globe Theatre with Lear, before an audience of great brilliancy completely crowding the house. He had a triumph in every way flattering, although the herculean toils of the season behind him had most severely taxed his strength. How he played may be imagined from the following report, made by a distinguished author in a private letter. “I went last night to see Forrest. I saw Lear himself; and never can I forget him, the poor, discrowned, wandering king, whose every look and tone went to the heart. Though mimic sorrows latterly have little power over me, I could not suppress my tears in the last scene. The tones of the heart-broken father linger in my ear like the echo of a distant strain of sad sweet music, inexpressibly mournful, yet sublime. The whole picture will stay in my memory so long as soul and body hang together.”

On the Monday and Tuesday evenings of the second week, he appeared as Richelieu. He had taken a severe cold, and was suffering so badly from congestion and hoarseness that Oakes tried to persuade him not to act. He could not be induced, he said, to disappoint the audience by failing to keep his appointment. Oakes accompanied him to his dressing-room, helped him on with his costume, and, when the bell rang, led his tottering steps to the stage entrance. The instant the foot of the veteran touched the stage and his eye caught the footlights and the circling expanse of expectant faces, he straightened up as if from an electric shock and was all himself. At the end of each scene Oakes was waiting at the wing to receive him and almost carry him to a chair. Besought to take some stimulant, he replied, “No: if I die to-night, they shall find no liquor in me. My mind shall be clear.” And so he struggled on, playing by sheer dint of will, with fully his wonted spirit and energy, but the moment he left the eyes of the audience seeming almost in a state of collapse. The play was drawing near its end. And this, though no one thought of it, this was to be the last appearance of Edwin Forrest on the stage. DÉbÛt, Rosalia de Borgia,—interval of fifty-five years with slow illumination of the continent by his fame,—exit, Richelieu! Oakes stood at the wing, all anxiety, peering in and listening intently. The characters were grouped in the final tableau. He stood central, resting on his left foot, his right slightly advanced and at ease, his right arm lifted and his venerable face upturned. Then his massive and solemn voice, breaking clear from any impediment, was heard articulating with a mournful beauty the last words of the play:

Then, instead of inclining for the rise of the audience and the fall of the curtain, he gazed for an instant musingly into vacancy, and, as if some strange intuition or prophetic spirit had raised the veil of fate, uttered from his own mind the significant words, “And so it ends.”

He slept little that night, and, the next day, was clearly so much worse that Oakes insisted resolutely that he should not act at any rate. He was announced for Virginius, and was so set on going that his friend had almost to use force to restrain him. Dr. S. W. Langmaid, so justly eminent for his faithful skill, was called. He said, positively, “If you undertake to act to-night, Mr. Forrest, you will in all likelihood die upon the stage.” He replied, pointing to Oakes, “Then I owe my life to that dear old fellow yonder; for if he had not obstinately resisted I should certainly have gone.” Pneumonia set in, and for more than a week a fatal result was feared. During all this time Oakes was his constant nurse, catching a few moments of sleep when he could, but for the whole period of danger never taking off his clothes except for a daily bath. Unwearied and incessant in attentions, he left not his station until his friend was so far recovered as to be able to start for Philadelphia. The day after the convalescent reached home he wrote a letter of affectionate acknowledgment to Oakes for all the services rendered with such a loving fidelity. Here is an extract from it: “The air is sunny, warm, and delicious, and I am pervaded by a feeling of rest which belongs only to home. How marvellously I was spared from death’s effacing fingers, and permitted for a little longer time to worship God in the glad sunshine of his eternal temple. To your tender care and solicitude during my illness I owe everything.” And thus the old tie of friendship between the pair received another degree of depth and was cemented with a new seal.

Here it is fit to pause awhile in the narrative, go back a little to gather up a few interesting things not yet mentioned, and supplement the account previously given of his inner life by some further description of the kind of man he was in social intercourse and in the privacy of his home during his last years.

His home was always a charmed and happy place to him, although sorrowfully vacant of wife and children. He took great delight in the works of art he had collected. In his picture-gallery he had paintings of which he really made friends; and often of a night when he was restless he would rise, go to them, light the gas, and gaze on them as if they had a living sympathy to soothe and bless his spirit. But his library was the favorite haunt where he felt himself indeed at ease and supplied with just the ministration and companionship he craved. It opened in the rear upon a spacious garden. Mr. Rees once asked him why he did not clear up this garden and beautify it with more flower-beds. He answered, “I prefer the trees. When I sit here alone the whistling of the wind through their branches sounds like a voice from another world.” He always went away with regret and came back with pleasure. Nor was his satisfaction altogether solitary. Writing to Oakes once he says, “Yes, my friend, I am indeed happy once more to reach this sweet haven of rest, my own dear home. My sisters received me with the greatest joy, the servants with unaffected gladness, and the two dogs actually went into ecstasies over me. It was a welcome fit for an emperor.”

The loss of his three sisters one by one struck heavy blows on his heart, and left his house darker each time than it had been before. In 1863 he writes,—

“Dear friend Oakes,—I cannot sufficiently thank you for the kind words of sympathy you have expressed for me in my late unhappy bereavement—the loss of my dear sister Henrietta, who on the death of my beloved mother devoted her whole life to me. Her wisdom was indeed a lamp to my feet, and her love a joy to my heart. Ah, my friend, we cannot but remember such things were that were most dear to us. Do we love our friends more as we advance in life, that our loss of them is so poignant, while in youth we see them fall around us like leaves in winter weather as though the next spring would once more restore them? I read your letter to my remaining sisters, and they thanked you with their tears. You may remember that once under a severe affliction of your own—the death of a loved friend—I endeavored to console you with the hope of immortality. That fails me now.”

In 1869 he wrote again, “My sister Caroline died last night. We have a sad house. Why under such bereavements has God not given us some comforting reasonable hope in the future, where these severed ties of friendship and love may be again united? Man’s vanity and self-love have betrayed him into such a belief; but who knows that the fact substantiates it?” And in 1871 once more he wrote, “My sister Eleanora is dead, and there is now no one on earth whose veins bear blood like mine. My heart is desolate.” This obituary notice appeared at the time:

“The death of Eleanora Forrest, sister of Mr. Edwin Forrest the tragedian, has cast a gloom over the large circle of her acquaintances, which time alone can dispel; but the gloom which rests over the household in which her gentle sway and influence brought peace and happiness no change of time or season can ever remove. To one, at least, the light of home went out with her life. To one, now the last of his race, his splendid mansion will be as some stately hall deserted. Its light has gone out; the garlands which her hands twined are dead; ‘the eyes that shone, now dimmed and gone,’ will only appear again to him in memory. Memory, however,

“There was something so mild, so pure, so Christian-like, in this lady, that her passing away from us is but a translation from earth to Heaven, like a flower blooming here for awhile to find eternal blossom there.

“Kind, gentle, with a hand open to charity, she did not remain at home awaiting the call of the destitute and suffering, but when the storms and the tempests of winter came and the poor were suffering, bearing their poverty and wretchedness in silence, she came forth unsolicited to aid them. We could name many instances of this; but she, who while living did not wish her charities known, receives her reward from One who reads the human heart and sways the destinies of mankind. The writer of this speaks feelingly of one whom it was a pleasure and a happiness to know. If ever a pure spirit left its earthly tenement to follow father, mother, brothers, and sisters to the home ‘eternal in the skies,’ it was that of Eleanora Forrest. There are many left to mourn her loss, but only one of kindred remains to grieve. To him the knowledge of her many virtues, sisterly affection, and the bright hereafter, must bring that peace no friendly aid can effect. Let us remember, in our hours of affliction, that

The revolutions of his tempestuous blood, the resentful memory of wrongs, the keen perception of insincerity, shallowness, and evanescence, and the want of any grounded faith in a future life gave Forrest many hours of melancholy, of bitterness, and almost of despair. But he never, not even in the darkest hour, became a misanthrope or an atheist. In one of his commonplace books he had copied these lines which he was often heard to quote:

A few of his characteristic expressions in his depressed moods may have interest for the reader:

“Is there then no rest but in the grave? Rest without the consciousness of rest? The rest of annihilation?”

“I am very sad and disheartened at the iniquitous decisions of these juries and judges. I could willingly die now with an utter contempt for this world and a perfect indifference to my fate in the next.”

“I wish the great Day of Doom were not a chimera. What a solace it would be to all those whom man has so deeply wronged!”

“This human life is a wretched failure, and the sooner annihilation comes to it the better.”

While these impulsive phrases reveal his intense and unstable sensibility, they must be taken with great allowance, or they will do injustice to his better nature. They are transitory phases of experience betraying his weakness. In his deeper and clearer moods he felt a strange and profound presentiment of immortality, and surmised that this life was neither the first nor the last of us. But living as he did mostly for this material world and its prizes, he could not hold his mind steadily to the sublime height of belief in the eternal life of the soul. And so all sorts of doubts came in and were recklessly entertained. Had his spirituality equalled his sensibility and intelligence, and had he aimed at personal perfection as zealously as he aimed at professional excellence, his faith in immortality would have been as unshakable as was his faith in God. Also could he have filled his soul with the spirit of forgiveness and charity instead of harboring tenacious instincts of hate and disgust, he would have been a serene and benignant man. His complaining irritability would have vanished in a devout contentment; for he would have seen a plan of exact compensations everywhere threading the maze of human life.

But then he would not have been Edwin Forrest. Inconsistent extremes, unregulated impulsiveness, unsubdued passion, some moral incongruity of character and conduct, of intuition and thought, belonged to his type of being. It is only required that those who assume to judge him shall be just, and not be misled by any superficial or partial appearance of good or evil to give an unfair verdict. His defects were twofold, and he had to pay the full penalty for them. First, no man can lead a really happy and noble life, in the high and true sense of the words, who is infested with feelings of hate and loathing towards persons who have injured him or shown themselves detestable. He must refuse to entertain such emotions, and with a magnanimous and loving heart contemplate the fairer side of society. For almost all our experience, whether we know it or not, is strained through and tested and measured by our emotional estimates of our fellow-men. It is chiefly in them, or in ourselves as affected by our thoughts of them, that God reveals himself to us or hides himself from us. Second, Forrest not only dwelt too much on mean or hostile persons and on real or fancied wrongs, but he did not live chiefly for the only ends which are worthy to be the supreme aim of man. The genuine ends of a man in this world are to glorify God, to serve humanity, and to perfect himself. And these three are inseparably conjoined, a triune unity. The man who faithfully lives for these religious ends will surely attain peace of mind and unwavering faith in a Providence which orders everything and cannot err. The highest conscious ends of Forrest were not religious, but were to glorify his art, to perfect his strength and skill, and to win the ordinary prizes of society,—wealth, fame, and pleasure. Elements of the superior aims indeed entered largely into his spirit and conduct, but were not his proposed and consecrating aim. This, as now frankly set forth, was his failure, and the lesson it has for other men.

But, on the other hand, he had his praiseworthy success. If he was inferior to the best men, he was greatly superior to most men. For he was no hypocrite, parasite, profligate, squanderer of his own resources, or usurper of the rights of others. After every abatement it will be said of him, by all who knew the man through and through, that he was great and original in personality, honest in every fibre, truthful and upright according to the standard of his own conscience, tender and sweet and generous in the inmost impulses of his soul. On the other hand, it must be admitted that he was often the obstinate victim of injurious and unworthy prejudices, and abundantly capable of a profanity that was vulgar and of animosities that were ferocious. This is written in the very spirit which he himself inculcated on his biographer, to whom he addressed these words with his own hand in 1870: “Having revealed myself and my history to you without disguise or affectation, I say, Tell the blunt truth in every particular you touch, no matter where it hits or what effect it may have. To make it easier for you, I could well wish that my whole life, moral and mental, professional and social, could have been photographed for your use in this biographical undertaking. And then, ‘though all occasions should inform against me,’ though I might have too much cause to sigh over my many weaknesses and follies, no single act of mine, I am sure, should ever make me blush with shame. I always admired the spirit of Cromwell, who said sternly, when an artist in taking his portrait would have omitted the disfiguring wart on his face, ‘Paint me as I am!’”

Forrest was one of those elemental men who want always to live in direct contact with great realities, and cannot endure to accept petty substitutes for them, or pale phantoms of them at several removes. He craved to taste the substantial goods of the earth in their own freshness, and refused to be put off with mere social symbols of them. He loved the grass, the wind, the sun, the rain, the sky, the mountains, the thunder, the democracy. He loved his country earnestly, truth sincerely, his art profoundly, men and women passionately and made them love him passionately,—the last too often and too much. For these reasons he is an interesting and contagious character, and, as his figure is destined to loom in history, it is important that his best traits be appreciated at their full worth.

It is but justice, as an offset to his occasional fits of the blues and to the lugubrious sentiments he then expressed, some of which were quoted a page or two back, to affirm the truth that if he suffered more than most people he likewise enjoyed much more. Prevailingly he loved the world, and set a high value on life and took uncommon pains to secure longevity. As a general thing his spirit of enjoyment was sharp and strong. One illustration of this was the pronounced activity of the element of humor in him. This humor was sometimes grim, almost sardonic, and bordering on irony and satire, but often breathed itself out in a sunny playfulness. This lubricated the joints and sockets of the soul, so to speak, and made the mechanism of experience move smoothly when otherwise it would have gritted harshly with great frictional waste in unhappy resistances. It is difficult to give in words due illustration of this quality, of its genial manifestations in his manner, and of its happy influence on his inner life. But all his intimate friends know that the trait was prominent in him and of great importance. When on board the steamer bound for California, sick and wretched, he sent for the captain, and with great earnestness demanded, “For how much will you sell this ship and cargo?” After giving a rough estimate of the value, the captain asked, “But why do you wish to know this?” Forrest answered, “I want to scuttle her and end this detestable business by sinking the whole concern to the bottom of the sea!” A soft-spoken clergyman, who occupied the next state-room, overheard him giving energetic expression to his discontent, and called on him to expostulate on the duty of forbearance and patience, saying, “Our Saviour, you know, was always patient.” “Yes,” retorted the actor, grimly, “but our Saviour went to sea only once, and then he disliked it so much that he got out and walked. Unfortunately, we cannot do that.”

At another time a Calvinistic divine had been trying to convince him of the punitive character of death, arguing that death was not the original destiny of man, but a penalty imposed for sin. “What,” said Forrest, “do you mean to say that if it had not been for that unlucky apple we should have seen old Adam hobbling around here still?”

Even to the end of his life he had the heart of a boy, and when with trusted friends it was ever and anon breaking forth in a playfulness and a jocosity which would have astonished those who deemed him so stern and lugubrious a recluse. One day he went into a druggist’s shop where he was familiar, for some little article. The druggist chanced to be alone and stooping very low behind his counter pouring something from a jug. Forrest slipped up and leaning over him thundered in his ear with full pomp of declamation, “An ounce of civet, good apothecary!” The poor trader revealed his comic fright by a bound from the floor which would not have disgraced a gymnast.

On arriving at the places where he was to act he was often annoyed by strangers who pressed about him with pestering importunity merely from a vulgar curiosity. On these occasions he would sometimes, as he reached the hotel and saw the crowd, leap out of the carriage, say with a low bow to his agent, “Please keep your seat, Mr. Forrest, and I will inquire about a room,” and then vanish, laughing in his sleeve, and leaving the embarrassed McArdle to sustain the situation as best he might.

His just and complacent pride in his work, too, kept him from being chronically any such disappointed and grouty complainer as he might sometimes appear. It is a sublime joy for a man of genius, a great artist, to feel, as the reward of heroic labor engrafted on great endowment, that his rank is at the top of the world; that in some particulars he is superior to all the twelve hundred millions of men that are alive. There were passages in the acting of Forrest, besides the terrific burst of passion in the curse of Lear, which he might well believe no other man on earth could equal.

The knowledge and culture of Forrest were in no sense limited to the range of his profession. He was uncommonly well educated, not only by a wide acquaintance with books, but also by a remarkably varied observation and experience of the world. Whenever he spoke or wrote, some proof appeared of his reading and reflection. Speaking of Humboldt, he said, “Humboldt was a man open to truth without a prejudice. He was to the tangible and physical world what Shakspeare was to the mind and heart of man.” Characterizing a religious discourse which much pleased him, he said, “Its logic is incontrovertible, its philosophy unexceptionable, and its humanity most admirable,—quite different from those homilies which people earth with demons, heaven with slaves, and hell with men.” On one occasion, alluding to the facts that Shakspeare when over forty attended the funeral of his mother, and that his boy Hamnet died at the age of twelve, he regretted that the peerless poet had not written out what he must then have felt, and given it to the world. His genius under such an inspiration might have produced something which would have made thenceforth to the end of time all parents who read it treat their children more tenderly, all children love and honor their parents more religiously. But, he added, it seemed contrary to the genius of Shakspeare to utilize his own experience for any didactic purpose. At another time he said, “Shakspeare is the most eloquent preacher that ever taught humanity to man. The sermons he uttered will be repeated again and again with renewed and unceasing interest not only in his own immortal pages, but from the inspired lips of great tragedians through all the coming ages of the world.”

A touching thing in Forrest in his last years was the unpurposed organic revelation in his voice of what he had suffered in the battle of life. What he had experienced of injustice and harshness, of selfishness and treachery, of beautiful things relentlessly snatched away by time and death, had left a permanent memorial in the unstudied tones and cadences of his speech. As he narrated or quoted or read, his utterance was varied in close keeping with what was to be expressed. But the moment he fell back on himself, and gave spontaneous utterance from within, there was a perpetual recurrence of a minor cadence, a half-veiled sigh, a strangely plaintive tone, sweet and mournful as the wail of a dying wind in a hemlock grove.

A trait of Forrest, to which all his friends will testify, was the perfect freedom of his usual manner in private life from all theatricality or affectation. His bearing was natural and honest, varying truthfully with his impulses. With an actor so powerfully marked as he this is not common. Most great actors carry from their professional into their daily life some fixed strut of attitude or chronic stilt of elocution or pompous trick of quotation. It was not so with Forrest, and his detachment from all such habits, his straight-on simplicity, were an honor to him and a charm to those who could appreciate the suppression of the shop in the manly assertion of dignity and rectitude. He had no swagger, though he had a swing which belonged to his heavy equilibrium. His speech attracted attention only from its uncommon ease and finish, not from any ostentation. The actor, it has been justly said, is so far contemptible who keeps his mock grandeur on when his buskins are off, and orders a coffee-boy with the air of a Roman general commanding an army. He seems ever to say by his manner, It is easier to be a hero than to act one. Charles Lamb relates that a friend one day said to Elliston, “I like Wrench because he is the same natural easy creature on the stage that he is off.” Elliston replied, with charming unconsciousness, “My case exactly. I am the same person off the stage that I am on.” The inference instead of being identical was opposite. The one was never acting, the other always. Mrs. Siddons, it is said, used to stab the potatoes, and call for a teaspoon in a tone that curdled the blood of the waiter. Once when she was buying a piece of calico at a shop in Bath, she interrupted the voluble trader by inquiring, Will it wash? with an accent that made him start back from the counter. John Philip Kemble, dissatisfied with Sheridan’s management and resolved to free himself from all engagements with him, rose in the greenroom like a slow pillar of state, and said to that astonished individual, “I am an eagle whose wings have long been bound down by frosts and snows; but now I shake my pinions and cleave into the general air unto which I am born.” Sheridan looked into the heart of the eagle, and with a few wheedling words smoothed his ruffled plumage and made him coo like a dove in response to new proposals. Greatness of soul is necessary for a great actor, quick detachableness, and facility of transitions, with full understanding, sensibility, and fire; but cold counterfeits of these, empty forms of them swollen out with mechanic pomp, are as odious as they are frequent. Some are great only when inspired and set off by grand adjuncts; others are great by the native build of their being. Forrest was of this latter class. He knew how to act in the theatre, and to be simple and sincere in the parlor.

But, when all is said, the greatest quality and charm of Forrest, the deepest hiding of his magnetism, was his softness and truth of heart, the quickness, strength, and beauty of his affection. Bitter experience had taught him, before he was an old man, not to wear his heart on his sleeve for the heartless to peck at it. But how shallow the observation which, not seeing his heart on his sleeve, incontinently concluded that he had none! The reverential gratitude with which he delighted to dwell on the memory of his mother, the yearning fondness with which he was wont to recall the names of his early benefactors and dwell on the thought of the few living friends who had been ever kind and true to him, amply demonstrated the strong grasp of his affection. “My mother,” he one day said to him who now copies his words, “was weeping on a certain occasion in my early childhood when she was hard pressed by poverty and care. My father, in his grave, almost awful way, said to her, ‘Do not weep, Rebecca. It will do no good. I know it is very dark here. But it is all right. Above the clouds the sun is still shining.’ I remember it made a great impression on my young mind; and many a time in afterlife it came up and was a comfort to me. Ah, what, what would I not give if I could really believe that when that dear good soul left the earth my father met her ‘on a happier shore,’ and said, ‘Rebecca, you will weep no more now. Did I not tell you it was all right?’” After the death of Forrest, nigh a quarter of a century after it was written, was found among his papers a faded and tear-stained letter, enclosing two withered leaves, which read thus:

“These leaves were taken from your mother’s grave, on Sunday, August 5th, 1849, and are presented as a humble but sacred memorial by your friend,

There is no surer proof of plentifulness of love within than is shown by its finding vent in endearments lavished on lower creatures and on inanimate things,—flowers, books, pictures, birds, dogs, horses. All these were copiously loved by Forrest. All his life he had some dog for a friend, and for the last twenty years he kept two or more. In the summer of 1870 a little turkey in his garden, only a week old, by some accident got its leg broken. He saw it, and commiserately picked up the poor thing, carefully set its leg, laid it in a basket of wool, hung it in a tree in the sunshine, and tenderly nursed and fed it till it was whole. This and the succeeding incidents occurred under the observation of his biographer, who was then paying him a visit.

He used to go into his stable and pat and fondle his horses and talk with them, looking in their eyes and smoothing their necks, as if they had full intelligence and sympathy with him. “Why, Brownie, poor Brownie, handsome Brownie, are you not happy to come out to-day?” he said, as we rode along the Wissahickon, in a tone so tender and sad that it moistened the eyes of his human hearer. It was his custom to go up the river-side to a secluded place, and there get out and feed the horse with apples. One day he had forgotten his supply, and, as he dismounted and walked along in front of Brownie, he was touched to find the intelligent creature following him, smelling at his pockets and nudging him for her apples.

In one aspect it was beautiful, in another it was mournful, to see him going about his house, lonely, lonely, solacing himself for what was absent with humble substitutes. He had a mocking-bird wonderfully gifted and a great favorite with him and his sister. It bore the nickname of Bob. In moulting it fell sick, lost both voice and sight, and seemed to be dying. The great soft-hearted tragedian, thought by many to be so gruff and savage, was overheard, as he stood before the cage, talking to the sick bird, “Ah, poor Bob, poor Bob! Your myriad-voiced throat has filled my house with wondrous melodies these years past. Why must this cruel affliction come to you? You are a sinless creature. You cannot do any harm. It perplexes my philosophy to know why you should have to suffer in this way. Ah, little Bob, where now are all your sweet mockeries? Blind? Dumb? It cuts me to the very soul to think of it. Ah, well, well!” And he tottered slowly away, musing, quite as his Lear used to do on the stage when unkindness had broken the old royal heart.

Another characteristic incident is worth relating. He had a chamber at the Metropolitan Hotel fronting on Broadway. Oakes and the present writer were in a rear room. He sent for us to come to him and see the funeral-procession of Farragut pass. He sank on his knees at the open window as the sacred corse went by, and we saw the tears streaming down his cheeks. The bands played a dirge, and the soldiers and marines marched on, visible masses of music in blue and gold, as the sailors proudly carried their dead admiral through the central artery of the nation, and every heart seemed vibrating with reverence and grief. “The grandest thing about this,” said Forrest, “is that he was a good man, worthy of all the honor he receives. He whose modesty kept his bosom from ever swelling with complacency while he was alive may now well exult in death, as the sailors, unwilling to confide their commander to any catafalque, lovingly bear him on their shoulders to his grave.”

The love which Forrest had for children was one of the deepest traits of his disposition. This tenderness was the same all through his career, except that it seemed to grow more profound and pensive in his age. Two anecdotes selected from among many will set this quality in an interesting light. When he was in the fullest strength of his manhood and was acting in Boston at the old National Theatre, there was at his hotel a very sick child whose mother was quite worn out with nursing it. Forrest begged permission to take care of the little sufferer through the succeeding night, that the mother might sleep. The mother, fearing that the terrible Metamora would prove rather a repulsive nurse for her darling, hesitated, but at length gave consent. At the close of the play he hurried back with so much haste that half the paint was left on one of his cheeks. Through the whole night, hour after hour, he paced up and down the room, tenderly soothing the fevered babe, which lay on his great chest with nothing but a silk shirt between its face and his skin. The mother slept, and so did the child. And when the doctor came in the morning, he said that the care of Forrest and the vitality the infant drew from his body during the long hours had saved its life.

The other anecdote, though less dramatic, is of still deeper significance as a revelation of his soul. During the last ten or twelve years of his life, when he was fulfilling his engagements in the different cities, he used so to time and direct his walks that he might be near some great public school at the hour when the children were dismissed. There he would stand—the grim-looking, lonely old man, whose surface might be hard, but whose heart was very soft—and gaze with a thoughtful and loving regard on the throng of boys and girls as they rushed out bubbling over with delight, variously sorting and grouping themselves on their way home. This was a great enjoyment to him, though not unmixed with an attractive pain. It soothed his childless soul with ideal parentage, gave him a bright glad life in reflected sympathy with the dancing shouters he saw, and stirred in his imagination a thousand dreams, now of the irrevocable past, now of the mysterious future.

Resuming the narrative with the opening of June, 1872, Forrest is lying in his bed in a woeful state, brought on him by a nostrum called “Jenkins’s cure for gout.” A doctor Jenkins of New Orleans told him if he would take it, it would produce an excruciating attack of the disease, but would then eradicate it from the system and effect a permanent cure. He took it. He experienced the excruciating attack. The permanent cure did not follow. As soon as Oakes learned of his situation, body racked with torture, limbs palsied, mind at times unhinged and wandering, he started for the scene. His own words will best describe their meeting. “When I entered his chamber he was in a doze, and I stood at his bedside until he awoke. Opening his eyes, he gazed steadily into my face for about a minute. He knew me then, and said, in the most touching manner, ‘My friend, I am always glad to see you, but never in my life so much so as now.’ Again looking steadily at me for about a minute, he said, ‘Oakes, put my hand in yours: it is paralyzed but true.’ I took his hand tenderly from the bed and placed it in mine. He could not move the fingers, but I felt his noble heart throb through them. At once I began organizing my hospital. I had him washed, his flannel and the bed-linen changed, the doors and windows flung wide open, and gave him all he could take of the best of nourishment,—strawberries, fresh buttermilk, and beef tea strong enough to draw four hundred pounds the whole length of the house. Already he is greatly improved. I keep him perfectly quiet, allowing no one on any excuse whatever to see him.” Under this style of doctoring and nursing, all impregnated with the magnetism of friendship, it was natural that in three weeks he should be comfortably about his house, as he was.

One morning in the midst of his illness, but when he had passed a night free from pain, and his mind was in a most serene state yet marked by great exaltation of thought and language, he began relating to Oakes, in the most eloquent manner, his recollections of old Joseph Jefferson, the great comedian. He told how when a boy he had visited that beautiful and gifted old man; what poverty and what purity and high morality were in his household; how he had educated his children; and how at last he had died among strangers, heart-broken by ingratitude. He told how he had seen him act Dogberry in a way that out-topped all comparison; how at a later time he had again seen him play the part of the Fool in Lear so as to set up an idol in the memory of the beholders, for he insinuated into the words such wonderful contrasts of the greatness and misery and mystery of life with the seeming ignorant and innocent simplicity of the comments on them, that comedy became wiser and stronger than tragedy.

His listener afterwards said, “We two were alone. Never had I seen him so deeply and so loftily stirred in his very soul as he was then about Jefferson. His eulogy had more moral dignity and intense religious feeling than any sermon I ever heard from the pulpit. It was as grand and fine as anything said by Cicero. This was especially true of his closing words. When he seemed to have emptied his heart in admiring praises on the old player, he ended thus, querying with himself as if soliloquizing: ‘Is it possible that all of such a man can go into the ground and rot, and nothing of him at all be left forever? If he is not immortal, he ought to be. It must be that he is, though our philosophy cannot find it out.’”

It is a curious proof of how his moods shaped and colored his beliefs to read in connection with the above the following extract from a letter he wrote in 1866. “There is great consolation in the sincere belief of the immortality of the soul. If I could honestly and reasonably entertain such a faith, that the love and friendship of to-day will extend through all time with renewed devotion, death would have no sting and the grave no victory. I quite envied the closing hours of Senator Foote the other day. He was so serenely confident of seeing all his friends again, that by the perishing light of his fervid brain he seemed for a moment to realize the illusion of his earth-taught faith.”

It was now September. The semi-paralyzed condition of his limbs forbade every thought of returning to the stage that season; though, with a self-flattery singular in one of so experienced and clear a head, he fondly hoped to recover in time, and to act for years yet. His interest in everything connected with his profession knew no abatement, and he always took the most cheerful view of the future of the drama. He did not yield to that common fallacy which glorifies the past at the expense of the present and holds that everything glorious is always in decline and sure ere long to perish. Sheridan said, while surrounded by Johnson, Burke, Hume, Robertson, Gibbon, Pitt, and Fox, “The days of little men have arrived.” The trouble is that we see the foibles and feel the faults of our contemporaries, but not those of our predecessors who sit, afar and still, aggrandized into Olympians in historic memory. Mrs. Siddons often saw before her, sitting together in the orchestra, all in tears, Burke, Reynolds, Fox, Gibbon, Windham, and Sheridan. Yet in her day as now the constant talk was of the failing glory of the theatre. Also in the time of Talma, in 1807, Cailhava presented a memoir to the Institute of France, “Sur les Causes de la DÉcadence du ThÉÂtre.” The fact is, the theatres of the world were never so numerous, so splendid, so largely attended, as now; the playing as a whole was never so good, the morality of the pieces never so high, and the behavior of the audiences never so orderly and refined. In spite of everything that can be said on the other side, this is the truth. The former advantage of the drama was simply that it stood out in more solitary and conspicuous relief, occupied a larger relative space, and made therefore a greater and more talked-of sensation. Its rule is now divided with a swarm of other claimants. Still, intrinsically its worth and rank must increase in the future, and not diminish. Forrest always clearly held to this faith, and was much cheered by it. His conviction that the drama was charged with a sacred and indestructible mission, and his enthusiastic love for the personal practice of its art,—these were thoughts and feelings

Accordingly, he would withdraw from the worship of his life, if withdraw he must, only piecemeal and as compelled. His voice was unimpaired, and he had for years been solicited to give readings. And so he resolved, since he could not play Hamlet and Othello on the stage, he would read them in the lecture-room.

Therefore he read these two plays in Philadelphia, Wilmington, Brooklyn, New York, and Boston. Although the rich mellow fulness, ease, and force of his elocution were highly enjoyable, and there were many beauties of characterization in his readings, his physique was so deeply shattered, and his vital forces so depressed, that the vivacity, the magnetism, the spirited variety of power necessary to draw and to hold a miscellaneous crowd were wanting. The experiment was comparatively a failure. The large halls were so thinly seated that, though the marks of approval were strong, the result was not inspiring. He felt somewhat disheartened, much wearied, and sighed for a good long period of rest in his own quiet home. And so on Saturday afternoon, December 7, 1872, in Tremont Temple, Boston, he read Othello, and made unconsciously his last bow on earth to a public assembly, with the apt words of the unhappy Moor, whose character much resembled his own:

Oakes went with him to the train, saw him comfortably installed in the car, and bade him an affectionate good-bye. “Another parting, my friend!” said Forrest: “the last one must come some time. I shall probably be the first to die.” Arriving at the hotel in New York, he ordered a room and a fire, and went to bed, “and lay there thinking,” as he said, “what a pleasant time he was indebted to his friend for in Boston.” He reached home safely on the 9th. Two days he passed in rest, lounging about his library, reading a little, and attending only to a few necessary matters of business. “The time glided away like an ecstatic dream, without any let or hindrance,” he wrote on the 11th to Oakes,—the last letter he ever penned,—closing with the words, “God bless you ever, my dear and much valued friend.”

The earthly finale was at hand. Twenty years before this, in 1852, he wrote to one of his early friends:

“I thank you for your kindness in drinking my health in company with my sisters to-day, the anniversary of my birth. The weather here is gloomy and wears an aspect in accordance with the color of my fate. There is a destiny in this strange world which often decrees an undeserved doom. The ways of Providence are truly mysterious. From boyhood to the present time I have endeavored to walk the paths of honor and honesty with a kindly and benevolent spirit towards all men. And I am not unwilling that my whole course of life should be scrutinized with justice and impartiality. When it shall be so all weighed together I have no fear of the result. And yet I have been fearfully wronged, maligned, and persecuted. I do not, however, lose my faith and trust in that God who will one day hold all men to a strict and sure account. Kind regards to all, and believe me,

On the eighth recurrence of the same anniversary after the date of the above sombre epistle—that is, in 1860—he wrote these words: “Friendship is as much prostituted as love. My heart is sick, and I grow aweary of life.” And once more, on the 9th of March, 1871, he set down his feeling in the melancholy sentence, “This is my birthday, another funeral procession in my sad life, and the end not far off.” These expressions reveal the gloomier side of a soul which had its sunny side as well, and the more painful aspect of a life which was also abundantly blessed with wealth, triumphs, and pleasures. But be the outward lot of any man what it may, unless he has communion with God, a love for his fellows that swallows up every hatred, and a firm faith in immortality, the burden of the song of his unsatisfied soul will ever be, “Vanity of vanities, all is vanity.”

But sooner or later there is an hour for every earthly vanity to cease. Nothing mortal can escape or be denied the universal fate and boon of death. Its meaning is the same for all, however diverse its disguises or varied its forms. A slave and prisoner, starved and festered in his chains, groaned, as the sweet and strange release came, “How welcome is this deliverance! Farewell, painful world and cruel men!” A Sultan, stricken and sinking on his throne, cried, “O God, I am passing away in the hand of the wind!” A fool, in his painted costume, with his grinning bauble in his hand, said, as he too vanished into the hospitable Unknown, “Alackaday, poor Tom is a dying, and nobody cares. O me! was there ever such a pitiful to-do?” And a Pope, the crucifix lifted before his eyes and the tiara trembling from his brow, breathed his life out in the words, “Now I surrender my soul to Him who gave it!”

The death of a player is particularly suggestive and impressive from the sharp contrast of its perfect reality and sincerity with all the fictitious assumptions and scenery of his professional life. The last drop-scene is the lowering of the eyelid on that emptied ocular stage which in its time has held so many acts and actors. The deaths of many players have been marked by mysterious coincidences. Powell, starting from the bed on which he lay ill, cried, “Is this a dagger which I see before me? O God!”—and instantly expired. Peterson, playing the Duke in Measure for Measure, said,—

and fell into the arms of the Friar to whom he was speaking; and these were his last words. Cummings had just spoken the words of Dumont in Jane Shore—

when he suddenly gasped, and was dead. Palmer, while enacting the part of the Stranger, having uttered the sentence in his rÔle, “There is another and a better world,” dropped lifeless on the stage. In such instances Fate interpolates in the stereotyped performance a dread impromptu which must make us all feel what mysteries we are and by what mysteries enshrouded.

The morning of the 12th came, and the death of Edwin Forrest was at hand. In the early light, solitary in the privacy of his chamber, he who had no blood relative on earth, the last of his race, was summoned to give up his soul and take the unreturning road into the voiceless mystery. He who in the mimic scene had so often acted death was now to perform it in reality. Now he who in all his theatrical impersonations had been so democratic, was to be, in his closing and unwitnessed human impersonation, supremely democratic, both in the substance and in the manner of his performing. For this severing of the spirit from the flesh, this shrouded and mystic farewell of the soul to the world, is a part cast inevitably for every member of the family of man, and enacted under conditions essentially identical by all, from the emperor to the pauper. Perform or omit whatever else he may, every one must go through with this. Furthermore, in the enactment of it all artificial dialects of expression, all caste peculiarities of behavior, fall away; the profoundest vernacular language of universal nature alone comes to the surface, and the pallor of the face, the tremor of the limbs, the glazing of the eye, the gasp, the rattle, the long sigh, and the unbreakable silence,—are the same for all. Death knows neither politeness nor impoliteness, only truth. Now the hour was at hand whose coming and method had been foresignalled years ago, when, at Washington, an apoplectic clot hung the warning of its black flag in his brain. No visible spectators gathered to the sight, whatever invisible ones may have come. No lights were kindled, no music played, no bell rang, no curtain rose, no prompter spoke. But the august theatre of nature, crowded with the circulating ranks of existence, stood open for the performance of the most critical and solemn portion of a mortal destiny. And suddenly the startling command came. With a shudder of all the terrified instincts of the organism he sprang to the action. There was a sanguinary rush through the proscenium of the senses. The cerebral stage deluged in blood, the will instantly surrendered its private functions, all fleshly consciousness vanished, and that automatic procedure of nature, which, when not meddled with by individual volition, is infallible, took up the task. Then, step by step, point for point, phase on phase, he went through the enactment of his own death, in the minutest particulars from beginning to end, with a precision that was absolutely perfect, and a completeness that could never admit of a repetition. It was the greatest part, filled with the most boundless meaning, of all that he had ever sustained; and no critic could detect the slightest flaw in its representation.

The appalling performance was done, the actor disrobed, transformed, and vanished, when the servants, concerned at his delay to appear, and alarmed at obtaining no answer to their knocking, entered the chamber. The body, dressed excepting as to the outer coat, lay facing upwards on the bed, with the hands grasping a pair of light dumb-bells, and a livid streak across the right temple. A near friend and a physician were immediately called. But it was vain. The fatal acting was finished, and the player gone beyond recall.

Before noon Oakes received the shock of this portentous telegram from Dougherty: “Forrest died this morning; nothing will be done until you arrive.” He started at once, and reached Philadelphia in the bitter cold of the next morning at four o’clock. Describing the scene, at a later period, he writes, “I went directly into his bedchamber. There he lay, white and pulseless as a man of marble. For a few minutes it seemed to me that my body was as cold as his and my heart as still. The little while I stood at his side, speechless, almost lifeless, seemed an age. No language can express the agony of that hour, and even now I cannot bear to turn my mind back to it.”

Arrangements were made for a simple and unostentatious funeral; a modest card of invitation being sent to only about sixty of his nearest friends or associates in private and professional life. But it was found necessary to forego the design of a reserved and quiet burial on account of the multitudes who felt so deep an interest in the occasion, and expressed so strong a desire to be present at the last services that they could not be refused admission. When the hour arrived, on that dark and rainy December day, the heavens muffled in black and weeping as if they felt with the human gloom below, the streets were blocked with the crowd, all anxious to see once more, ere it was borne forever from sight, the memorable form and face. The doors were thrown open to them, and it was estimated that nearly two thousand people in steady stream flowed in and out, each one in turn taking his final gaze. The house was draped in mourning and profusely filled with flowers. In a casket covered with a black cloth, silver mounted, and with six silver handles, clothed in a black dress suit, reposed the dead actor. Every trace of passion and of pain was gone from the firm and fair countenance, looking startlingly like life, whose placid repose nothing could ever disturb again. All over the body and the casket and around it were heaped floral tributes in every form, sent from far and near,—crosses, wreaths, crowns, and careless clusters. From four actresses in four different cities came a cross of red and white roses, a basket of evergreens, a wreath of japonicas, and a crown of white camelias. Delegations from various dramatic associations were present. A large deputation of the Lotus Club came from New York with the mayor of that city at their head. All classes were there, from the most distinguished to the most humble. Many of the old steadfast friends of other days passed the coffin, and looked their last on its occupant, with dripping eyes. One, a life-long professional coadjutor, stooped and kissed the clay-cold brow. Several poor men and women who had been blessed by his silent charities touched every heart by the deep grief they showed. And the household servants wept aloud at parting from the old master who had made himself earnestly loved by them.

The only inscription on the coffin-lid was the words,

The pall-bearers were James Oakes, James Lawson, Daniel Dougherty, John W. Forney, Jesse R. Burden, Samuel D. Gross, George W. Childs, and James Page. The funeral cortÉge, consisting of some sixty carriages, moved through throngs of people lining the sidewalk along the way to Saint Paul’s Church, where the crowd was so great, notwithstanding the rain, as to cause some delay. It seemed as though the very reserve and retiracy of the man in his last years had increased the latent popular curiosity about him, investing him with a kind of mystery. A simple prayer was read; and then, in the family vault, with the coffined and mouldering forms of his father and mother and brother and sisters around him, loving hands placed all that was mortal of the greatest tragedian that ever lived in America.

The announcement of the sudden and solitary death of Forrest produced a marked sensation throughout the country. In the chief cities meetings of the members of the dramatic profession were called, and resolutions passed in honor and lamentation for the great man and player, “whose remarkable originality, indomitable will, and unswerving fidelity,” they asserted, “made him an honor to the walk of life he had chosen,” and “whose lasting monument will be the memory of his sublime delineations of the highest types of character on the modern stage.”

For a long time the newspapers abounded with biographic and obituary notices of him, with criticisms, anecdotes, personal reminiscences. In a very few instances the bitterness of ancient grudges still pursued him and spoke in unkindness and detraction. There are men in whose meanness so much malignity mixes that they cannot forgive or forget even the dead. But in nearly every case the tone of remark on him was highly honorable, appreciative, and even generous. Two brief examples of this style may be cited.

“One thing must be said of Edwin Forrest, now that he lies cold in the tomb—he never courted popularity; he never flattered power. Importuned a thousand times to enter society, he rather avoided it. The few friendships he had were sincere. He never boasted of his charities; and yet we think, when the secrets of his life are unsealed, this solitary man, who dies without leaving a single known person of his own blood, will prove that he had a heart that could throb for all humanity. Having known him and loved him through his tribulations and his triumphs for more than a generation, we feel that in what we say we speak the truth of one who was a sincere friend, an honest citizen, and a benevolent man.”

“In our view Edwin Forrest was a great man; the one genius, perhaps, that the American stage has given to history. The conditions of his youth, the rough-and-tumble struggle of a life fired by a grand purpose, the loves, hates, triumphs, and failures that preceded the placing of the bays upon his brow, and the long reign that no new-comer ventured to disturb, all point to a nature that could do nothing by halves and bore the ineffaceable imprint of positive greatness. He was, essentially, a self-made man. All the angularities that result from a culture confined by the very conditions of its existence to a few of the many directions in which men need to grow were his. His genius developed itself irresistibly,—even as a spire of corn will shoot up despite encumbering stones,—gnarled, rugged, and perhaps disproportioned. His art was acquired not in the scholar’s closet or under the careful eye of learned tradition, but from demonstrative American audiences. Therefore such errors of performance as jumped with the easily excited emotions of an unskilled auditory were made a part of his education and his creed by a law which not even genius can surmount. So Forrest grew to giant stature, a one-sided man. Experience and a liberal culture in later life worked for him all that opportunity can do for greatness. That these did not wholly remove the faults of his early training was inevitable, but they so broadened his life and power that men of wisest censure saw in him the greatest actor of his time, and a man who under favorable early conditions would have stood, perhaps, peerless in the history of his art. Such a man, bearing a life flooded with the sunshine of glory, but often clouded with storm and almost wrecked by the pain that is born of passion, needs from the nation that produced and honored him, not fulsome adulation or biased praise, but dispassionate analysis and intelligent appreciation.”

One elaborate sketch of his life and character was published—by far the ablest and boldest that appeared—whose most condemnatory portion and moral gist ought to be quoted here, for two reasons. First, on account of its incisive power, honesty, and splendid eloquence. Second, that what is unjust in it may be seen and qualified:

“The death of this remarkable man is an incident which seems to prompt more of indefinite emotion than of definite thought. The sense that is uppermost is the sense that a great vitality, an enormous individuality of character, a boundless ambition, a tempestuous spirit, a life of rude warfare and often of harsh injustice, an embittered mind, and an age laden with disappointment and pain, are all at rest. Mr. Forrest, partly from natural bias to the wrong and partly from the force of circumstances and the inexorable action of time, had made shipwreck of his happiness; had cast away many golden opportunities; had outlived his fame; had outlived many of his friends and alienated others; had seen the fabric of his popularity begin to crumble; had seen the growth of new tastes and the rise of new idols; had found his claims as an actor, if accepted by many among the multitude, rejected by many among the judicious; and, in wintry age, broken in health, dejected in spirit, and thwarted in ambition, had come to the ‘last scene of all’ with great wealth, indeed, but with very little of either love or peace or hope. Death, at almost all times a blessing, must, in ending such an experience as this, be viewed as a tender mercy. His nature—which should have been noble, for it contained elements of greatness and beauty—was diseased with arrogance, passion, and cruelty. It warred with itself, and it made him desolate. He has long been a wreck. There was nothing before him here but an arid waste of suffering; and, since we understand him thus, we cannot but think with a tender gratitude that at last he is beyond the reach of all trouble, and where neither care, sorrow, self-rebuke, unreasoning passion, resentment against the world, nor physical pain can any more torment him. His intellect was not broad enough to afford him consolation under the wounds that his vanity so often received. All his resource was to shut himself up in a kind of feudal retreat and grim seclusion, where he brooded upon himself as a great genius misunderstood and upon the rest of the world as a sort of animated scum. This was an unlovely nature; but, mingled in it, were the comprehension and the incipient love of goodness, sweetness, beauty, great imaginings, and beneficent ideas. He knew what he had missed, whether of intellectual grandeur, moral excellence, or the happiness of the affections, and in the solitude of his spirit he brooded upon his misery. The sense of this commended him to our sympathy when he was living, and it commends his memory to our respect in death.”

The writer of the powerful article from which the above extract is taken, in another part of it, said of Forrest, “He was utterly selfish. He did not love dramatic art for itself, but because it was tributary to him.”

Now, although the brave and sincere spirit of the article is as clear as its masterly ability, something is to be said in protest against the sweeping verdict it gives and in vindication of the man so terribly censured. That there is some truth in the charges made is not denied. All of them—except the two last, which are wholly baseless—have been illustrated and commented on in this biography, but, as is hoped, in a tone and with a proportion and emphasis more accordant with the facts of the whole case. The charges, as above made, of sourness, ferocity, arrogance, cynicism, wretchedness, wreck, and despair, are greatly unjust in their overcharged statement of the sinister and sad, profoundly unfair in their omission of the sunny and smiling, features and qualities in the life and character with which they deal. The writer must have taken his cue either from inadequate and unfortunate personal knowledge of the man or from representations made by prejudiced parties. Ample data certainly are afforded in preceding pages of this volume to neutralize the extravagance in the accusations while leaving the truth that is also in them with its proper weight.

One fact alone scatters the entire theory that the social and moral condition of the tragedian was so fearfully dismal, forlorn, and execrable,—the fact that he had high and precious friendships with women, tenderly cherished and sacredly maintained. These were the foremost joy and solace of his life. They were kept up by unfailing attentions, epistolary and personal, to the last of his days. Into these relations he carried a fervor of affection, a poetry of sentiment, a considerate delicacy and refinement of speech and manner, which secured the amplest return for all he gave, and drew from the survivors, when he was gone, tributes which if they were published would cover him with the lustre of a romantic interest. But it is forbidden to spread such matters before the common gaze. They have a sacred right of privacy which must be no further violated than is needed to refute the absurd belief that the experience of Edwin Forrest was one of such unfathomable desolation and unhappiness.

No, a portrait in which he is shown as a man whose all-ruling motives were cruel egotism, pride, vanity, and avarice, a man “whose nature fulfilled itself,” and for that reason made his life a half-ignominious and half-pathetic “failure,” will be repudiated by his countrymen. At the same time his genuine portrait will reveal the truth that while he loved the good in this world well, he hated the evil too much,—the truth that while he sought success by honorable means, he too rancorously loathed those who opposed him with dishonorable means,—and the truth that while he won many of the solid prizes of existence and enjoyed them with a more than average measure of happiness, he missed the very highest and best prizes from lack of spirituality, serene equilibrium of soul, and religious consecration.

His literary agent for three years and intimate theatrical confrÈre for a much longer period, Mr. C. G. Rosenberg, moved by the injurious things said of him, published an article admitting his explosive irritability, but affirming his justice and kindness and fund of genial humor and denying the charges of an oppressive temper and arrogant selfishness. His business manager and constant companion for a great many years loved him as a brother, and always testified to his high rectitude of soul and his many endearing qualities. In one of his latest years, when this faithful servant lost a pocket-book containing over three thousand dollars of his money, and was in excessive distress about it, Forrest, without one sign of anger or peevishness or regret, simply said, in a gentle tone, “Do not blame yourself, McArdle. Accidents will happen. We can make it all up in a few nights. So let it go and never mind.” John McCullough, who for six years had every condition requisite for reading his character to the very bottom, bore witness to his rare nobility and social charm, saying, “In heart he was a prince, and would do anything for a friend. A thorough student of human nature, gifted with intensity, he applied himself to the heart, and ever reached it. He was essentially an autocrat. His personal magnetism was great, and he could draw everything to him. Wherever he might be, men recognized him as king, and he reigned without resistance, also without imposition.” For six years, after the close of the War, he gave a one-armed soldier, as a vegetable garden, the free use of a piece of land worth twenty-five thousand dollars. This is an extract from one of his letters: “Notice has been sent me that the price of the picture by Tom Gaylord is one hundred and fifty dollars, but that if I think this too much I may fix my own price. No doubt it is more than the painting is worth, but as the young man is just beginning, and needs to be cheered on, I shall gladly give it to encourage him for his long career of art.” When a certain poor man of his acquaintance had died, and his widow knew not where to bury him, he gave her a space for this purpose in his own lot in the cemetery. And every winter he gave private orders to his grocer to supply such suffering, worthy families as he knew, with what they needed, and charge the bills to him. Surely these are not the kind of deeds done by, these not the kind of tributes paid to, a misanthropic old tyrant, discontented with himself, sick of the world, and breathing scorn and wrath against everybody who approached him.

The following letter, addressed by one of the oldest and choicest friends of Forrest to another one, speaks for itself:

“My dear Friend,—Our old and distinguished friend is no more. It is a great sorrow to us and to his country. The papers show that all mourn his loss, for he and his fame belonged to the public. I knew Forrest well; except yourself, no man knew him better than I did. He was a man of genius, of great will and energy, and, without much education, by his own untiring efforts raised himself to the very highest pinnacle of fame in his profession. There was a grandeur in the man, in every thing he did and said, and hence the great admiration his friends had for him. He was a truly noble and generous man, one who loved his friends with devotion, and despised his enemies. I first made his acquaintance at Lexington, Kentucky, in the fall of 1822. He came there with Collins & Jones as one of their theatrical corps. He was then between sixteen and seventeen, and was the pet of us college boys. He made his first appearance as Young Norval, and the boys were so much taken with him that after the play was over we went to the greenroom, and took him, dressed as he was in character, to a supper. That night he slept with me in my boarding-house. We had breakfast in my room, and it was late before he left. I wanted to lend him a suit to go home in; but no, he would go in his Highland costume, a feather in his hat, straight down Main Street, with a crowd of boys following him to his hotel. He played all that winter in Lexington, and when the Medical and Law Colleges broke up in the spring he went to Cincinnati. That was in March or April, and he boarded at Mrs. Bryson’s, on Main Street. In the summer of 1823 he came to Newport with Mrs. Riddle and her daughter and two or three actors, and rented a house on the bank of the river. I assisted him in fixing up a small theatre in the old frame buildings of the United States barracks at the Point of Licking, and we had plays there until October. My brother-in-law, Major Harris, played Iago to his Othello. I was to have played Damon to his Pythias, but some difficulty occurred which prevented it. Forrest was then very poor, but kept up his spirits, and spent many nights with me in my father’s old office. His great delight was to get in a boat and sail for hours on the river when the wind was high. In the fall of 1823 he returned with Collins & Jones to Lexington, the Drakes, I think, uniting, and played the winter of 1823-24. He played with Pelby and his wife, and Pemberton, an actor from Nashville. He improved rapidly in his profession, and had always one of the most prominent characters cast to him. In fact, he would play second to no man. I was very intimate with him that whole winter, and on the first day of January, 1824, Tom Clay and several of us gave a fine dinner at Ayers’s Hotel, and he was the distinguished guest. We all made speeches and recitations, and before we had finished the entertainment we had an extensive audience. Forrest had many intimate friends among the students, and he often attended the college declamations. He had a great admiration for the eloquence of Doctor Holley, our President, and has often told me of the benefit he derived from the style of this remarkable orator. In March of 1824 I returned home, after the breaking up of the Law School, and played Zanga, in Young’s Revenge, at the Columbia Street Theatre, for the benefit of old Colonel John Cleve Symmes. We had a crowded house. Sallie Riddle played in the same piece. It was to enable Mr. Symmes to get to his Hole at the North Pole; but, poor man, he never got further than New York. I think Mr. Forrest went that spring to New Orleans. I am very certain he was not in Cincinnati when I played in the Revenge, otherwise he would have performed in the same play. It has been published in the papers that Forrest was once a circus rider and tumbler. No such thing. The only time he was ever connected with a circus was when with the circus company in Lexington he played Timour the Tartar. Mrs. Pelby and others were in the same piece. He looked Grandeur itself when mounted on Pepin’s famous cream-colored horse. After March, 1824, I did not meet Mr. Forrest again until the spring of 1828. He was then playing in New York, and I saw him in his great character of Othello. His star had then begun to rise, and it continued to rise until it reached its zenith, and there it continued to shine until the last hour of his life. His place cannot be filled in this country. Great actors are born, and not made. To be a great tragedian a man must possess the soul, the passion, and the eloquence to delineate the character he represents. Forrest had that beyond most men.

“I thank you for the paper containing his will and other reminiscences of him. My wife has been since his death clipping from the newspapers all that has been written about him, and has put the notices in her scrap-book. Some of the journals have done him justice, others have not; but posterity will cherish his memory and feel proud of the man. In 1870 I had a copy made of my portrait of George Frederick Cooke by Sully, and sent it to him. I think you saw it. He wrote me at Fire Island, New York, a long and affectionate letter acknowledging the receipt of the portrait and pressing me to spend a week with him at his house. My daughter, Mrs. Jones, has the letter, and has copied it in her book of original letters written to my father by Henry Clay and many other distinguished men of our country. The last time Mr. Forrest was in Cincinnati he walked over one morning to see me and the family. We took him back in my carriage to his hotel, and as he parted from my daughter Martha and myself his eyes were filled with tears, and he exclaimed, ‘God bless you!’ and left us. This was the last time I ever saw our distinguished and much beloved friend. My daughter, only last night, was speaking of this event of our parting, and how much affected Mr. Forrest seemed to be.

“Forrest was a great favorite with my wife. She knew him in 1823 and 1824, and, before our marriage, had often witnessed his performances at Lexington when a girl. She well knew the great friendship that united us: hence in referring to our boy and girl days in Lexington, Kentucky, she often speaks of Forrest, and how much he was respected and his company sought by the college boys at Old Transylvania. I have a very fine daguerreotype picture of our friend, and two quite large photographs he sent me through you several years ago. They will be faithfully preserved and handed down to my children and to their children as the picture of a man concerning whom it may well be said, ‘Take him for all in all, we shall not look upon his like again.’

“All we have left to us, my friend, is to meet and talk over the pleasure we once enjoyed in the company of our friend. He was so full of wit and humor! And how well he told a story! I remember the day, some years back, he and you spent at my house. All my family were present, together with several friends, and he fascinated us all at dinner by his eloquence, and his incidents of foreign travel. How heartily we laughed at the anecdotes which he told with such fine effect! Then we had music at night, and he recited the ‘Idiot Boy,’ to the delight of every one, and it was the ‘witching time of night’ when the company broke up.

Alas, how easy it is, and how congenial it seems to be to many, to let down and tarnish the memory of a great man by an estimate in which his vices are magnified and his virtues omitted! So did old Macklin say of David Garrick, “He had a narrow mind, bounded on one side by suspicion, by envy on the other, by avarice in front, by fear in the rear, and with self in the centre.” But against every unkind or demeaning word spoken of the departed Forrest a multitude of facts protest. Two of these may be cited to show the genius he had to make himself loved and admired and remembered.

On receiving intelligence of the death of his benefactor, a literary gentleman who had been tried by severe misfortunes of poverty and blindness and paralysis, and had experienced extreme kindness as well as generous aid at the hands of Forrest, wrote to Oakes a long letter, eloquent with gratitude and admiration, and closing with the poetic acrostic which follows. The writer thoroughly knew and loved the actor both personally and professionally,—a fact that adds value to his eulogistic appreciation:

On the first anniversary of his death a company of gentlemen, actuated by purely disinterested motives, met in New York and organized the Edwin Forrest Club, with a president, vice-president, and seven directors. “The primary object of the club shall be to foster the memory of the great actor, to erect a statue of him in the Central Park, and to collect criticisms, pictures, and all things relating to him, for the purpose of forming a Forrest Museum.” After the memory of Forrest had been drunk standing, Mr. G. W. Metlar, a friend from his earliest boyhood, paid an affectionate eulogy to his worth. Others offered similar tributes. And the corresponding secretary of the club, Mr. Harrison, said, “Gentlemen, however well the world may know Mr. Forrest as an actor, it knows comparatively nothing of him as a man. A kinder heart never beat in the bosom of a human being. In the finer sympathies of our nature he was more like a child than one who had felt an undue share of the rude buffets of ingratitude. When speaking with him of the troubles of others I have often seen his eyes suffused with tears. The beggar never knocked at his door and went away unladen. And many is the charity that fell from his manly hand and the relieved knew not whence it came; but

And I may say with conscientious pride that however much any of the great actors may have done for their national stage, Mr. Forrest, equal to any of them, has done as much for the theatre of his country, and will remain a recognized peer in the everlasting group.

The longer I allude to the tragedian the stronger becomes the sadness that tinctures my feelings to think that he is no more, and that the existence of the gifts Nature had so liberally bestowed on him had to cease with the cessation of his pulse.”

Everything set down by the biographer in this volume has been stated in the simple spirit of truth. And if the pen that writes has distilled along the pages such a spirit of love for their subject as makes the reader suspect the writer possessed with a fond partiality, he asks, Why is it so? His love is but a response to the love he received, and to the grand and beautiful qualities he saw. A dried-up and malignant heart does not breathe such effusive words in such a sincere tone as those which, in 1869, Forrest wrote to Oakes: “The good news you send of the restored health of our dear friend Alger gives me inexpressible relief. Now I go into the country with abounding joy.”

The fortune Forrest had laboriously amassed would amount, it was thought, when it should all be made available, to upwards of a million dollars. It was found that in his will he had left the whole of it—excepting a few personal bequests—to found, on his beautiful estate of “Spring Brook,” about eight miles from the heart of Philadelphia, the Edwin Forrest Home, for the support of actors and actresses decayed by age or disabled by infirmity.

The trustees and executors have arranged the grounds and prepared the buildings, removed thither all the relics of the testator, his books, pictures, and statues, and made public announcement that the home is ready for occupation. Thus the greatest charity ever bequeathed in the sole interest of his own profession by any actor since the world began is already in active operation, and promises to carry the name it wears through unlimited ages. It pleasantly allies its American founder with the old tragedian Edward Alleyn, the friend of Shakspeare, who two hundred and fifty years ago established munificent institutions of knowledge and mercy, which have been growing ever since and are now one of the princeliest endowments in England.

Those who loved Forrest best had hoped for him that, reposing on his laurels, pointed out in the streets as the veteran of a hundred battles, the vexations and resentments of earlier years outgrown and forgotten, enjoying the calls of his friends, luxuriating in bookish leisure, overseeing with paternal fondness the progress of the home he had planned for the aged and needy of his profession, taking a proud joy in the prosperity and glory of his country and in the belief that his idolized art has before it here amidst the democratic institutions of America a destiny whose splendor and usefulness shall surpass everything it has yet known,—the days of his mellow and vigorous old age should glide pleasantly towards the end where waits the strange Shadow with the key and the seal. Then, they trusted, nothing in his life should have become him better than the leaving of it would. For, receding step by step from the stage and the struggle, he should fade out in a broadening illumination from behind the scenes, the murmur of applause reaching him until his ear closed to every sound of earth.

It would have been so had he been all that he should have been. It was ordained not to be so. Shattered and bowed, he was snatched untimely from his not properly perfected career. But all that he was and did will not be forgotten in consequence of what he was not and did not do.

He will live as a great tradition in the history of the stage. He will live as a personal image in the magnificent Coriolanus statue. He will live as a learned and versatile histrionist in the exact photographic embodiments of his costumed and breathing characters. He will live as a diffused presence in the retreat he has founded for his less fortunate brethren. Perhaps he will live, in some degree, as a friend in the hearts of those who perusing these pages shall appreciate the story of his toils, his trials, his triumphs, and his disappearance from the eyes of men. He will certainly live in the innumerable and untraceable but momentous influences of his deeds and effluences of his powerful personality and exhibitions caught up by sensitive organisms and transmitted in their posterity to the end of our race. And, still further, if, as Swedenborg teaches, there are theatres in heaven, and all sorts of plays represented there, those who in succeeding ages shall recall his memory amidst the shades of time may think of him still as acting some better part before angelic spectators within the unknown scenery of eternity.

Here the pen of the writer drops from his hand in the conclusion of its task, and, with the same words with which it began, ends the story of Edwin Forrest.