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,