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FORREST'S EARLY CAREER.

struggled triumphantly through all opposing circumstances, and laid the foundation of a career as brilliant as it was successful. His experiences at that time were undoubtedly very beneficial, giving him that determined action and energized expression for which he stood unrivalled. They forced him to undertake a great variety of parts, threw him entirely on his own resources, and secured him against the adoption of a weak or secondary style. Their effect was like that of the sculptor: they marked decidedly the lines and projecting surfaces which subsequent art was to smooth and polish. But a broader field opened before him when, upon his return to the seaboard cities, working with characteristic energy on the strong material of his own nature, he developed a style of acting which, however criticised, stamped itself at once upon the hearts of his audiences. Advancing years served to give detail and finish to many of his prominent impersonations, and every succeeding season revealed new beauties of execution and evidences of profoundest study in all that most required mental penetration and artistic skill. The impression which hasty and superficial criticism at one time created, that he was suited only to parts in which vehemence was to be expressed, afterward gave place to the conviction that his conception of the characters in which he appeared was studiously complete and his representation skilfully sustained. The fact that his artistic excellence was acquired by self-cultivation as the natural result