Forrest was a lover of beautiful things and of rare old books. Gabriel Harrison describes a Thanksgiving Day spent at the Broad Street residence, towards the close of the great tragedian's life, in which the old folio edition of Shakespeare, 1623, was taken out of its case and exhibited with the greatest possible tenderness and pride. Other rare things of the stage that had belonged to Garrick and similarly famous actors were also shown. "Then he conducted his guest to the basement of his house, and exhibited a perfect little theatre, containing scenery, footlights, and room enough to seat at least two hundred people. 'Here,' he said, 'I have had little children perform a whole play which I have rehearsed with them to my great pleasure.' This remark," Harrison comments, was a proof of his tender heart; it showed that half a century of buffets with the hard world had not chilled the impulses of youth."

Forrest had all his life dearly loved children and been very tender with them. One cannot help feeling that, if his son had lived, the estrangement between him and his wife would somehow have been averted. There is a beautiful story about one occasion when, as a young man acting at the Old National Theatre in Boston, he hurried from the playhouse, Metamora's paint only imperfectly removed from his cheeks, to nurse the sick baby of a woman staying at the same hotel. The child had been ailing for many days, and its mother was quite worn out from caring for it. But Forrest paced up and down the room all night long, soothing it, and when the doctor came the next day, he said that the vitality which the

infant drew from the man's strong breast, against which it had finally slept, had been the means of saving its life.

His own life's span was drawing to a close. A shattering illness in the spring of 1872 compelled him to retire definitively from the stage, and though he gave some public readings after that, he made no great success of it. After reading "Othello," on Saturday afternoon, December 7, 1872, in Tremont Temple, Boston,1 he was glad to journey back to his Philadelphia home as quickly as he could. And there, on the morning of December 12, his servant found him dead in his bed. He had slipped away quietly and painlessly in the night. His will provided a retreat for aged actors, which was opened in 1876. Of it Wilson Barrett has said that it is "like a gentleman's country seat, and the old actors and actresses his honoured guests." There are seldom more than a dozen women and men here resident at a time, the idea being that these guests of Edwin Forrest's bounty shall have every comfort and be allowed every privilege possible. Each year Forrest's guests appropriately celebrate his birthday by giving a play.

Mrs. Forrest, or Mrs. Catherine Norton Sinclair, as we must now perforce call her, survived her husband

1The Boston Journal of December 9, 1872, gave about five lines of fine print to Forrest on this occasion: "The audience included much of the genius and culture of our community, although the attendance was not, numerically speaking, all it should have been." The impassioned scenes from "Othello were delivered, the critic added, with the marked dramatic power for which Mr. Forrest is distinguished."

nearly twenty years. Soon after the trial she determined to go on the stage and played a season at Brougham's Lyceum (later Wallack's), opening on February 2, 1852, in "School For Scandal." After that she played "Lady of Lyons," "Much Ado About Nothing," "Love's Sacrifice," and "The Patrician's Daughter." George Vandenhoff, a prominent English actor who now supported her, trained her for her parts, and he has categorically described, in his interesting volume, "An Actor's Note-Book," the terms of their alliance. He was an utter stranger to this lady, he declares, until "some time in 1851," when he was invited even urged to "coach her for the stage. At first he was reluctant to do this because he believed that it was too late in life for her to take such a step; but upon her representation that she would probably have to earn her living in this way, he consented to help her prepare three or four parts. Since she had no money with which to pay her teacher, it was agreed that in consideration of his instructions and of his performing with her, he was to have an equal share of such profits as "her temporary and factitious attraction would secure." (Vandenhoff had been trained for the law.)

It was by Vandenhoff's advice, we are told, that the lady played Lady Teazle the night of her New York début. He regarded this as the one part in which she could give a fairly artistic performance. These details are of interest from the fact that Vandenhoff was considerably criticized at the time in the belief that he had "put money in his purse by taking advantage of Mrs.