The "Sun" of the same date said,—
"Mr. Edwin Forrest, who has long held the first rank as a tragic actor in America, made his first appearance here last night in a new drama, also of American growth, entitled the Gladiator. The acting of Mr. Forrest as Spartacus was throughout admirable. His very figure and voice were in his favor, the one being strongly muscular, the other replete with a rough music befitting one who in his youth has dwelt, a free barbarian, among the mountains. He electrified his audience; indeed, we have not heard more enthusiastic bursts of applause shake the walls of an English theatre since Othello expired with poor Kean. The great recommendations of Mr. Forrest as a tragedian we take to be strong passion, and equally strong judgment. In the whirlwind of his emotions he never loses sight of self-control. He is the master, not the slave, of his feelings. He appeals to no fastidious coterie for applause; he is not remarkable for the delivery of this or that pretty tinkling poetic passage; still less is he burdened with refined sensibility, which none but the select few can understand; far otherwise; he gives free play to those rough natural passions which are intelligible all the world over. His pathos is equally sincere and unsophisticated. His delivery of the passage,—
'And one day hence,
My darling boy, too, may be fatherless,'—
was marked by the truest and tenderest sensibility. Equally successful was he in that pleasing pastoral idea,—
'And Peace was tinkling in the shepherd's bells,
And singing with the reapers;'
which, had it been written in Claude's days, that great painter would undoubtedly have made the subject of one of his best landscapes.
'Famine shrieked in the empty corn-fields,'—
a striking image, which immediately follows the preceding one, was given by Mr. Forrest with an energy amounting almost to the sublime. Not less impressive was his delivery of