In 1870, Mr. William D. Gallagher, an old and dear friend of Mr. Forrest, visited Col. Taylor at his estate in Newport. Taylor gave him many pleasing reminiscences of his early days and his romantic friendship with the young actor, then so world-famous. He said that while at Lexington he one night invited Forrest to his hotel. He acceded, without waiting to change his costume as Young Norval. He spent the night with him, sharing his bed, and breakfasted with him the next morning. After breakfast, as he went to his own quarters in another street, the boys, attracted by his theatrical dress, followed him with shouts and cheers.
President Holley was a man of very extraordinary oratorical power. He was really a man of genius, his freedom of thought and his æsthetic culture far in advance of his time. He had a great fame in his day, but, leaving no visible work behind him, his name is now but a faded tradition. He was so much struck by the performances of Forrest that he generously sought him out and held several long interviews with him, in which, with a masterly power which profoundly impressed his youthful listener, he unfolded his views of art and of life and urged him to cherish noble aspirations in the profession he had chosen. This contact with the veteran preacher was one of the moulding points in the career of the player. Such acts of condescension and disinterestedness—or perhaps it is juster to call them acts of love and duty—are charming and are divinely encouraging. There are more of them in the world than we think, though certainly there are far fewer of them than there ought to be. The record of each, while delightful to contemplate, is a stimulus to produce others.
Holley urged Forrest to curb his taste for comic and farcical parts and as soon as possible to cease appearing in such characters. He strove to impress on him a deeper sense of his fitness for the highest walks of tragedy, and explained to him most eloquently the noble qualities the enactment of such parts both required and cultivated in the performer, as well as the valuable lessons they taught to the spectator. He also dwelt at length on the true principle of the dramatic art, which he maintained to be not merely to hold the mirror up to crude nature, but to give a choice and refined presentation of the truth. Nature, he said, is reality, but art is ideality. The actor is not to reflect all the direct and unrelieved facts of nature, but to present a selective and softened or intensified reflection of them. Art plays the tune of nature, he held, but with variations. He uttered these and other thoughts with such remarkable grace and precision that Forrest said the conversation made an epoch in his mind, although he differed from him in opinion, then and always holding that the purpose of acting was to show the exact truth of nature. Holley was right; and it is notable that his youthful auditor in rejecting the view he advocated accurately marked his own central defect not less than his most conspicuous merit as an actor.
Closing their season at Lexington, February 22d, 1823, the company started across the country for Cincinnati, the women with the theatrical paraphernalia in covered wagons, the men on horseback. Their good humor and abundant faculty for finding or making enjoyment in everything stood them in hand during the journey, which their rude accommodations and the wintry weather would otherwise have made cheerless enough. They opened in Cincinnati, in the old Columbia Street Theatre, on the evening of March 6th, 1823. The play was The Soldier's Daughter. Forrest, who lacked just three days of being seventeen years old, was assigned the humble part of Malfort, a serious walking gentleman. His range of casts during this season was extremely varied, reaching from the heights of dire tragedy to the level of ridiculous pantomime. He danced in the then popular ballet of Little Red Riding-Hood. He often sang comic songs between the plays. Eberle, who was a good violinist, on one occasion appeared as an old broken soldier with a wooden leg and a fiddle, accompanied by Forrest as his daughter in a ragged female dress. The father fiddled, the daughter sang with laughable pathos,—
"Oh, cruel was my parients, as tored my love from me;
And cruel was the great big ship as tooked him off to sea;
And cruel was the capitaine and the boswain and the men,
As didn't care a fardin if we never met agen."
(Tears.)
The performance was encored so warmly that it was repeated many successive nights. He also played Corinthian Tom in the extravaganza of Tom and Jerry, Lubin in the Wandering Boys of Switzerland, and Blaize in the Forest of Bondy, or the Dog of Montargis. In the last character he sang this song: