All hurt behind; backs red, and faces pale
With flight and agued fear! Mend, and charge home,
Or, by the fires of heaven, I’ll leave the foe
And make my wars on you.”
In all these speeches the measureless contempt, the blasting irony, the huge moral chasm separating the haughty speaker from the cowering rabble, were deeply relished by Forrest, and received an expression in his bearing, look, and tone, everyway befitting their intensity and their dimensions. Particularly in the reply to Sicinius,—
“Shall remain!
Hear you this Triton of the minnows? Mark you
His absolute ‘shall’?”—
the width of the gamut of the ironical circumflexes gave one an enlarged idea of the capacity of the human voice to express contempt. And when his disdain to beg the votes of the people and his mocking gibes at them had aggravated them to pronounce his banishment, his superhuman expression of scornful wrath no witness could ever forget:
“You common cry of curs! whose breath I hate