3, 1869 he opened Booth's
Theatre and that he managed for five years. In 1876 he made a tour of
the south, which, so great was the enthusiasm his presence aroused, was
nothing less than a triumphal progress. In San Francisco, where he
filled an engagement of eight weeks, the receipts exceeded $96,000, a
result at that time unprecedented on the dramatic stage.

The circumstances of the stage and of the lives of actors have greatly
changed since the generation went out to which such men as Junius Booth
and Augustus A. Addams belonged. No tragedian would now be so mad as to
put himself in pawn for drink, as Cooke is said to have done, nor be
found scraping the ham from the sandwiches provided for his luncheon, as
Junius Booth was, before going on to play Shylock. Our theatre has no
longer a Richardson to light up a pan of red fire, as that old showman
once did, to signalise the fall of the screen in _The School for
Scandal_. The eccentrics and the taste for them have passed away. It
seems really once to have been thought that the actor who did not often
make a maniac of himself with drink could not be possessed of the divine
fire. That demonstration of genius is not expected now, nor does the
present age exact from its favourite players the performance of all
sorts and varieties of parts. Forrest was the first of the prominent
actors to break away from the old usage in this latter particular.
During the most prosperous years of his life, from 1837 to 1850, he
acted only about a dozen parts, and most of them were old. The only new
parts that he studied were Claude Melnotte, Richelieu, Jack Cade, and
Mordaunt, the latter in the play of _The Patrician's Daughter_, and he
"recovered" Marc Antony, which he particularly liked. Edwin Booth, who
had inherited from his father the insanity of intemperance, conquered
that utterly, many years ago, and nobly and grandly trod it beneath his
feet; and as he matured in his career, through acting every kind of
part, from a dandy negro up to Hamlet, he at last made choice of the
characters that afford scope for his powers and his aspirations, and so
settled upon a definite, restricted repertory. His characters were
Hamlet, Macbeth, Lear, Othello, Iago, Richard the Second, Richard the
Third, Shylock, Cardinal Wolsey, Benedick, Petruchio, Richelieu, Lucius
Brutus, Bertuccio, Ruy Blas, and Don Caesar de Bazan. These he acted in
customary usage, and to these he occasionally added Marcus Brutus,