CHARLOTTE CUSHMAN 355 crat, that gentleman remarked to him: " Mr. Forrest, I never in my life saw you play Lear so well as you did to-night." Whereupon the veteran almost indig- nantly replied, rising slowly and laboriously from his chair to his full height : " Play Lear ! What do you mean, sir ? I do not play Lear ! I play Hamlet, Richard, Shylock, Virginius, if you please, but by God, sir, I am Lear ! " Nor was this wholly imaginative. Ingratitude of the basest kind had rent his soul. Old friends were gone from him ; new friends were but half-hearted. His hearthstone was desolate. The public, to whom he had given his best years, was becoming impatient of his infirmities. The royalty of his powers he saw by degrees torn from his decaying form. Other kings had arisen on the stage, to whom his old subjects now showed a reverence once all his own. The mockery of his diadem only remained. A wreck of the once proud man who had de- spised all weakness, and had ruled his kingdom with imperial sway, he now stood alone. Broken in health and in spirit, deserted, forgotten, unkinged, he might well exclaim, " I am Lear ! " CHARLOTTE CUSHMAN By Dutton Cook (1816-1876) The Pilgrim Fathers figure in American pedi- grees almost as frequently and persistently as Norman William and his followers appear at the trunk of our family-trees. Certainly, the Mayflower must have carried very many heads of houses across the Atlantic. It was not in the Mayflower, however, but in the Fortune, a smaller vessel, of fifty-five tons, that Robert Cushman, Nonconformist, the founder of the Cushman family in America, sailed from Eng- land, for the better enjoyment of liberty of con- science and freedom of religion. In the seventh generation from Robert Cushman appeared El- kanah Cushman, who took to wife Mary Eliza, daughter of Erasmus Babbit, Jr., lawyer, musi- cian, and captain in the army. Of this marriage was born Charlotte Saunders Cushman, in Rich- mond Street, Boston, July 23, 18 16, and other children. Charlotte Cushman says of herself : " I was born a tom-boy." She had a passion for climbing trees and for breaking open dolls' heads. She could not
