their understanding with a levity for which I
want a name.' Addison, who has some lively papers on the subject in the
_Spectator_, undertook to give a faithful account of the progress of
the Italian opera on the English stage, 'for there is no question,' he
writes, 'but our great grandchildren will be very curious to know why
their forefathers used to sit together like an audience of foreigners in
their own country; and to hear whole plays acted before them in a tongue
which they did not understand.'

Before writing thus in the _Spectator_, Addison, in order to oppose the
Italian opera, by what he regarded as a more rational pastime, produced
his English opera of _Rosamond_, which was acted in 1706, and proved a
failure on the stage. The music is said to have been bad, and the poetry
is the work of a writer destitute of lyrical genius. Lord Macaulay, who
finds a merit in almost everything produced by Addison, praises 'the
smoothness with which the verses glide, and the elasticity with which
they bound,' and considers that if he 'had left heroic couplets to Pope,
and blank verse to Rowe, and had employed himself in writing airy and
spirited songs, his reputation as a poet would have stood far higher
than it now does.' The gliding movement of the verse may be admitted;
but lyric poetry demands the higher qualities of music and imaginative
treatment, and Addison's 'smoothness,' so far from being a poetical
gift, is a mechanical acquisition.

In 1713 his _Cato_, with its stately rhetoric and cold dignity, received
a very different reception. The prologue, written by Pope, is in
admirable accordance with the spirit of the play. Addison's purpose is
to exhibit a great man struggling with adversity, and Pope writes:

'He bids your breasts with ancient ardour rise,
And calls forth Roman drops from British eyes;
Virtue confessed in human shape he draws,
What Plato thought, and God-like Cato was:
No common object to your sight displays,
But what with pleasure Heaven itself surveys;
A brave man struggling in the storms of fate,
And greatly falling with a falling state!
While Cato gives his little senate laws,
What bosom beats not in his country's cause?'

Addison has proved that he could draw a life-like character in his
representation of Sir Roger de Coverley, but the _dramatis personae_, who
act a part, or are supposed to act one, in _Cato_, are mere dummies,
made to express fine sen