t of a passionate part, and
then calling out 'What's next?'"

Lastly came the great Mr. Pope, with that poor, deformed body and
brilliant mind. He was not content merely to be a "looker on in
Vienna," or in Utica; he pottered around unceasingly, hobnobbed with
Oldfield (who now began to take the liveliest interest in the play),
and suggested several alterations in the text. Once Nance ventured to
criticise a speech of Portius; the amiable Addison, unlike the fashion
of some other amiable authors, heard her objections with approval,
and soon Mr. Pope was again called into consultation. There was more
hobnobbing, a change of diction, and the rehearsals continued. Then,
to cap the climax of poetic condescension, little Alexander honoured
"Cato" with a flowing prologue wherein he set forth, archaically
enough, that

"To wake the soul by tender strokes of art,
To raise the genius, and to mend the heart,
To make mankind in conscious virtue bold,
Live o'er each scene, and be what they behold:
For this the tragic Muse first trod the stage,
Commanding tears to stream through every age;
Tyrants no more their savage nature kept,
And foes to virtue wonder'd how they wept."

At last came the eventful evening of April 13, when "Cato" saw the
light. The theatre was packed, just as Steele promised that it should
be, yet the audience would have been large had Dick never existed.
There were no press agents to "boom" matters, but as it became
known that the Whigs stood sponsors for the tragedy there was a
corresponding desire to be in either at its triumph or its death. The
result has passed into history. The characters were, for the most
part, finely acted, and the play was admired for its lofty sentiments
and elegance of expression, while the Tories, _mirabile dictu_, vied
with their enemies in enthusiastic tokens of approval. The Whigs went
to the theatre expecting to appropriate all of Mr. Addison's illusions
to the sacred cause of liberty, and what must have been their horror
on finding that the Tories, refusing to be discomfited by any of those
illusions, applauded as violently as did the friends of Hanover?

Pope has left us a description of this first night, in a letter to Sir
William Trumbull. "Cato," he writes, "was not so much the wonder of
Rome in his days, as he is of Britain in ours; and though all the
foolish industry possible has been used to make it thought a party
play, yet what the author once sai