triumph of “Cato,” so far as lusty applause could bring about that result. Captain Steele undertook the packing of the house, and accomplished his task thoroughly. Fancy the gallant officer, his hat cocked jauntily, clothed in his best scarlet coat, rather soiled about the gold-lace edgings, assembling a select party at the Devil, or the Gray’s Inn, or the Fountain, or the Tennis Court Tavern or Coffee-house. Bumpers round to the success of Joe’s tragedy! He never wanted an excuse for a glass, but this was really a prime one, and then a rather unsteady march of the chosen band to the theatre.
Addison was very nervous about the whole business. Suppose that political zeal should carry the house too far? It was a time of extraordinary excitement. Mr. Pope’s line in the prologue, “Britons, arise, be worth like this approved!” might stir up the audience to some treasonable act. The author of the play might be charged with promoting insurrection. “The line was liquidated,” says Johnson, “to Britons, attend!” The opposition peers crowded the boxes. The pit was full of zealous partisans, frequenters of the Whig coffee-houses, and students from the Inns of Court. To make assurance doubly sure, Sir Gilbert Heathcote, Governor of the Bank of England, “Sir Gibby,” as he was popularly called, came from the city, bringing with him a host of fellow citizens, “warm men and true Whigs, but better known at Jonathan’s and Garraway’s than in the haunts of wits and critics,” as Lord Macaulay says. These were instructed to cheer to the utmost whenever a Tory hiss was heard. But, in truth, these tremendous preparations for defence were entirely unnecessary.
The Tories had never contemplated the slightest opposition to the play. The gentle, courtly, and kind-hearted Addison was the last man whose opinions they would have dreamt of attacking through his literature, much less whom they would have planned to crush by an acrimonious antagonism. The severest Tory-writers paid homage to him as a scholar and a gentleman of wit and virtue, in whose friendship many of both parties were happy, and whose name they heard, with regret, banded about in the brawls of factions. Certainly the conduct of Captain Steele and his civic auxiliaries was irritating enough to provoke opposition. But the ministerialists only laughed good-naturedly when Sir Gibby and his friends made the mistake of applauding the sham patriotism of the hypocritical Sempronius with greater enthusiasm than they could be induced to bestow on the calmer eloquence of Cato. Pope, in his letter to Sir William Trumbull, gives a vivid description of the first night. “Cato 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 said of another may the most properly in the world be applied to him, on this occasion:
“‘Envy itself is dumb in wonder lost,
And factions strive who shall applaud him most!’
The numerous and violent claps of the Whig party on the one side of the theatre were echoed back by the Tories on the other; while the author sweated behind the scenes with concern to find their applause proceeding more from the hand than the head. This was the case, too, of the prologue-writer” (Pope, himself), “who was clapped into a staunch Whig at almost every two lines.” Imagine Addison (“he had light-blue eyes, extraordinary bright, and face perfectly regular and handsome, like a tinted statue,” says Colonel Henry Esmond), imagine Addison standing in the wings, or, as Mrs. Porter related, wandering through the whole exhibition behind the scenes with restless and unappeasable solicitude, shrinking rather as Booth rolled out his lines at the footlights, and the audience shouted plaudits not to the poet but to the politician—approved not the polish and music, and even beauty of his verses, but the inuendoes of party supposed to lurk in them. Was he satisfied, do you think? Was his muse not rather ashamed and affronted? Still the loud roar of applause, Captain Steele playing the part of fugleman, must have had a pleasant ring in it. And it would have been hard at that moment to pause and analyse it, to see how far it was adulterated with the spirit of faction.
The sons of Cato enter, and the play begins:
“The dawn is overcast: the morning lours,
And heavily in clouds brings on the day,
The great, the important day, big with the fate
Of Cato and of Rome,” &c.
Some of the critics (they must have been of the Tory camp) thought they discovered here a plagiarism from Nat Lee’s “Alexander”:
“The morning rises black: the louring sun,
As if the dreadful business he foreknew
Drives heavily his sable chariot on,” &c.
