a fifth act, decided to write it himself, and finished it, according to Steele (Preface to ‘Drummer’), in a week. Steele further undertook to pack a house, a device which Addison's immense popularity may have rendered superfluous. The play was accordingly acted at Drury Lane (Genest, ii. 512) on 14 April 1713. Its dramatic weakness has never been denied. The love scenes are incongruous. It consists in great part of declamation, which Addison's taste restrained within limits, and polished into many still familiar quotations, but which remains commonplace. The success, however, at the time was unprecedented. Whigs and tories not only united in admiring Addison, but were equally anxious to claim a right to his fine phrases about liberty. Addison himself disclaimed party intention. Pope, the friend of the tory circle, wrote an eloquent prologue. Swift himself attended a rehearsal after a long period of estrangement from the author. Bolingbroke, as Pope told Caryll (30 April 1713), sent for Booth, the actor of Cato, and presented him with fifty guineas for ‘defending the cause of liberty so well against a perpetual dictator,’ innuendo Marlborough; and the whigs, says Pope, intend a similar present and are trying to invent as good a sentence. He afterwards (Ep. to Augustus, v. 215) sneered at Addison for appearing to claim some political merit in a copy of verses sent with ‘Cato’ (Nov. 1714) to the princess royal. No tories, however, could scruple at the political maxims of ‘Cato,’ and men of all parties applauded it to the echo. It ran for twenty nights, the last performance being on 9 May. A fourth edition appeared on 4 May, and eight were published in the year. The three managers gained each 1,350l. by the season; to which subsequent performances at Oxford enabled them to add 150l. more, a sum then unprecedented (Cibber's Apology, 377, 387). It was translated into French, Italian, and German; the Jesuits translated it into Latin, that it might be played by the scholars at St. Omer; and Voltaire praised it as the first reasonable English tragedy, and speaks of the sustained elegance and nobility of its language, though blaming its dramatic weakness, and observing that the barbarism and irregularity sanctioned by Shakespeare have left some traces even in Addison (Letters to Bolingbroke and Falkener prefixed to Brutus and Zaire; Life of Louis XIV; and 18th Letter on the English). ‘Cato’ marks in fact the nearest approach in the English theatre to an unreserved acceptance of the French canons, of which Philips's ‘Distressed Mother’—an adaptation of Racine's ‘Andromaque’—had given an example in the previous year (1712). The influence, however, of Shakespeare, though eclipsed, was not extinguished. Rowe was writing tragedies in imitation of his style; and Addison himself (though De Quincey strangely asserts the contrary in his ‘Life of Shakespeare’) frequently speaks of him with high praise (see Tatler, 41; Spectator, 25, 39, 40, 61, 160, 419, 592).
John Dennis made a splenetic, though not pointless, attack upon the awkward dramatic construction of ‘Cato,’ due chiefly to Addison's attempt to preserve the unities, from which full quotations are given in Johnson's Life of Addison. Pope defended Addison (or revenged grievances of his own) by a savage ‘Narrative of the Frenzy of John Dennis.’ Addison thereupon conveyed to Dennis a disavowal of any complicity in this attack, and a disapproval of its manner. Such a disavowal, though no more than due to Dennis and to Addison's own character, chagrined Pope. Pope was already involved in a bitter quarrel with Ambrose Philips, and became irritated against the whole clique who gathered round Addison at Button's. When he published the first four books of his Homer in 1715, a version of the first ‘Iliad’ by Tickell appeared simultaneously. Tickell indeed expressly disavowed any intention of rivalry, declaring that he had abandoned a task now fallen into abler hands, and that he published his fragment only to bespeak public favour for an intended translation of the ‘Odyssey.’ Pope, in a conversation reported by himself, admitted to Addison that he had no monopoly in Homer, and accepted Addison's proposal to read Pope's version of the second book as he had read Tickell's version of the first. Pope came, however, to believe in, or assert, the existence of a conspiracy against his fame. Addison had prompted Tickell to write, or corrected Tickell's verses, or written them himself in Tickell's name. Another proof of this plot, as he told Spence, was given to him by Warwick, soon to be Addison's stepson. Addison had encouraged Gildon to attack Pope in a pamphlet on Wycherley, and had afterwards paid the assailant ten guineas. Hereupon Pope wrote to Addison expressing his scorn for underhand dealings, and enclosing, as a proof of his own openness, a sketch of the famous lines finally incorporated in the ‘Epistle to Arbuthnot.’ Addison, he said, ever afterwards ‘used him very civilly.’ A complimentary reference to Pope's Homer in the ‘Freeholder’ is the only clear indication we have of Addison's later feeling.
The accusation has been fully discussed, and is the subject of a note by Blackstone in
