rehearsal, doubtless with many fears on the part of the author. His anxieties during this period must have been great. "I was this morning," writes Swift to Stella on the 6th of April, "at ten, at the rehearsal of Mr. Addison's play, called _Cato_, which is to be acted on Friday. There was not half a score of us to see it. We stood on the stage, and it was foolish enough to see the actors prompted every moment, and the poet directing them, and the drab that acts Cato's daughter (Mrs. Oldfield) out in the midst of a passionate part, and then calling out, 'What's next?'" Mrs. Oldfield not only occasionally forgot the poet's text, she also criticised it. She seems to have objected to the original draft of a speech of Portius in the second scene of the third act; and Pope, whose advice Addison appears to have frequently asked, suggested the present reading: "Fixt in astonishment, I gaze upon thee Like one just blasted by a stroke from heaven Who pants for breath, and _stiffens, yet alive_, In dreadful looks: a monument of wrath."[57] Pope also proposed the alteration of the last line in the play from "And oh, 'twas this that ended Cato's life," to "And robs the guilty world of Cato's life;" and he was generally the cause of many modifications. "I believe," said he to Spence, "Mr. Addison did not leave a word unchanged that I objected to in his _Cato_."[58] On the 13th of April the play was ready for performance, and contemporary accounts give a vivid picture of the eagerness of the public, the excitement of parties, and the apprehensions of the author. "On our first night of acting it," says Cibber, in his Apology, speaking of the subsequent representation at Oxford, "our house was, in a manner, invested, and entrance demanded by twelve o'clock at noon; and before one it was not wide enough for many who came too late for their places. The same crowds continued for three days together--an uncommon curiosity in that place; and the death of Cato triumphed over the injuries of Cæsar everywhere." The prologue--a very fine one--was contributed by Pope; the epilogue--written, according to the execrable taste fashionable after the Restoration, in a comic vein--by Garth. As to the performance itself, a very lively record of the effect it produced remains in Pope's letter to Trumbull of the 30th April, 1713: "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 had been used to make it thought a party play, yet what the author said of another may the most properly be applied to him on this occasion: 'Envy itself is dumb, in wonder lost, And factions strive who shall applaud him most!'[59]