The play was admirably acted by Booth, Colonel Woodvil; Mills, Sir John; Wilks, Heartley; Cibber, Dr. Wolf (the Cantwell of the modern arrangement); and Walker (soon to be famous as Captain Macheath), Charles. Mrs. Porter played Lady Woodvil, and Mrs. Oldfield turned the heads and touched the hearts of all lively and susceptible folks by her exquisite coquetry, in Maria. The play was not a servile imitation of, but an excellent adaptation to modern circumstances of, the "Tartuffe." Thoroughly English, it abounds with the humour and manner of Cibber, and despite some offences against taste, it was at this time the purest comedy on the stage. There was farce enough for the gallery, maxim and repartee, suggestions and didactic phrases for the rest of the house. The success surpassed even expectation. It raised against Cibber a phalanx of implacable foes--foes who howled at everything of which he was, afterwards, the author; but it gained for him his advancement to the poet-laureateship, and an estimation which caused some people to place him, for usefulness to the cause of true religion, on an equality with the author of "The Whole Duty of Man!" Cibber foresaw the tempest, and, probably, also the prosperous gales which were to follow, to which there is some allusion in the Epilogue spoken by Mrs. Oldfield, which, of course, had a fling against marriage:-- "Was't not enough that critics might pursue him? But must he rouse a party to undo him? These blows, I told him, on his plays would fall: But he, unmov'd, cried, ----'s blood! we'll stand it all!" In the theatre itself the opposition to the piece was confined, Cibber says, to "a few smiles of silent contempt. As the satire was chiefly employed on the enemies of the Government, they were not so hardy as to own themselves such, by any higher disapprobation or resentment." They made up for this constrained silence, as above noted, and _Mist's Journal_, for fifteen years, lost no opportunity of mauling the detested offender. With the editor of that paper, says Cibber, "though I could never persuade my wit to have an open account with him (for, as he had no effects of his own, I did not think myself obliged to answer his bills), notwithstanding, I will be so charitable to his real _manes_, and to the ashes of his paper, as to mention one particular civility he paid to my memory after he thought he had ingeniously killed me. Soon after the 'Nonjuror' had received the favour of the town, I read in one of his journals the following short paragraph:--'Yesterday died Mr. Colley Cibber, late comedian of the Theatre Royal, notorious for writing the _Nonjuror_.' The compliment, in the latter part, I confess," adds Cibber, "I did not dislike, because it came from so impartial a judge."