It was to Booth, therefore, that Cato was finally assigned, the other masculine parts being handed over to Cibber, Mills, Wilks, Powell, Ryan, Bowman, and Keen.  The latter was a popular actor of majestic mould who used to play the King in “Hamlet” (a role too often left to the mercies of third-rate mouthers) in a fashion which would have justified the loyal and historic gentleman who preferred that character to all others in the play.  As already mentioned, Marcia was to be acted by Oldfield, and to Mistress Porter, who usually revelled in the delineation of high and mighty passions, was given gentle, tearful Lucia, daughter to Lucius (Keen).

The rehearsals now went on apace, but evidently without much show of enthusiasm.  Addison assisted, probably dispirited and nervous but outwardly unruffled, for he always presented a well-starched front to the watching-world.  Honest Dick Steele looked on, and in that frank, ingenuous way he told his friends, with perhaps a suspicious flush on his winsome face and a swimming gleam in his eyes, that he was preparing to pack the theatre on the opening night in the interests of worried Joe.  Poor, good-hearted Dick!  Then there was Parson Swift, who sat behind the scenes with mild interest on his face and a sneer in that ugly, gnarled heart of his.  “We stood on the stage,” he writes to Stella, “and it was foolish enough to see the actors prompting 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?’”

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.”