At last came the eventful evening of April 13, when “Cato” saw the light.  The theatre was packed, just as Steele promised that it should be, yet the audience would have been large had Dick never existed.  There were no press agents to “boom” matters, but as it became known that the Whigs stood sponsors for the tragedy there was a corresponding desire to be in either at its triumph or its death.  The result has passed into history.  The characters were, for the most part, finely acted, and the play was admired for its lofty sentiments and elegance of expression, while the Tories, mirabile dictu, vied with their enemies in enthusiastic tokens of approval.  The Whigs went to the theatre expecting to appropriate all of Mr. Addison’s illusions to the sacred cause of liberty, and what must have been their horror on finding that the Tories, refusing to be discomfited by any of those illusions, applauded as violently as did the friends of Hanover?

Pope has left us a description of this first night, in a letter to Sir William Trumbull.  “Cato,” he writes, “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.’[A]

[Footnote A:  From Addison’s poem of “The Campaign,” wherein the author sings of the greatness of Marlborough.]

“The numerous and violent claps of the Whig party on the one side of the theatre, were echoed 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, who was clapped into a staunch Whig at almost every two lines.  I believe you have heard that after all the applause of the opposite faction, my lord Bolingbroke sent for Booth, who played Cato, into the box between one of the acts, and presented him with fifty guineas, in acknowledgement (as he expressed it) for defending the cause of liberty so well against a Perpetual Dictator.[A] The Whigs are unwilling to be distanced this way, and therefore design a present to the same Cato very speedily; in the meantime they are getting ready as good a sentence as the former on their side:  so betwixt them it is probable that Cato (as Dr. Garth expressed it) may have something to live upon after he dies.”

[Footnote A:  It is suggested by Macaulay that Lord Bolingbroke hinted at “the attempt which Marlborough had made to convert the Captain-Generalship into a patent office, to be held by himself for life.”  The anecdote of Pope gives us an amusing example of the stealing of Whig thunder by the clever Tories.]