&c., the whole thing being intended as a moral cushion to break the suddenly descending spirits of the sender.
Years later the great man was favoured with another cushion of this sort by no less a person than his friend Alexander Pope, whose august criticism he asked in behalf of "Cato." The major part of the play--all of it, in fact, excepting the last act--had been written when Addison first began to fall under the passionate influence of French tragedy, with its tiresome regularity of form and attempted imitation of the classic drama.[A] And a powerful influence it was in the days of good Queen Anne, so powerful, verily, that it almost emasculated the art of play-writing, and for a time well nigh bereft the stage of originality of thought or freedom of expression.

Form, form, that was the cry still ringing in the ears of the author when he put the finishing touches to a production which was to be famous for the nonce, and then go down in the dark waters of oblivion with the wreck of many like it.
[Footnote A: Just as the school of Racine and Boileau set its face against the extravagances of the romantic coteries, so Addison and his English followers, adopting the principles of the French classicists, applied them to the reformation of the English theatre.

Hence arose a great revival of respect for the political doctrines of Aristotle, regard for the unities of time and place, attention to the proprieties of sentiment and diction--in a word, for all those characteristics of style afterwards summed up in the phrase "correctness."-- W.J.
COURTHOPE'S "Addison."] "When Mr.Addison," related Pope, "had finished his 'Cato,' he brought it to me, desired to have my sincere opinion of it, and left it with me for three or four days.

I gave him my opinion of it sincerely, which was, 'that I thought he had better not act it, and that he would get reputation enough by only printing it.' This I said as thinking the lines well written, but the piece was not theatrical enough.

Some time after Mr.Addison said 'that his own opinion was the same with mine, but that some particular friends of his, whom he could not disoblige, insisted on its being acted,'" These particular friends who were not to be disobliged seem to have been shining lights of the Whig party.