Before writing thus in the _Spectator_, Addison, in order to oppose the Italian opera, by what he regarded as a more rational pastime, produced his English opera of _Rosamond_, which was acted in 1706, and proved a failure on the stage. The music is said to have been bad, and the poetry is the work of a writer destitute of lyrical genius. Lord Macaulay, who finds a merit in almost everything produced by Addison, praises 'the smoothness with which the verses glide, and the elasticity with which they bound,' and considers that if he 'had left heroic couplets to Pope, and blank verse to Rowe, and had employed himself in writing airy and spirited songs, his reputation as a poet would have stood far higher than it now does.' The gliding movement of the verse may be admitted; but lyric poetry demands the higher qualities of music and imaginative treatment, and Addison's 'smoothness,' so far from being a poetical gift, is a mechanical acquisition.
In 1713 his _Cato_, with its stately rhetoric and cold dignity, received a very different reception. The prologue, written by Pope, is in admirable accordance with the spirit of the play. Addison's purpose is to exhibit a great man struggling with adversity, and Pope writes:
'He bids your breasts with ancient ardour rise, And calls forth Roman drops from British eyes; Virtue confessed in human shape he draws, What Plato thought, and God-like Cato was: No common object to your sight displays, But what with pleasure Heaven itself surveys; A brave man struggling in the storms of fate, And greatly falling with a falling state! While Cato gives his little senate laws, What bosom beats not in his country's cause?'
Addison has proved that he could draw a life-like character in his representation of Sir Roger de Coverley, but the _dramatis personæ_, who act a part, or are supposed to act one, in _Cato_, are mere dummies, made to express fine sentiments. There is no flesh and blood in them, and owing to the dramatist's regard for unity of place, the play is full of absurdities. Yet _Cato_ was received with immense applause. It was regarded from a political aspect, and both Whig and Tory strove to turn the drama to party account. 'The numerous and violent claps of the Whig party,' Pope writes, 'on the one side of the theatre, were echoed back 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.'