The boxes
were in a blaze with the stars of the Peers in Opposition. The pit was
crowded with attentive and friendly listeners from the Inns of Court and
the literary coffee-houses. Sir Gilbert Heathcote, Governor of the Bank
of England, was at the head of a powerful body of auxiliaries from the
city, warm men and true Whigs, but better known at Jonathan's and
Garroway's than in the haunts of wits and critics.

These precautions were quite superfluous. The Tories, as a body,
regarded Addison with no unkind feelings. Nor was it for their interest,
professing, as they did, profound reverence for law and prescription,
and abhorrence both of popular insurrections and of standing armies, to
appropriate to themselves reflections thrown on the great military chief
and demagogue, who, with the support of the legions and of the common
people, subverted all the ancient institutions of his country.
Accordingly, every shout that was raised by the members of the Kitcat
was echoed by the High Churchmen of the October; and the curtain at
length fell amidst thunders of unanimous applause.

The delight and admiration of the town were described by the Guardian in
terms which we might attribute to partiality, were it not that the
Examiner, the organ of the Ministry, held similar language. The Tories,
indeed, found much to sneer at in the conduct of their opponents. Steele
had on this, as on other occasions, shown more zeal than taste or
judgment. The honest citizens who marched under the orders of Sir Gibby,
as he was facetiously called, probably knew better when to buy and when
to sell stock than when to clap and when to hiss at a play, and incurred
some ridicule by making the hypocritical Sempronius their favorite, and
by giving to his insincere rants louder plaudits than they bestowed on
the temperate eloquence of Cato. Wharton, too, who had the incredible
effrontery to applaud the lines about flying from prosperous vice and
from the power of impious men to a private station, did not escape the
sarcasms of those who justly thought that he could fly from nothing more
vicious or impious than himself. The epilogue, which was written by
Garth, a zealous Whig, was severely and not unreasonably censured as
ignoble and out of place. But Addison was described, even by the
bitterest Tory writers, as a gentleman of wit and virtue, in whose
friendship many persons of both parties were happy, and whose name ought
not to be mixed up with factious