moderation of the treaty, and threw the blame upon the want of union
among the allies, which was itself occasioned by the knowledge that he
and his colleagues had determined to sacrifice all other interests to
their own.[9] There was a risk that a treaty which was thought
inadequate by its authors would rouse universal indignation, and prove
as fatal to their power as the continuance of the war. The Peace became
the political test of the hour, and every artifice of prose and verse
was employed to appease public opinion.

Pope did not stop with applauding the Peace; he denounced the
Revolution. He afterwards professed a lofty superiority to party
prejudices; but there were obvious reasons which might induce him to lay
aside his usual caution at this crisis. The war was directed against
Louis XIV., the champion of Roman Catholicism, and the Pretender. A
general belief prevailed that the Protestant succession could only be
secured by reducing the French king to helplessness, and that a Peace,
on the other hand, which saved him and the Harley administration from
ruin, would be propitious to the cause of tories, papists, and
Jacobites. "They fancied," says Bolingbroke, "that the Peace was the
period at which their millenary year would begin."[10] A young and
sanguine poet may well have shared a conviction in which both sides
concurred,--the ministerialists by their hopes, and the opposition by
their fears. No sooner was the treaty concluded than it became apparent
that the hopes and fears were exaggerated. The ministry was torn to
pieces by intestine divisions; its supporters--a heterogeneous body, who
had been loosely held together by a common enmity--were rapidly throwing
off their allegiance; the good will, which had been founded upon large
and vague expectations, was converted into hostility under total
disappointment; and the failing health of the Queen rendered it probable
that the accession of a whig sovereign would shortly complete the
discomfiture of the faction. After the conclusion of the Peace, says
Bolingbroke, "we saw nothing but increase of mortification, and nearer
approaches to ruin."[11]

Having been too precipitate in casting in his lot with the tories, Pope
hastened to qualify his rashness by conciliating the whigs, and
undertook to furnish the Prologue to Addison's Cato. This play was
brought out April 14, 1713, at the request of the opposition, who
intended it for a remonstrance against the arbitrary