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4 issue has 154 pages). Peter was vital to this growth and even had notions of covering Boswell and Johnson and their circle. Arthur and I reluctantly applied the brakes: could we really imagine fifty to seventy-five more reviews each issue? Peter would have been up to it. On 13 June 1978, Irvin Ehrenpreis wrote to us. Dear Mr. Tasch: Could I just say that the last number of The Scriblerian thrilled me, not with any single item but with my sense of the generally high standard you have been able to maintain so long. As ECS has declined and the annual bibliography of 18th C. studies has swollen and festered, you have gained in breadth without losing your crispness. I do hope you can continue on this level. It was addressed to Peter and, fittingly, should have been addressed to him. He had been visited by the unicorn. Roy S. Wolper Temple University RECENT ARTICLES* ADDISON TERRY, RICHARD. ‘‘Revolt in Utica: Reading Cato Against Cato,’’ PQ, 85 (Winter–Spring 2006), 121–139. Addison’s Cato (1713) is not known for its subtlety. With its melodramatic plot twists and its one-dimensional, exemplary hero, it embodies much that is irritating in eighteenth-century drama: heavy-handedness, contrived narration, and a statically perfect protagonist. From Johnson (who saw it as a work sustained ‘‘by the emulation of factious praise’’) to the present, humorless agitprop renders it a convenient text for shallow political appropriation. Challenging this legacy, Mr. Terry believes that Cato is not exemplary, that eighteenth-century readers and reviewers did not approve of the protagonist’s stoicism, and that the love plots, which appear extraneous, are integral to the drama. Because Mr. Terry’s claims are counterintuitive, they at first betray the lamentable poststructuralist habit of at- *Unsigned reviews are by the editors. tributing a meaning opposite to the most obvious. But Mr. Terry is not glib. Cato’s reception is complicated. In the spring of 1713, a reviewer in the Examiner approved of the play’s message of political loyalty free of self-interest (interpreted as anti-Whig), but censured the protagonist’s suicide. Lady Mary Wortley Montagu’s proffered epilogue predicted that viewers would not sympathize with a hero who kills himself. Her coda, which was rejected in favor of Samuel Garth’s, may echo the sentiments of Astell in Some Reflections on Marriage, which condemned the suicide of Cato as incoherent and cowardly. Addison’s protagonist was not, as Mr. Terry shows, universally extolled. He avers that Addison himself satirizes Cato in key episodes. In the first act, Numidian prince Juba extols Roman superiority as embodied by the restrained Cato, a resister of Caesar’s despotism. Juba’s interlocutor Syphax claims that the Numidians are martial equals to the Romans and that Numidian self-denial 5 rivals Roman self-discipline. In love with Cato’s daughter and in thrall to the cult of Rome, Juba reflects the problems of servitude to an ordering empire. Mr. Terry reads the dialogue as a ‘‘savage critic’’ topos: a western explorer’s project of civilizing natives goes absurdly awry, as nonwesterners discover the paradoxes , pretensions, and double standards of European civilization. Similarly, the love scenes, which comprise thirty percent of the play’s action , illuminate its putative hero. At the outset of the play, Cato’s daughter Marcia , emulating her father, represses her feelings for Juba in the name of civic duty. By the end, she displays and accepts these emotions, appearing to reject the stoicism for which her father is a standard bearer, a philosophy that Addison himself impugned in Spectators Nos. 43 and 397, and that his Christian audience would have looked on with ambivalence. Addison gives Cato a Christian death: a demise in which the Roman patriot feels certain of the soul’s immortality. Mr. Terry’s more nuanced arguments may prompt rereadings of a play that even specialists do not revisit. ASTELL TAYLOR, E. DEREK. ‘‘Mary Astell’s Work Toward a New Edition of A Serious Proposal to the Ladies, Part II,’’ SB, 57 (2008), 197–232. Mr. Taylor’s account of his discovery of Astell’s own copy of A Serious Proposal to the Ladies...