deserve it."). Not long after the American Revolution, Edmund Burke quotes the play as well in his Letter to Charles-Jean-Francois Depont, expanded the following year into Reflections on the Revolution in France: "The French may be yet to go through more transmigrations. They may pass, as one of our poets says, 'through many varieties of untried being,' before their state obtains its final form." The poet in reference is, of course, Addison and the passage Burke quoted is from Cato (V.i. II): "Through what variety of untried being,/Through what new scenes and changes must we pass!" Charles Thomson, a Patriot leader from Pennsylvania whom John Adams once described as "the Sam Adams of Philadelphia," paraphrased a passage from Cato in a letter to Benjamin Franklin about Parliament's violations of the freedoms of the colonists. Thomson wrote, “I am ready to ask with the poet [referring to Joseph Addison] 'Are there not some chosen thunders in the stores of heaven armed with uncommon wrath to blast those Men, who by their cursed schemes of policy are dragging friends and brothers into the horrors of civil War and involving their country in ruin?' Even yet the wounds may be healed and peace and love restored; But we are on the very edge of the precipice." Thomson paraphrased Cato Act I: Scene 1 Verses:21 – 24. Influence today Although the play has fallen considerably from popularity and is now rarely performed or read, it was widely popular and often cited in the 18th century, with Cato as an exemplar of republican virtue and liberty. For example, John Trenchard and Thomas Gordon were inspired by the play to write a series of essays on individual rights, using the name "Cato." Addison's tragedy also inspired the Portuguese playwright Almeida Garrett (1799–1854) to write Catão, in 1821. The play was premiered on 29. September of the same year, celebrating the anniversary of the 1820 Liberal Revolution, in Portugal, by a group of Portuguese liberal intellectuals. It was staged a few times in Portugal, the following years, always by amateurs. In 1828, it had the British premiere, in Plymouth, by a group of exiled officers and intellectuals, reviewed by British newspapers. Catão had its first edition in 1822. There were four other editions, being one of them in London, in 1828. Wilkins Micawber, a character in the 1850 novel David Copperfield by Charles Dickens, quotes Cato from