Quotes from Joseph Addison's books, and about them
The Song of the Lark on Cato: “Thea had spent hours making trees out of “Thanatopsis,” Hamlet’s soliloquy, Cato on “Immortality.””
Alexander Hamilton on Cato: “Washington had his favorite play, Addison’s Cato, the story of a self-sacrificing Roman statesman, staged at Valley Forge to buck up his weary men.”
Washington: A Life on Cato: “As he experienced the first stirrings of an abiding passion for theater, he read Joseph Addison’s Cato, a paean to republican virtues that he quoted repeatedly throughout his life.”
Hitch-22 on Cato: “I strongly suspect, and have written, that the line comes from Addison's play Cato, which was vastly popular with American audiences at the time of the Revolution.”
My Life on Cato: “I had drawn extensively from the monologue in Addison's Cato”
The History of Henry Esmond on The Campaign: “Esmond revisited his poetic friend, he found this thought, struck out in the fervor of conversation, improved and shaped into those famous lines, which are in truth the noblest in the poem of the "Campaign."”