Fielding clearly began his second year at the 'little theatre' with some social or political exhortation, as the following bill appears for January:--"By a Company of Comedians, At the New Theatre in the Haymarket, this Day, January 26, will be presented a Dramatick Satire on the Times (never performed before) call'd The Mirrour." By February "the Original Company who perform'd _Pasquin_" are notified on the bills; and on the 2nd of March a performance is announced of a _Dramatick Tale of the King and the Miller of Mansfield_, presumably the same _Miller of Mansfield_ openly declared by one of Walpole's "hired scribblers" to be aimed at the overthrow of the Ministry. [6] All such preliminary skirmishes, however, served but to introduce the grand attack of the _Historical Register for the Tear 1736_, the first performance of which may be assigned to the end of March 1737. [7] In the _Register_ we have the most complete display of Fielding's vigour as a fighting politician. Here, to recur to Mr Pasquin's characteristic phrase, he "lays about him" with a gusto and honest frankness quite lost among our own tepid conventions. But however hard the hitting, however boisterous the broad humour, however biting the irony, it is noteworthy that in this his chief political satire, written moreover for a yet unregulated stage, Fielding never stoops to the shameless personalities of his day. The fashion of the eighteenth-century permitted even the great and classical genius of Pope to hurl lines at the persons of his opponents that, to modern ears, scarcely bear quotation. Fielding, as we know, constantly asserted his intention of throwing not at the vicious but at vice; and accordingly, even in this party play, flung openly in the face of the Minister, there is but one reference (and that only a fling at his "lack of any the least taste in polite literature") to the notorious personal failings of Sir Robert. It is against the Minister, and not the man, that the hot-blooded Opposition dramatist directs his humour and his irony. Fielding's manly and generous nature here permitted no virulent personalities to blacken his pages. [8]