The comedy of Lope de Vega, ‘_La Noche de San Juan_,’ was then represented on the open air stage, and a short concert followed, after which the King and Queen were conducted to a flower-decked gallery erected in the other adjoining garden.[223] Here, after midnight, another delicate refection was partaken of, the Count and Countess of Olivares serving the King and Queen, the whole banquet being so well organised that everything went off with the utmost decorum and quietness, except for the sweet music which enlivened the feast. When the day was just breaking the King and Queen entered their coach and, after a few turns in the Prado, rode home to the palace to bed. Olivares was praised to the skies for the organisation of this lavish feast, and the wonder is expressed that the licentious crowd of people who frequented the Prado at night should have been so awed by the presence of the King in the garden adjoining, that no disturbance or disorder took place. This feast, fine as it was, was completely thrown in the shade by another which took place a few yards away, two years later (1633), when, at tremendous expense, and much unjust appropriation of other people’s property, Olivares run up and sumptuously furnished, in an amazing short time, the pleasure palace of the Buen Retiro, which afterwards became Philip’s favourite place of residence, where his comedies, academies, concerts, recitations and masquerades could be indulged in with more propriety than in the gloomy, old half-Moorish palace on the cliff at the other end of the town. The house warming of the Buen Retiro lasted for a week in one continual round of tedious entertainment, in which invention and lavishness exhausted itself; but this was only the first of a series of such revels in the same place, for which any pretext was seized.