The chief incident before the curtain was a riot, caused by the footmen who had been excluded from their gallery, on the night of Macklin's benefit,--5th May 1737. But of this incident I shall speak in another page. Of Mrs. Pritchard there is barely an appearance; her great opportunity had not yet arrived. At Covent Garden there was no new piece, but something better,--a revival of Shakspeare's "King John," in which Delane played the King, and Walker, Falconbridge,--a character for which he was personally and intellectually fitted, and in which, as in Hotspur, he gained more laurels than he ever acquired by his Macheath. They who pursued novelty might find it with Giffard's company, playing at the Lincoln's Inn Fields, where, however, the only successful piece was "King Charles I.," a tragedy by Havard, a young actor, already known by his "Scanderbeg," and who succeeded to the place left vacant by Mills. Giffard played Charles, a character which is rather exaggerated by the author, who acted Juxon. Chesterfield said, in reference to this piece, that "the catastrophe was too recent, too melancholy, and of too solemn a nature to be heard of anywhere but in the pulpit." However this may be, the way in which the tragedy was composed was anything but solemn. Desultory Havard had been commissioned by Giffard to write the piece. It was done to order, and under constraint; for the patron locked up the poet in a garret, near Lincoln's Inn, during a certain number of hours, daily, from which he was not suffered to emerge till he had repeated, from behind the door, to Giffard, who was on the landing, a certain number of newly-written lines,--till the whole was completed, when the poet became free. At the Haymarket, Fielding and satire reigned, but not supreme,--for his pieces were as often hissed as applauded; but the political allusions in "Tumble-down Dick, or Phaeton in the Suds," pleased, and those in the "Historical Register for 1736," made the audience laugh, and Sir Robert Walpole, satirised as Quidnunc,[29] winced. The government had for some time contemplated a restriction of the licence of the stage. Hitherto, the Lord Chamberlain could stop a play in its career. It was now proposed to establish a licenser, according to whose report the Chamberlain might prohibit the play from entering on a career at all. The proposal arose out of an officious act of Giffard's, who took the manuscript of a satirical piece, called the "Golden Rump," to the minister, at which piece the latter was so shocked, that the bill for gagging the stage was at once proceeded with.