It is curious to mark, at a time when audiences bore with gross wit, and were accustomed, on slight provocation, to resort to acts of violence, how sensitive they were on other points. Poor Hughes, who died on the first night of the representation of his "Siege of Damascus," in 1720, was compelled to remodel the character of Phocyas, a Christian who turns Moslem, as the managers considered that the audience would not tolerate the sight of him after his apostasy. So Charles Killigrew, Master of the Revels, cut out the whole of the first act from Cibber's adaptation of "Richard III." on the ground that the Jacobite portion of the audience, in the distress of King Henry, would be painfully or angrily reminded of the sorrows of King James. After all, susceptible as audiences occasionally were, the sensibilities of the gallery remained untouched, or evidence of the fact was offered in an exaggerated form. When Dryden's Cleomenes, or Rowe's Jane Shore, used to complain of the hunger under which they suffered, it was the humour of the "gods" to fling bread down upon the stage by way of showing their sympathy, or their want of it. "All the parts will be played to the best advantage, the whole of the company being now in town," was no unusual bait thrown out to win an audience. Sometimes the house would fill to see, on great occasions, the foremost folk in the land, fops and fine ladies occupying the amphitheatre erected on the stage, and the players acting between a double audience. What should we think now of an author taking a benefit, obtaining at it the presence of the heir to the throne, and delivering an oration on the condition and merits of the royal family and the state of the nation as regarded foreign and domestic relations? Yet this is what Durfey did, to the delight and edification of his hearers, at Drury Lane, in 1715. On other occasions plays were given "for the entertainment of the new Toasts and several Ladies of Quality," whereat crowds flocked to behold the pretty nymphs whose names consecrated the flowing bumpers of the beaux, and the married ladies who had enjoyed that honour in their earlier days. "The boxes still the brighter circles were; Triumphant toasts received their homage there." At other times, there were less friendly and admiring gatherings; and epilogues laudatory of Eugene and Marlborough filled the house with friends and foes of those illustrious men, and furnished reasons for very unreasonable conflicts. A flourish of the pen, too, in the _Tatler_ or _Spectator_, could send half the town to fight for vacant benches; and it was remarked that there was scarcely a comedian of merit who had not been recommended to the public in the former journal. But to see these, there often only thronged "Poets free o' th' house, and beaux who never pay."