Income from _The Toy-Shop_ and the gift of a hundred pounds from Pope allowed Dodsley to open, under the sign of Tully's Head, the bookshop that was to become so important in the history of English literature. Dodsley the bookseller did not cease writing; when _The King and the Miller of Mansfield_ opened at Drury Lane on 29 January 1737, with young Colley Cibber in the role of Henry II, it was evident that Dodsley's stagecraft had improved. The play was a triumph, with thirty-seven performances in 1737--the most popular play of the year and one of the most popular plays of the century. _The Toy-Shop_ had been Dodsley's attempt to adopt sophisticated city ways; _The King and the Miller of Mansfield_ is a return to his "native Sherwood." Instead of indulging in the sometimes labored, sometimes second-hand wit and contemptuous satiric stance of the earlier play, _The King and the Miller of Mansfield_ reflects the earnest sentimentality and democratic impulse of the ballad, later printed in Percy's _Reliques_ (1765), upon which the play is modeled. The plot is simple. Henry II, lost and separated from his courtiers in Sherwood Forest, is given shelter by honest John Cockle, a miller in nearby Mansfield and one of His Majesty's Keepers of the Forest. Meanwhile, at the miller's house, his son Dick and Dick's former sweetheart Peggy plan how to gain access to the king so that he might redress the wrongs done to their innocent love by the lust of the haughty Lord Lurewell. By coincidence Lurewell is one of the courtiers lost in the forest. In the final scene, with all the principals assembled, the king's identity is made known and distributive justice dispensed. Allardyce Nicoll argues that the success of _The King and the Miller of Mansfield_ makes Dodsley the most important sentimentalist of the thirties.[6] Certainly the play was frequently produced with revivals of earlier sentimental works like Cibber's _Love's Last Shift_ (1696) and Steele's _The Conscious Lovers_ (1723); and, in fact, it would be difficult to find a list of definitive characteristics of sentimental drama that Dodsley's play does not satisfy in every particular. The bourgeois nobility and integrity of Dick and Peggy poignantly engage the audience's pity and admiration, while the improbable resolution affirms the inevitable triumph of goodness. There is even--what some critics have required of sentimental drama--love of rural scenery and use of native setting.[7]