Dodsley has cleverly integrated scene and theme in _The King and the Miller of Mansfield_. The moral and social problem stressed in the play is the existence and abuse of aristocratic privilege. Implicitly the play assumes that rank should correlate with goodness. The king himself is the best example of this. Alone at night in Sherwood Forest, Henry asks himself, "Of what Advantage is it now to be a King? Night shews me no Respect: I cannot see better, nor walk so well as another Man" (p. 11). Cut off from the trappings of monarchy he finds his common humanity and, at the conclusion of the play, redresses the wrongs of rank when he knights the instinctively noble miller and reproves the vicious but hereditarily titled Lord Lurewell. His accidental separation from the corruption of court and courtiers initiates Henry's contact with John Cockle, representative of all the middle-class virtues. Significantly, they are in the miller's environment: rural England, symbol of uncorrupted beauty, correlative to the innocent beauty of young Peggy before her acquaintance with Lords "of Prerogative."[8] As critics have noted, the whole sentimental movement in English drama is opposed in tone to the cynical ethos of aristocratic privilege; but Dodsley explicitly advocates a democratic sensibility that estimates individual worth independent of the accident of birth. The "bourgeois sententiae" of _The King and the Miller of Mansfield_ are certainly as ideologically explicit as the arguments for the value of the mercantile middle class in Lillo's _The London Merchant_ (1731).[9] Dodsley did, after all, have working-class credentials; his years in "service" furnished the materials for _Servitude: A Poem_ (1729) and _A Muse in Livery_ (1732). The allegorical frontispiece to _A Muse in Livery_ shows a young man aspiring to knowledge, virtue, and happiness but manacled by poverty to misery, folly, and ignorance, his foot chained to a giant stone inscribed "Despair."