[100] Should be "Confederacy."
[101] Quoted from a humorous account of the piece's reception, written by Pope.
SPILLER'S BENEFIT TICKET.
[CHAPTER XVI.]
COMPETITION, AND WHAT CAME OF IT.
"Augustus," as it was the fashion to call George I., by performing a justifiable act, inflicted some injury this year, by restoring the Letters Patent of Charles II. to Christopher Rich, of which the latter had been deprived, and under which his son, John, opened the revived theatre in Lincoln's Inn Fields, on the 18th December 1714, with the "Recruiting Officer." The enlarged stage was "superbly adorned with looking-glasses on both sides;" a circumstance which Quin said "was an excellent trap to such actresses who admired their own persons more than they attended to the duties of their profession." Some good actors left Drury for the Fields;—Keen, the two Bullocks, Pack, Spiller, Cory, Knap, Mrs. Rogers, and Mrs. Knight. Cibber rather contemptuously says of such of the above as he names, that "they none of them had more than a negative merit,—being able only to do us more harm by leaving us without notice, than they could do us good by remaining with us; for, though the best of them could not support a play, the worst of them, by their absence, could maim it,—as the loss of the least pin in a watch may obstruct its motion."
John Rich's company in the Fields either played old pieces, or adaptations from them, or "from the French"; none of which deserved even a passing word, except a roaring farce—pieces which now grew popular—called "Love in a Sack," by Griffin, whom I notice not as an indifferent author, but as an excellent comedian, who made his first appearance in a double capacity. Griffin may also be noticed under a double qualification. He was a gentleman and a glazier. His father was a Norfolk rector, and had been chaplain to the Earl of Yarmouth,—that gallant Sir Robert Paston, who was in France and Flanders with James, Duke of York. In the Paston Free School, at North Walsham, Griffin learnt his "rudiments," having done which his sire apprenticed him to the useful but not dignified calling of a glazier. The "'prentice lad," disgusted at the humiliation, ran away, took to strolling, found his way, after favourable report, to Rich's theatre, and there proved so good an actor, that the Drury Lane management ultimately lured him away to a stage where able competitors polished him into still greater brilliancy. The season concluded on the last day of July[102] 1715 with a "benefit for Tim Buck, to release him out of prison."