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160 pleasure. They are neither men, nor even devils, but a sort of lubbar-fiends, compounded of cruelty, avarice, and brutal debauchery; like Dutch swabbers possessed by demons."

Dryden next made a monstrous and ludicrous attempt to alter "Paradise Lost" into a five act drama, in rhyme. He has prefixed to it "an apology for heroic poetry and poetic licence," in which there is one passage which may to some slight extent make redemption for the audacity of the attempt. "I cannot," he writes, "without injury to the deceased author of 'Paradise Lost,' but acknowledge that this poem has received its entire foundation, part of the design, and many of the ornaments, from him. What I have borrowed will be so easily discerned from my own production, that I shall not need to point the reader to the places; and truly, I should be sorry for my own sake, that any one should take the pains to compare them together; the original being undoubtedly one of the greatest, most noble, and most sublime poems, that either this age or nation has produced."

This opera (for it is rather that than any other kind of play) stands in perhaps the same relation to "Paradise Lost" that the metrical versions of the Psalms do to the original, or a travestie of a Greek tragedy to the classic drama itself. Scott truly observes, that "Eve is somewhat of a coquette, even in the state of innocence, and the absurd expression, 'dissolved in hallelujahs,' provoked from a facetious critic a parody of 'anchovies dissolved in sauce. It is said that Dryden called on the aged poet, and asked his leave to make this monstrous alteration. He appears to have been either startled by this irreverent essay, or to have thought it expedient to abandon a style in which lesser wits bid fair to rival him; for his taste soon changed, and "Aurungzebe" was his last rhyming play.