Abdiel

killed by the King of Spain. Devoting his life to revenge he begins by accepting the advances of the lascivious queen, proceeds to slay the king, his son, and then the queen herself, and is finally slain by the King's other son, Philip. The outlines of Young's Zanga (q.v.) are evidently borrowed from Abdelazer, but Zanga keeps true to his single aim of vengeance, while Abdelazer is furthermore swayed by ambition, jealousy, and lubricity.

Abdiel (Hebrew abd, servant, and 'el, God), in Milton's Paradise Lost, the one seraph who refused to join Satan's rebellion against the Almighty in Heaven.

Faithful found,

Among the faithless, faithful only he;
Among innumerable false unmoved,
Unshaken, unseduced, unterrified,
His loyalty he kept, his love, his zeal.
Paradise Lost, Bk. v, 896.

Like Zophiel in the same poem he seems to have owed his introduction into the heavenly hierarchy to Milton himself. The name, indeed, may be found in I Chronicles v, 15, as the son of Guni, but thorough search has failed to reveal any mention of a seraph of this name in Biblical, Cabalistic or patriotic literature. As to the character itself Milton may have modelled it upon the herald angel Raphael in Vondel's choral drama of Lucifer. The lines quoted above apply equally well to Raphael as to Abdiel. In each case a single seraph opposes the enemy in his own palace, all undaunted by the hostile scorn of myriads. That this is no mere coincidence is shown by many other similarities between the Dutch drama and the English epic.

Abellino, hero of M. G. Lewis's tale, The Bravo of Venice, a bandit who for the furtherance of his schemes assumes staccato disguises as a beggar and winds up in glory as the husband of the Doge's niece. Lewis founded his tale on a German story by Zschokke, Aballino the Great Bandit, which was adapted for the American stage by William Dunlap (1801). Other plays were also based on Zschokke.

Abencerages. A powerful Moorish family whose quarrels with their rivals, the Zegris, hastened the fall of the kingdom of Granada in Spain. The love of Aben Hamad, an Abencerage, for the wife or sister of Boabdil, led, in 1485, to the slaughter of all the heads of the family in the Alhambra palace. This legend has been utilized by Chateaubriand in his romance of The Last of the Abencerages (1827). Aben Hamad, the hero, is accused of adultery with Queen Daxara and perishes with thirty-five other members of his family in a general massacre.

Aben-Ezra, Raphael, in Charles Kingsley's historical novel, Hypatia, a friend of the Prefect of Alexandria.

Abessa, in Spenser's Faerie Queene (1590), an impersonation in female form of abbeys, convents and monasteries. She is the daughter of Corceca ("blind-heart") and the paramour of Kirkrapine. Una on her lion, searching for the Red Cross Knight, called out to Abessa, who was so terrified at sight of the lion that she ran into the house of Blind Superstition. The lion, however, broke down the door. The allegory means that when Truth arrived the abbeys and convents became alarmed and barred her out. But that noble lion, Henry VIII, broke in as the royal advocate of the true faith.

Abhorson. An executioner intro

duced in Measure for Measure into a single scene (Act iv, Sc. 2), who has given much food for conjecture by his principal speech:

Every true man's apparel fits your thief.

Abner

flight from Saul when her husband Nabal refused to do so.

Abigail, heroine of Christopher Marlowe's The Jew of Malta (1591). When the house of Barabas, her father, is seized by the Christians and turned into a convent, she, at her father's command, becomes a nun in order to recoup the treasures concealed there. Her simulated conversion becomes real, she turns Christian in earnest, and Barabas goes mad, poisons her and ends by being precipitated into a boiling cauldron which he had prepared for a Turkish prince.

Abner, in Racine's tragedy of Athalie, the confidential friend of Joad. It is to him that the high priest addresses the famous line:

Je crains Dieu, Abner, et n'ai point autre

crainte.

(I fear God, Abner, and have no other fear.) Abou Ben Adhem, in Leigh Hunt's short poem of that name, learns from an angelic vision that "one who loves his fellow-man stands first in the regards of the Almighty.

Abra, in Matthew Prior's historical and didactic poem Solomon on the Vanity of the World (1718), a concubine who captivates the weary and sated monarch by her obedience and fidelity. Two lines in Solomon's speech are specially famous as calling up in concise form an image of womanly devotion:

Abra was ready ere I called her name, And though I called another, Abra came. ii, 364.

Prior possibly borrowed the name from the mediæval romance of Amadis of Gaul, wherein the Sultan of Babylon has a sister, Abra, who secures his throne after he is slain by her lover, Lisuarte.

Abraham-Cupid, in Romeo and Juliet (Act ii, Sc. 1), is an expression which has given much trouble to the commentators. Upton conjectures it to be a printer's error for Adam Cupid, which he twists into an allusion to Adam Bell, the outlawed archer. Dyce, more plausibly, thinks that Abraham is merely a corruption of auburn, and supports his view by

Absolute

citing passages from old books where the corruption is unquestionable. Mr. R. G. White remarks, in confirmation of Dyce, that " Cupid is always represented by the old painters as auburn-haired."

Abram or Abraham-men, a cant term for a certain class of beggars of the sixteenth century. The anony mous Fraternity of Vacabondes (1575) supplies this definition:

An Abraham-man is he that walketh bare

armed and bare-legged, and feigneth himself mad, and carrieth a pack of wool, a stick with bacon on it, or such like toy and nameth

himself Poor Tom.

He

Absalom, in Dryden's Absalom and Achitophel (1681), a political satire in verse, is intended for James, Duke of Monmouth, a natural son of Charles II by Lucy Waters. resembles the Absalom of the Old Testament in his personal charms, his popularity with the masses and his unfilial behavior towards his putative father. See ACHITOPHEL.

Absent-minded Beggar. Kipling's jovial nickname for Tommy Atkins (the British soldier), in a poem of that name written at the beginning of the Boer war and printed in the Daily Mail, October 31, 1899.

Absolon, in The Miller's Tale, one of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales (1388), a pompous and conceited parish clerk, full of many small accomplishments of which he is inordinately vain. He is outwitted in his designs on Alison (q.v.), the young wife of an old carpenter, by his rival Nicholas.

Absolute, Sir Anthony, and Captain Absolute, father and son in Sheridan's comedy of The Rivals (1775). Sir Anthony is a boisterous, blustering, domineering old gentleman, firmly persuaded that he is the most amiable of beings and really hiding a warm heart under his fierce exterior. The son, though gallant and fine-mettled, is adroit enough to make his way by conciliation, strategy and dry humor. Under the name of Ensign Beverley he courts the heiress, Lydia Languish, and by this disguise precipitates a comedy of errors that are not cleared up until the end. Hazlitt thinks the