Chapter Adona to Æacus of A by Brewer's Readers Handbook

Adramelech (ch=k), one of the fallen angels. Milton makes him overthrown by Uriel and Raphaël (Paradise Lost, vi . 365). According to Scripture, he was one of the idols of Sepharvaim, and Shalmaneser introduced his worship into Samaria. [The word means “the mighty magnificent king.”]

The Sepharvites burnt their children in the fire to Adramelech.—2 Kings xvii. 31.

Klopstock introduces him into The Messiah, and rep resents him as surpassing Satan in malice and guile, ambition and mischief. He is made to hate every one, even Satan, of whose rank he is jealous; and whom he hoped to overthrow, that by putting an end to his servitude he might become the supreme god of all the created worlds. At the crucifixion he and Satan are both driven back to hell by Obaddon, the angel of death.

Adraste , a French gentleman, who enveigles a Greek slave named I sidore from don Pèdre. His plan is this: He gets introduced as a portrait-painter, and thus imparts to Isidore his love and obtains her consent to elope with him. He then sends his slave Zaïde to don Pèdre, to crave protection for ill treatment, and Pèdre promises to befriend her. At this moment Adraste appears, and demands that Zaïde be given up to him to punish as he thinks proper. Pèdre intercedes; Adraste seems to relent; and Pèdre calls for Zaïde. Out comes Isidore instead, with Zaïde’s veil. “There,” says Pèdre, “take her and use her well.” “I will do so,” says the Frenchman, and leads off the Greek slave.—Molière: Le Sicilien ou L’Amour Peintre (1667).

Adrastus, an Indian prince from the banks of the Ganges, who aided the king of Egypt against the Crusaders. He wore a serpent’s skin, and rode on an elephant. Adrastus was slain by Rinaldo.—Tasso: Jerusalem Delivered, bk. xx.

(Adrastus of Helvetia was in Godfrey’s army.)

Adrastus, king of Argos, the leader of the confederate army which besieged Thebes in order to place Polynices on the throne usurped by his brother Etêôclês.—Statius: The Thebaid.

The siege of Thebes occurred before the siege of Troy; but Statius lived about a century after Virgil. Virgil died B.C. 19; Statius died A.D. 96.

Adria, the Adriatic.

Fled over Adria to the Hesperian fields [Italy].
   —Milton: Paradise Lost, i. 520 (1665).

Adriana, a wealthy Ephesian lady, who marries Antipholus, twin-brother of Antipholus of Syracuse. The abbess Æmilia is her mother-in-law, but she knows it not; and one day when she accuses her husband of infidelity, she says to the abbess, if he is unfaithful it is not from want of remonstrance, “for it is the one subject of our conversation. In bed I will not let him sleep for speaking of it; at table I will not let him eat for speaking of it; when alone with him I talk of nothing else, and in company I give him frequent hints of it. In a word, all my talk is how vile and bad it is in him to love another better than he loves his wife” (act v. sc. I).—Shakespeare: Comedy of Errors (1593).

Adriano de Armado (Don), a pompous, fantastical Spaniard, a military braggart in a state of peace, as Parolles was in war. Boastful but poor, a coiner of words but very ignorant, solemnly grave but ridiculously awkward, majestical in gait but of very low propensities.—Shakespeare: Love’s Labour’s Lost (1594).

(Said to be designed for John Florio, surnamed “The Resolute,” a philologist, Holofernes, the pedantic schoolmaster, in the same play, is also meant in ridicule of the same lexicographer.)

Adriatic wedded to the Doge. The ceremony of wedding the Adriatic to the doge of Venice was instituted in 1174 by pope Alexander III., who gave the doge a gold ring from his own finger in token of the victory achieved by the Venetian fleet at Istria over Frederick Barbarossa. The pope, in giving the ring, desired