e conceived of as born with
the tree they were attached to and dying along with it; they had their
abode in wooded mountains away from men; held their revels among
themselves, but broke them off at the approach of a human footstep.

DRYAS, the father of Lycurgus, a Thracian king, and slain by him,
who, in a fit of frenzy against the Bacchus worshippers, mistook him for
a vine and cut him down. See LYCURGUS.

DRYASDUST, a name of Sir Walter Scott's invention, and employed by
him to denote an imaginary character who supplied him with dry
preliminary historical details, and since used to denote a writer who
treats a historical subject with all due diligence and research, but
without any appreciation of the human interest in it, still less the soul
of it.

DRYBURGH, an abbey, now a ruin, founded by David I., on the Tweed,
in Berwickshire, 3 m. SE. of Melrose; the burial-place of Sir Walter
Scott.

DRYDEN, JOHN, a celebrated English poet, "glorious John," born in
Northamptonshire, of a good family of Puritan principles; educated at
Westminster School and Cambridge; his first poetic production of any
merit was a set of "heroic stanzas" on the death of Cromwell; at the
Restoration he changed sides and wrote a poem which he called "Astraea
Redux" in praise of the event, which was ere long followed by his "Annus
Mirabilis," in commemoration of the year 1666, which revealed at once the
poet and the royalist, and gained him the appointment of poet-laureate,
prior to which and afterwards he produced a succession of plays for the
stage, which won him great popularity, after which he turned his mind to
political affairs and assumed the role of political satirist by
production of his "Absalom and Achitophel," intended to expose the
schemes of Shaftesbury, represented as Achitophel and Monmouth as
Absalom, to oust the Duke of York from the succession to the throne; on
the accession of James II. he became a Roman Catholic, and wrote "The
Hind and the Panther," characterised by Stopford Brooke as "a model of
melodious reasoning in behalf of the milk-white hind of the Church of
Rome," and really the most powerful thing of the kind in the language; at
the Revolution he was deprived of his posts, but it was after that event
he executed his translation of Virgil, and produced his celebrated odes
and "Fables" (1631-1700).

DUALISM, or MANICHAEISM, the doctrine that there are two
opposite and independently existing principles w