JOSEPH AND HIS BRETHREN,

A SCRIPTURAL DRAMA;

IN TWO ACTS.

BY

H. L. HOWARD.

"The Devil spoke,

*

**** well you know

How many ages, as the years of men,

This universe we have possessed; and ruled,
In manner at our will, the affairs of earth,
Since Adam and his facile consort Eve
Lost Paradise, deceived by me; though since
With dread attending, when that fatal wound
Shall be inflicted by the seed of Eve
Upon my head."

"But if there be in glory aught of good,
It may by means far different be attained;
Without ambition, war, or violence,
By deeds of peace, by wisdom eminent,
By patience, temperance."-MILTON.

LONDON:

PRINTED FOR G. AND W. B. WHITTAKER,

AVE-MARIA-LANE.

1824.

LONDON:

PRINTED BY R. GILBERT,

ST. JOHN'S SQUARE.

BIBL

OTHEC

PREFACE.

In the perusal of this Volume it will appear I have availed myself of the title " Scriptural Drama," rather than Dialogue, as being more favourable to the just presentment of the thoughts and feelings of man in a wild and wilful state of nature, as well as the impassioned pathos of the story itself. In doing this it has not been my intention to transpose the text and suit the story to the

iv

Drama, but to suit the Drama to the story.

With respect to the leading character after the second Chorus, I must confess I was rather puzzled. To take it as it stood, I could not, nor could I leave it out; and I had the alternative either to exalt it in its vice or to sink it into monotony. The latter I was led to decline, for my own sake as well as the Reader's. The Book from which I was transcribing offered me a precedent, (truth is modesty, if false delicacy is affectation, passion becomes sentiment when purified by the moral and so commended to true delicacy,) and I have taken as a precedent the Bible which is full of the acts of passion and nature, and gives us the unqualified evil that we may apply the moral. To represent a

woman exalted and abandoned, artful, voluptuous and cruel, I feel with the reader is a distasteful point in nature—but it is

nature.

LONDON, Dec. 2, 1823.

THE AUTHOR.