Father of the Greek Drama, Thespis (B.C. sixth century).

Father of the Spanish Drama, Lopez de Vega (1562-1635).

DRAP, one of Queen Mab’s maids of honor.—­Drayton, Nymphidia.

DRAPIER’S LETTERS, a series of letters written by Dean Swift, and signed “M.D.  Drapier,” advising the Irish not to take the copper money coined by William Wood, to whom George I. had given a patent.  These letters (1724) stamped out this infamous job and caused the patent to be cancelled.  The patent was obtained by the Duchess of Kendall (mistress of the king), who was to share the profits.

  Can we the Drapier then forget? 
  Is not our nation in his debt? 
  ’Twas he that writ the “Drapier’s Letters.” 
  Dean Swift, Verses on his own death.

DRAWCANSIR, a bragging, blustering bully, who took part in a battle, and killed every one on both sides, “sparing neither friend nor foe.”—­George Villiers, duke of Buckingham, The Rehearsal (1671).

  Juan, who was a little superficial,
  And not in literature a great Drawcansir. 
  Byron, Don Juan, xi. 51 (1824).

At length my enemy appeared, and I went forward some yards like a Drawcansir, but found myself seized with a panic as Paris was when he presented himself to fight with Menelaus.—­Lesage, Gil Blas, vii. (1735).

DREAM AUTHORSHIP.  Coleridge says that he wrote his Kubla Khan from his recollection of a dream.

[Illustration] Condillac (says Cabanis) concluded in his dreams the reasonings left incomplete at bed-time.

Dreams.  The Indians believe all dreams to be revelations, sometimes made by the familiar genius, and sometimes by the “inner or divine soul.”  An Indian, having dreamt that his finger was cut off, had it really cut off the next day.—­Charlevoix, Journal of a Voyage to North America.

DREAMER (The Immortal), John Bunyan, whose Pilgrim’s Progress is said by him to be a dream (1628-1688).

[Illustration] The pretense of a dream was one of the most common devices of mediaeval romance, as, for example, the Romance of the Rose and Piers Plowman, both in the fourteenth century.

DREARY (Wat), alias BROWN WILL, one of Macheath’s gang of thieves.  He is described by Peachum as “an irregular dog, with an underhand way of disposing of his goods” (act i.1).—­Gay, The Beggar’s Opera (1727).

DREW (Timothy).  A half-witted cobbler who, learning that a tailor had advertised for “frogs,” catches a bagful and carries them to him, demanding one dollar a hundred.  The testy tailor imagining himself the victim of a hoax, throws his shears at his head, and Timothy, in revenge empties the bag of bull-frogs upon the clean floor of Buckram’s shop.  Next day Timothy’s sign was disfigured to read—­Shoes Mended and Frogs Caught.  By Timothy Drew.—­The Frog Catcher, Henry J. Finn, American Comic Annual 1831.