Charles Davenant’s operatic _Circe_ (Dorset Garden, March, 1676-7) is an amazing distortion of mythological story. There are songs without number, a dance of magicians, storms, dreams, an apparition of Pluto in a Chariot drawn by Black Horses, but all these are very much of the stage, stagey, born of candle-light and violins, hardly to be endured in cold print. Ragusa, the Sorceress in Tate’s _Brutus of Alba: or the Enchanted Lovers_ (Dorset Garden, May, 1678) is a far more formidable figure. Tate has managed his magic not without skill, and the conclusion of Act III, an incantation, was deservedly praised by Lamb. Curiously enough the plot of _Brutus of Alba_ is the story of Dido and Æneas, Vergil’s names being altered “rather than be guilty of a breach of Modesty,” Tate says. But Tate supplied Henry Purcell with the libretto for his opera _Dido and Æneas_, wherein also witches appear. It must not be forgotten that _Macbeth_ was immensely popular throughout the whole of the Restoration period, when, as has been noted above, the witch scenes were elaborated and presented with every resource of scenery, mechanism, dance, song, and meretricious ornament. Revival followed revival, each more decorative than the last, and the theatre was unceasingly thronged. Duffett undertook to burlesque this fashion, which he did in an extraordinary Epilogue to his skit _The Empress of Morocco_, produced at the Theatre Royal in the spring of 1674, but for all his japeries _Macbeth_ never waned in public favour. Spirits in abundance appear in the Earl of Orrery’s unpublished tragedy _Zoroastres_,[19] the principal character being described as “King of Persia, the first Magician.” He is attended by “several spirits in black with ghastly vizards,” and at the end furies and demons arise shaking dark torches at the monarch whom they pull down to hell, the sky raining fire upon them. It was almost certainly never acted, and is the wildest type of transpontine melodrama.