Haydn introduced them into his oratorio "The Creation," but, as the custom goes now, the third part of the work, in which they appear, is frequently, if not generally omitted in performance.

Adam, to judge by the record in Holy Writ, made an uneventful end: "And all the days that Adam lived were nine hundred and thirty years: and he died"; but this did not prevent Lesueur from writing an opera on his death ten years after Haydn's oratorio had its first performance.

He called it "La Mort d'Adam et son Apotheose," and it involved him in a disastrous quarrel with the directors of the Conservatoire and the Academie.

Pursuing the search chronologically, the librettists next came upon Cain and Abel, who offered a more fruitful subject for dramatic and musical invention.

We know very little about the sacred operas which shared the list with works based on classical fables and Roman history in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries; inasmuch, however, as they were an outgrowth of the pious plays of the Middle Ages and designed for edifying consumption in Lent, it is likely that they adhered in their plots pretty close to the Biblical accounts.