the twelve Di Majores of Latin letters.
For when a book is of absorbing interest without a single startling incident, without a murder, without even an elopement (except a very minor one mentioned in the first chapter), and deprived of the adventitious aids of railway accidents, shipwrecks, or other dii ex machina, we may be sure that there is much nature and much thought in it. Were there not it must infallibly be dull, and The Egoist is never dull.
In John Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera (1728), the ludicrously contrived last-minute rescue of Maceath works as a deliberate deflation of opera’s various dii ex machinis.