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Title: Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 8, Slice 6
       "Dodwell" to "Drama"

Author: Various

Release Date: June 9, 2010 [EBook #32758]

Language: English

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THE ENCYCLOPÆDIA BRITANNICA

A DICTIONARY OF ARTS, SCIENCES, LITERATURE AND GENERAL INFORMATION

ELEVENTH EDITION

 

VOLUME VIII SLICE VI

Dodwell to Drama


 

Articles in This Slice

DODWELL, EDWARD DORLÉANS, LOUIS
DODWELL, HENRY DORMER
DOG DORMITORY
DOGE DORMOUSE
DOG-FISH DORNBIRN
DOGGER BANK DORNBURG
DOGGETT THOMAS DORNER, ISAAC AUGUST
DOGMA DORNOCH
DOGMATIC THEOLOGY DOROHOI
DOGRA DOROTHEUS
DOGS, ISLE OF D’ORSAY, ALFRED GUILLAUME GABRIEL
DOG-TOOTH DORSET, EARLS, MARQUESSES AND DUKES OF
DOGWOOD DORSETSHIRE
DOL DORSIVENTRAL
DOLABELLA, PUBLIUS CORNELIUS DORT, SYNOD OF
DOLBEN, JOHN DORTMUND
DOLCE, LUDOVICO DORY
DOLCI, CARLO DOSITHEUS MAGISTER
DOLDRUMS DOSSAL
DÔLE DOSSERET
DOLE DOST MAHOMMED KHAN
DOLERITE DOSTOIEVSKY, FEODOR MIKHAILOVICH
DOLET, ÉTIENNE DOUAI
DOLGELLEY DOUARNENEZ
DOLGORUKI, VASILY LUKICH DOUBLE
DOLHAIN DOUBLE BASS
DOLICHOCEPHALIC DOUBLEDAY, ABNER
DOLL DOUBLEDAY, THOMAS
DOLLAR (town of Scotland) DOUBLET
DOLLAR (money) DOUBS (river of France)
DOLLING, ROBERT WILLIAM RADCLYFFE DOUBS (department of France)
DÖLLINGER, JOHANN JOSEPH IGNAZ VON DOUCE, FRANCIS
DOLLOND, JOHN DOUGLAS
DOLMAN DOUGLAS, SIR CHARLES
DOLNJA TUZLA DOUGLAS, GAVIN
DOLOMIEU, TANCRÈDE GRATET DE DOUGLAS, SIR HOWARD
DOLOMITE DOUGLAS, JOHN
DOLOMITES, THE DOUGLAS, STEPHEN ARNOLD
DOLPHIN DOUGLAS (capital of the Isle of Man)
DOMAT JEAN DOUGLAS (village of Scotland)
DOMBES DOUGLASS, FREDERICK
DOMBROWSKI, JAN HENRYK DOUKHOBORS
DOME DOULLENS
DOMENICHINO ZAMPIERI DOULTON, SIR HENRY
DOMESDAY BOOK DOUMER, PAUL
DOMESTIC RELATIONS DOUMIC, RENÉ
DOMETT, ALFRED DOUNE
DOMFRONT DOURO
DOMICILE DOUROUCOULI
DOMINIC, SAINT DOUSA, JANUS
DOMINICA DOUVILLE, JEAN BAPTISTE
DOMINICANS DOUW GERHARD
DOMINIS, MARCO ANTONIO DE DOVE (river of England)
DOMINOES DOVE (bird)
DOMINUS DOVER, GEORGE JAMES WELBORE AGAR-ELLIS
DOMITIAN DOVER, HENRY JERMYN
DOMRÉMY-LA-PUCELLE DOVER, ROBERT
DON (river of Russia) DOVER (capital of Delaware, U.S.A.)
DON (river of Scotland) DOVER (borough of Kent, England)
DONAGHADEE DOVER (city of New Hampshire, U.S.A.)
DONALDSON, SIR JAMES DOVER (town of New Jersey, U.S.A.)
DONALDSON, JOHN WILLIAM DOVERCOURT
DONATELLO DOW, LORENZO
DONATI, GIOVANNI BATTISTA DOW, NEAL
DONATIO MORTIS CAUSA DOWAGER
DONATION OF CONSTANTINE DOWDEN, EDWARD
DONATISTS DOWDESWELL, WILLIAM
DONATUS, AELIUS DOWER
DONAUWÖRTH DOWIE, JOHN ALEXANDER
DON BENÍTO DOWLAS
DONCASTER DOWN (county of Ireland)
DON COSSACKS, TERRITORY OF THE DOWN (smooth rounded hill)
DONEGAL (county of Ireland) DOWNES ANDREW
DONEGAL (town of Ireland) DOWNING, SIR GEORGE
DONELSON, FORT DOWNMAN, JOHN
DONGA DOWNPATRICK
DONGOLA (province of Sudan) DOWNS
DONGOLA (town of Sudan) DOWNSHIRE, WILLS HILL
DONIZETTI, GAETANO DOWRY
DONJON DOWSER and DOWSING
DON JUAN DOXOLOGY
DONKIN, SIR RUFANE SHAW DOYEN, GABRIEL FRANÇOIS
DONNAY, CHARLES MAURICE DOYLE, SIR ARTHUR CONAN
DONNE, JOHN DOYLE, SIR FRANCIS HASTINGS CHARLES
DONNYBROOK DOYLE, JOHN ANDREW
DONOSO CORTÉS, JUAN DOYLE, RICHARD
DONOVAN, EDWARD DOZSA, GYÖRGY
DOOM DOZY, REINHART PIETER ANNE
DOON DE MAYENCE DRACAENA
DOOR DRACHMANN, HOLGER HENRIK HERBOLDT
DOORWAY DRACO (Athenian statesman)
DOPPLERITE DRACO (constellation)
DORAN, JOHN DRACONTIUS, BLOSSIUS AEMILIUS
DORAT, CLAUDE JOSEPH DRAFTED MASONRY
DORCHESTER, DUDLEY CARLETON DRAG
DORCHESTER, GUY CARLETON DRAGASHANI
DORCHESTER (town of England) DRAGOMAN
DORCHESTER (village of England) DRAGOMIROV, MICHAEL IVANOVICH
DORCHESTER (district of Boston, U.S.A.) DRAGON
DORDOGNE (river of France) DRAGONETTI, DOMENICO
DORDOGNE (department of France) DRAGON-FLY
DORDRECHT DRAGON’S BLOOD
DORÉ, LOUIS AUGUSTE GUSTAVE DRAGOON
DORIA, ANDREA DRAGUIGNAN
DORIANS DRAINAGE OF LAND
DORIA-PAMPHILII-LANDI DRAKE, SIR FRANCIS
DORION, SIR ANTOINE AIMÉ DRAKE, NATHAN
DORIS DRAKENBORCH, ARNOLD
DORISLAUS, ISAAC DRAKENSBERG
DORKING DRAMA (part)

374

DODWELL, EDWARD (1767-1832), English traveller and writer on archaeology. He belonged to the same family as Henry Dodwell the theologian, and was educated at Trinity College, Cambridge. He travelled from 1801 to 1806 in Greece, and spent the rest of his life for the most part in Italy, at Naples and Rome. He died at Rome on the 13th of May 1832, from the effects of an illness contracted in 1830 during a visit of exploration to the Sabine Mountains. His widow, a daughter of Count Giraud, thirty years his junior, subsequently became famous as the “beautiful” countess of Spaur, and played a considerable rôle in the political life of the papal city. He published A Classical and Topographical Tour through Greece (1819), of which a German translation appeared in 1821; Views in Greece, thirty coloured plates (1821); and Views and Descriptions of Cyclopian or Pelasgic Remains in Italy and Greece (London and Paris, with French text, 1834).


DODWELL, HENRY (1641-1711), scholar, theologian and controversial writer, was born at Dublin in October, 1641. His father, having lost his property in Connaught during the rebellion, settled at York in 1648. Here Henry received his preliminary education at the free school. In 1654 he was sent by his uncle to Trinity College, Dublin, of which he subsequently became scholar and fellow. Having conscientious objections to taking orders he relinquished his fellowship in 1666, but in 1688 he was elected Camden professor of history at Oxford. In 1691 he was deprived of his professorship for refusing to take the oath of allegiance to William and Mary. Retiring to Shottesbrooke in Berkshire, and living on the produce of a small estate in Ireland, he devoted himself to the study of chronology and ecclesiastical polity. Gibbon speaks of his learning as “immense,” and says that his “skill in employing facts is equal to his learning,” although he severely criticizes his method and style. Dodwell’s works on ecclesiastical polity are more numerous and of much less value than those on chronology, his judgment being far inferior to his power of research. In his earlier writings he was regarded as one of the greatest champions of the non-jurors; but the doctrine which he afterwards promulgated, that the soul is naturally mortal, and that immortality could be enjoyed only by those who had received baptism from the hands of one set of regularly ordained clergy, and was therefore a privilege from which dissenters were hopelessly excluded, did not strengthen his reputation. Dodwell died at Shottesbrooke on the 7th of June 1711. His chief works on classical chronology are: A Discourse concerning Sanchoniathon’s Phoenician History (1681); Annales Thucydidei et Xenophontei (1702); Chronologia Graeco-Romana pro hypothesibus Dion. Halicarnassei (1692); Annales Velleiani, Quintilianei, Statiani (1698); and a larger treatise entitled De veteribus Graecorum Romanorumque Cyclis (1701).

His eldest son Henry (d. 1784) is known as the author of a pamphlet entitled Christianity not founded on Argument, to which a reply was published by his brother William (1709-1785), who was besides engaged in a controversy with Dr Conyers Middleton on the subject of miracles.

See The Works of H. D. ... abridg’d with an account of his life, by F. Brokesby (2nd ed., 1723) and Thomas Hearne’s Diaries.


DOG, the English generic term for the quadruped of the domesticated variety of Canis (Fr. chien). The etymology of the word is unknown; “hound” represents the common Teutonic term (Ger. Hund), and it is suggested that the “English dog”—for this was a regular phrase in continental European countries—represented a special breed. Most canine experts believe that the dog is descended from the wolf, although zoologists are less certain (see Carnivora); the osteology of one does not differ materially from that of the other: the dog and the wolf breed with each other, and the progeny thus obtained will again breed with the dog. There is one circumstance, however, which seems to mark a difference between the two animals: the eye of the dog of every country and species has a circular pupil, but the position or form of the pupil is oblique in the wolf. W. Youatt says there is also a marked difference in the temper and habits of the two. The dog is generally easily managed, and although H. C. Brooke of Welling, Kent, succeeded in making a wolf fairly tractable, the experience of others has been the reverse of encouraging. G. Cuvier gives an interesting account of a young wolf which, having been trained to follow his master, showed affection and submission scarcely inferior to the domesticated dog. During the absence from home of his owner the wolf was sent to a menagerie, but pined for his master and would scarcely take any food for a considerable time. At length, however, he became attached to his keepers and appeared to have forgotten his former associate. At the end of eighteen months his master returned, and, the moment his voice was heard, the wolf recognized him and lavished on him the most affectionate caresses. A still longer separation followed, but the wolf again remembered his old associate and showed great affection upon his return. Such an association proves that there is very little difference between the dog and the wolf in recognition of man as an object of affection and veneration. H. C. Brooke succeeded in training his wolf so well that it was no uncommon sight to see the latter following his master like a dog. The wolf did not like strangers, however, and was very shy in their presence.

In the Old and New Testaments the dog is spoken of almost with abhorrence; it ranked amongst the unclean beasts: traffic in it was considered as an abomination, and it was forbidden to be offered in the sanctuary in the discharge of any vow. Part of the Jewish ritual was the preservation of the Israelites from the idolatry which at that time prevailed among every other people. Dogs were held in considerable veneration by the Egyptians, from whose tyranny the Israelites had just escaped; figures of them appeared on the friezes of most of the temples, and they were regarded as emblems of the divine being. Herodotus, speaking of the sanctity in which some animals were held by the Egyptians, says that the people of every family in which a dog died shaved themselves—their expression of mourning—adding that this was a custom of his own time.

The cause of this attachment to and veneration for the dog is, however, explained in a far more probable and pleasing way than by many of the fables of ancient mythology. The prosperity of Lower Egypt, and almost the very subsistence of its inhabitants, depended upon the annual overflowing of the Nile; and they looked for it with the utmost anxiety. Its approach was announced by the appearance of a certain star, Sirius, and as soon as that star was seen above the horizon the people hastened to remove their flocks to the higher ground and abandoned the lower pastures to the fertilizing influence of the stream. They hailed it as their guard and protector; and, associating with its apparent watchfulness the well-known fidelity of the dog, they called it the “dog-star” and worshipped it. It was in far later periods and in other countries that the appearance of the dog-star was regarded as the signal of insufferable heat or prevalent disease. In Ethiopia, not only was great veneration paid to the dog, but the inhabitants used to elect a dog as their king. It was kept in great state, and surrounded by a numerous train of officers and guards: when it fawned upon them it was supposed to be pleased with their proceedings; when it growled, it disapproved of the manner in which their government was conducted. Such indications of will were implicitly obeyed, or were translated by the worshippers as their own caprice or interest indicated.

Even 1000 years after this period, the dog was highly esteemed in Egypt for its sagacity and other excellent qualities; for when Pythagoras, after his return from Egypt, founded a new sect in Greece, and at Croton in southern Italy, he taught, with the Egyptian philosophers, that at the death of the body the soul entered into that of various animals. After the death of any of his favourite disciples he would hold a dog to the mouth of the man in order to receive the departing spirit, saying that there was no animal which could perpetuate his virtues better than that quadruped. It was in order to preserve the Israelites from errors and follies of this kind, and to prevent the possibility of such idolatry being established, that the dog was afterwards regarded with utter abhorrence amongst the Jews, and this feeling prevailed during the continuance of the Israelites in Palestine.

Plate I.

GREAT DANE. SAINT BERNARD.
DALMATIAN. MASTIFF. OLD ENGLISH SHEEP DOG.
COLLIE. CHOW. NEWFOUNDLAND.
POODLE. BULL DOG. FRENCH BULL DOG. From “Country Life in America.”
BOSTON TERRIER.
(From Photos by Bowden Bros.)
TYPICAL NON-SPORTING DOGS.

Plate II.

ENGLISH SETTER. POINTER.
IRISH SETTER. LABRADOR RETRIEVER.
FLAT-COATED RETRIEVER. IRISH WOLF-HOUND.
IRISH TERRIER. DACHSHUND. ROUGH-COATED FOX TERRIER. FIELD SPANIEL.
(From Photos by Bowden Bros.)
TYPICAL SPORTING DOGS.

375

The Hindus also regard the dog as unclean, and submit to various purifications if they accidentally come in contact with it, believing that every dog is animated by a wicked and malignant spirit condemned to do penance in that form for crimes committed in a previous state of existence. In every Mahommedan and Hindu country the most scurrilous epithet bestowed on a European or a Christian is “a dog,” and that accounts for the fact that in the whole of the Jewish history there is not a single allusion to hunting with dogs. Mention is made of nets and snares, but the dog does not seem to have been used in the pursuit of game.

In the early periods of the history of other countries this seems to have been the case even where the dog was esteemed and valued, and had become the companion, the friend and the defender of man and his home; and in the 2nd century of the Christian era Arrian wrote that “there is as much difference between a fair trial of speed in a good run, and ensnaring a poor animal without an effort, as between the secret piratical assaults of robbers at sea and the victorious naval engagements of the Athenians at Artemisium and at Salamis.” The first hint of the employment of the dog in the pursuit of other animals is given by Oppian in his Cynegetica, who attributes it to Pollux about 200 years after the promulgation of the Levitical law. The precise species of dog that was cultivated in Greece at that early period cannot be affirmed, although a beautiful piece of sculpture in the possession of Lord Feversham at Duncombe Hall, representing the favourite dog of Alcibiades, differs but little from the Newfoundland dog of the present day. In the British Museum is another piece of early sculpture from the ruins of the villa of Antoninus, near Rome. The greyhound puppies which it represents are identical with a brace of saplings of the present day. In the early periods of their history the Greeks depended too much on their nets to capture game, and it was not until later times that they pursued their prey with dogs, and then not with greyhounds, which run by sight, but with beagles, the dwarf hound which is still very popular. Later, mention is made of large and ferocious dogs which were employed to guard sheep and cattle, or to watch at the door of the house, or even to act as a companion, and G. Cuvier expresses the opinion that the dog exhibits the most complete and the most useful conquest that man has made. Each individual is entirely devoted to his master, adopts his manners, distinguishes and defends his property, and remains attached to him even unto death; and all this springs not from mere necessity nor from constraint, but simply from gratitude and true friendship.

The swiftness, the strength and the highly developed power of scent in the dog, have made it a powerful ally of man against the other animals; and perhaps these qualities in the dog were necessary to the establishment of society. Instances of dogs having saved the lives of their owners by that strange intuition of approaching danger which they appear to possess, or by their protection, are innumerable: their attachment to man has inspired the poet and formed the subject of many notable books, while in Daniel’s Rural Sports is related a story of a dog dying in the fulness of joy caused by the return of his master after a two years’ absence from home.

It is not improbable that all dogs sprang from one common source, but climate, food and cross-breeding caused variations of form which suggested particular uses, and these being either designedly or accidentally perpetuated, the various breeds of dogs arose, and became numerous in proportion to the progress of civilization. Among the ruder or savage tribes they possess but one form; but the ingenuity of man has devised many inventions to increase his comforts; he has varied and multiplied the characters and kinds of domestic animals for the same purpose, and hence the various breeds of horses, cattle and dogs. The parent stock it is now impossible to trace; but the wild dog, wherever found on the continent of Asia, or northern Europe, has nearly the same character, and bears no inconsiderable resemblance to the British dog of the ordinary type; while many of those from the southern hemisphere can scarcely be distinguished from the cross-bred poaching dog, the lurcher.

Dogs were first classified into three groups:—(1) Those having the head more or less elongated, and the parietal bones of the skull widest at the base and gradually approaching towards each other as they ascend, the condyles of the lower jaw being on the same line with the upper molar teeth. The greyhound and all its varieties belong to this class. (2) The head moderately elongated and the parietals diverging from each other for a certain space as they rise upon the side of the head, enlarging the cerebral cavity and the frontal sinus. To this class belong most of the useful dogs, such as the spaniel, the setter, the pointer and the sheepdog. (3) The muzzle more or less shortened, the frontal sinus enlarged, and the cranium elevated and diminished in capacity. To this class belong some of the terriers and most of the toy dogs.

Later, however, “Stonehenge” (J.H. Walsh), in British Rural Sports, classified dogs as follows:—(a) Dogs that find game for man, leaving him to kill it himself—the pointer, setters, spaniels and water spaniels. (b) Dogs which kill game when found for them—the English greyhound. (c) Dogs which find and also kill their game—the bloodhound, the foxhound, the harrier, the beagle, the otterhound, the fox terrier and the truffle dog. (d) Dogs which retrieve game that has been wounded by man—the retriever, the deerhound. (e) Useful companions of man—the mastiff, the Newfoundland, the St Bernard dog, the bulldog, the bull terrier, terriers, sheepdogs, Pomeranian or Spitz, and Dalmatian dogs. (f) Ladies’ toy dogs—King Charles spaniel, the Blenheim spaniel, the Italian greyhound, the pug dog, the Maltese dog, toy terriers, toy poodles, the lion dog, Chinese and Japanese spaniels. In 1894 Modern Dogs (Rawdon B. Lee) was issued, the simple classification of sporting and non-sporting dog—terriers and toy dogs, being adopted; but although there had been an understanding since 1874, when the first volume of the Kennel Club Stud Book (Frank C. S. Pearce) was issued, as to the identity of the two great divisions of dogs, an incident at Altrincham Show in September 1900—an exhibitor entering a Russian wolfhound in both the sporting and non-sporting competitions—made it necessary for authoritative information to be given as to how the breeds should be separated. Following petitions to the Kennel Club from exhibitors at the club’s own show at the Crystal Palace, and also at the show of the Scottish Kennel Club in Edinburgh during the autumn of 1900, the divisions were decided upon as follows:—

Sporting.—Bloodhound, otterhound, foxhound, harrier, beagle, basset hound (smooth and rough), dachshund, greyhound, deerhound, Borzoi, Irish wolfhound, whippet, pointer, setter (English, Irish and black and tan), retriever (flat-coated, curly-coated and Labrador), spaniel (Irish water, water other than Irish, Clumber, Sussex, field, English springer, other than Clumber, Sussex and field: Welsh springer, red and white and Cocker); fox terriers (smooth- and wire-coated); Irish terrier, Scotch terrier, Welsh terrier, Dandie Dinmont terrier, Skye terrier (prick-eared and drop-eared), Airedale terrier and Bedlington terrier.

Non-Sporting.—Bulldog, bulldog (miniature), mastiff, Great Dane, Newfoundland (black, white and black, or other than black), St Bernard (rough and smooth), Old English sheepdog, collie (rough and smooth), Dalmatian, poodle, bull terrier, white English terrier, black and tan terrier, toy spaniel (King Charles or black and tan, Blenheim, ruby or red and tricolour), Japanese, Pekingese, Yorkshire terrier, Maltese, Italian greyhound, chow-chow, black and tan terrier (miniature), Pomeranian, pug (fawn and black), Schipperke, Griffon Bruxellois, foreign dogs (bouledogues français, elk-hounds, Eskimos, Lhasa terriers, Samoyedes and any other varieties not mentioned under this heading).

On the 4th of May 1898 a sub-committee of the Kennel Club decided that the following breeds should be classified as “toy dogs”:—Black and tan terriers (under 7 ℔), bull terriers (under 8 ℔), griffons, Italian greyhounds, Japanese, Maltese, Pekingese, poodles (under 15 in.), pugs, toy spaniels, Yorkshire terriers and Pomeranians.

All these varieties were represented at the annual show of the 376 Kennel Club in the autumn of 1905, and at the representative exhibition of America held under the management of the Westminster Kennel Club in the following spring the classification was substantially the same, additional breeds, however, being Boston terriers—practically unknown in England,—Chesapeake Bay dogs, Chihuahuas, Papillons and Roseneath terriers. The latter were only recently introduced into the United States, though well known in Great Britain as the West Highland or Poltalloch terrier; an application which was made (1900) by some of their admirers for separate classification was refused by the Kennel Club, but afterwards it was granted, the breed being classified as the West Highland white terrier.

The establishment of shows at Newcastle-on-Tyne in June 1859 secured for dogs attention which had been denied them up to that time, although sportsmen had appreciated their value for centuries and there had been public coursing meetings since the reign of Charles I. Lord Orford, however, established the first club at Marham Smeeth near Swaffham, where coursing is still carried on, in 1776. The members were in number confined to that of the letters in the alphabet; and when any vacancy happened it was filled up by ballot. On the decease of the founder of the club, the members agreed to purchase a silver cup to be run for annually, and it was intended to pass from one to the other, like the whip at Newmarket, but before starting for it, in the year 1792, it was decided that the winner of the cup should keep it and that one should be annually purchased to be run for in November. At the formation of the club each member assumed a colour, and also a letter, which he used as the initial of his dog’s name. The Newcastle dog show of 1859 was promoted by Mr Pape—a local sporting gunmaker—and Mr Shorthose, and although only pointers and setters were entered for in two classes immense interest was taken in the show. But neither the promoters nor the sportsmen who supported it could have had the faintest idea as to how popular dog shows would become. The judges at that historic gathering were: Messrs J. Jobling (Morpeth), T. Robson (Newcastle-on-Tyne) and J. H. Walsh (London) for pointers, and E. Foulger (Alnwick), R. Brailsford (Knowsley) and J. H. Walsh for the setters. Sixty dogs were shown, and it was said that such a collection had not been seen together before; while so even was the quality that the judges had great difficulty in making their awards. The prizes were sporting guns made by Mr Pape and presented by him to the promoters of the show. So great a success was scored that other shows were held in the same year at Birmingham and Edinburgh; while the Cleveland Agricultural Society also established a show of foxhounds at Redcar, the latter being the forerunner of that very fine show of hounds which is now held at Peterborough every summer and is looked upon as the out-of-season society gathering of hunting men and women.

Mr Brailsford was the secretary of the show at Birmingham, and he had classes for pointers, English and Irish setters, retrievers and Clumber spaniels. Another big success was scored, and the National Dog Show Society was established for the purpose of holding a show of sporting dogs in Birmingham every winter. Three years later proposals were made in The Field to promote public trials of pointers and setters over game, but it was not until the 18th of April 1865 that a further step was taken in the recognition of the value of the dog by the promotion of working trials. They were held at Southill, near Bedford, on the estate of S. Whitbread, M.P., and they attracted great interest. The order of procedure at the early field trials was similar to what it is to-day, only the awards were given in accordance with a scale of points as follows: nose, 40; pace and range, 30; temperament, 10; staunchness before, 10; behind, 10. Style of working was also taken into consideration. In 1865 a show was held in Paris, and after the National Dog Club—not the Birmingham society—had failed, as the result of a disastrous show at the Crystal Palace, a further exhibition was arranged to be held in June 1870 under the management of G. Nutt and a very strong committee, among whom were many of the most noted owners of sporting dogs of that time. The details of the show were arranged by S. E. Shirley and J. H. Murchison, but the exhibition, although a most interesting one, was a failure, and the guarantors had to face a heavy loss. A second venture proved to be a little more encouraging, although again there was a loss; but in April 1873, the Kennel Club, which is now the governing body of the canine world, was founded by S. E. Shirley, who, after acting as its chairman for many years, was elected the president, and occupied that position until his death in March 1904. His successor was the duke of Connaught and Strathearn; the vice-presidents including the duke of Portland, Lord Algernon Gordon Lennox, J. H. Salter and H. Richards. The progress of the club has been remarkable, and that its formation did much to improve the conditions of the various breeds of dogs, to encourage their use in the field by the promotion of working trials, and to check abuses which were common with regard to the registration of pedigrees, &c., cannot be denied. The abolition of the cropping of the ears of Great Danes, bull terriers, black and tan terriers, white English terriers, Irish terriers and toy terriers, in 1889 gained the approval of all humane lovers of dogs, and although attempts have been made to induce the club to modify the rule which prohibits the exhibition of cropped dogs, the practice has not been revived; it is declared, however, that the toy terriers and white English terriers have lost such smartness by the retention of the ears that they are becoming extinct. The club has control over all the shows held in the United Kingdom, no fewer than 519 being held in 1905, the actual number of dogs which were entered at the leading fixtures being: Kennel Club show 1789, Cruft’s 1768, Ladies’ Kennel Association 1306, Manchester 1190, Edinburgh 896 and Birmingham 892. In 1906, however, no fewer than 1956 dogs were entered at the show of the Westminster Kennel Club, held in Madison Square Garden, New York; a fact proving that the show is as popular in America as it is in the United Kingdom, the home of the movement. The enormous sum of £1500 has been paid for a collie, and 1000 guineas for a bulldog, both show dogs pure and simple; while £500 is no uncommon price for a fox terrier. Excepting for greyhounds, however, high prices are rarely offered for sporting dogs, 300 guineas for the pointer “Coronation” and 200 guineas for the retriever “High Legh Blarney” being the best reported prices for gun dogs during the last few years.

The foreign and colonial clubs which are affiliated to the Kennel Club are: the Guernsey Dog Club, the Italian Kennel Club, the Jersey Dog Club, La Société Centrale (Paris), Moscow Gun Club of the Emperor Alexander II., New South Wales Kennel Club, Nimrod Club (Amsterdam), Northern Indian Kennel Association, Royal St Hubert’s Society (Brussels) and the South African Kennel Club (Cape Town). Its ramifications therefore extend to all parts of the world; while its rules are the basis of those adopted by the American Kennel Club, the governing body of the “fancy” in the United States. A joint conference between representatives of the two bodies, held in London in 1900, did much towards securing the uniformity of ideas which is so essential between associations having interests in common.

Most of the leading breeds have clubs or societies, which have been founded by admirers with a view to furthering the interests of their favourites; and such combinations as the Bulldog Club (incorporated), the London Bulldog Society, the British Bulldog Club, the Fox Terrier Club, the Association of Bloodhound Breeders—under whose management the first man-hunting trials were held,—the Bloodhound Hunt Club, the Collie Club, the Dachshund Club, the Dandie Dinmont Terrier Club, the English Setter Club, the Gamekeepers’ Association of the United Kingdom, the International Gun Dog League, the Irish Terrier Club, the Irish Wolfhound Club, the St Bernard Club, the National Terrier Club, the Pomeranian Club, the Spaniel Club, the Scottish Terrier Club and the Toy Bulldog Club have done good work in keeping the claims of the breeds they represent before the dog-owning public and encouraging the breeding of dogs to type. Each club has a standard of points; some hold their own shows; while others issue club gazettes. All this has been brought about by the establishment of a show for sporting dogs at Newcastle-on-Tyne in the summer of 1859.

America can claim a list of over twenty specialist clubs, and in both countries women exhibitors have their independent 377 associations, Queen Alexandra having become one of the chief supporters of the Ladies’ Kennel Association (England). There is a ladies’ branch of the Kennel Club, and the corresponding clubs in America are the Ladies’ Kennel Association of America and the Ladies’ Kennel Association of Massachusetts.

The Gazette is the official organ of the Kennel Club. The Field, however, retains its position as the leading canine journal, the influence of J. H. Walsh (“Stonehenge”), who did so much towards establishing the first dog shows and field trials, having never forsaken it: the work he began was carried on by its kennel editor, Rawdon B. Lee (d. 1908), whose volumes on Modern Dogs (sporting, non-sporting and terriers) are the standard works on dogs. Our Dogs, The Kennel Magazine, and The Illustrated Kennel News are the remaining canine journals in England. Several weekly papers published on the continent of Europe devote a considerable portion of their space to dogs, and canine journals have been started in America, South Africa and even India: while apart from Lee’s volumes and other carefully compiled works treating on the dog in general, the various breeds have been written about, and the books or monographs have large sales. At the end of 1905 E. W. Jaquet wrote The Kennel Club: a History and Record of its Work, and an edition de luxe of Dogs is edited by Mr Harding Cox; Mr Sidney Turner, the chairman of the Kennel Club committee, edited The Kennel Encyclopaedia, the first number of which was issued in 1907. Dog lovers are now numbered by their tens of thousands, and in addition to shows of their favourites, owners are also liberally catered for in the shape of working trials, for during the season competitions for bloodhounds, pointers, setters, retrievers, spaniels and sheepdogs are held.

Breeds of Dog.

Nothing is known with certainty as to the origin of the vast majority of breeds of dogs, and it is an unfortunate fact that the progressive changes which have been made within comparatively recent times by fanciers have not been accurately recorded by the preservation, in museums or collections, of the actual specimens considered typical at different dates. No scientific classification of the breeds of dogs is at present possible, but whilst the division already given into “sporting” and “non-sporting” is of some practical value, for descriptive purposes it is convenient to make a division into the six groups:—wolfdogs, greyhounds, spaniels, hounds, mastiffs and terriers. It is to be remembered, however, that all these types interbreed freely, and that many intermediate, and forms of wholly doubtful position, occur.

Wolfhounds.—Throughout the northern regions of both hemispheres there are several breeds of semi-domesticated dogs which are wolf-like, with erect ears and long woolly hair. The Eskimo dog has been regarded as nothing more than a reclaimed wolf, and the Eskimo are stated to maintain the size and strength of their dogs by crossing them with wolves. The domestic dogs of some North American Indian tribes closely resemble the coyote; the black wolfdog of Florida resembles the black wolf of the same region; the sheepdogs of Europe and Asia resemble the wolves of those countries, whilst the pariah dog of India is closely similar to the Indian wolf. The Eskimo dog has small, upright ears, a straight bushy tail, moderately sharp muzzle and rough coat. Like a wolf, it howls but does not bark. It occurs throughout the greater part of the Arctic regions, the varieties in the old and new world differing slightly in colour. They are fed on fish, game and meat. They are good hunters and wonderfully cunning and enduring. Their services to their owners and to Arctic explorers are well known, but Eskimo dogs are so rapacious that it is impossible to train them to refrain from attacking sheep, goats or any small domesticated animals. The Hare Indian dog of the Great Bear Lake and the Mackenzie river is more slender, gentle and affectionate than the Eskimo dog, but is impatient of restraint, and preserves many of the characters of its wild ally, the coyote, and is practically unable to bark.

The Pomeranian dog is a close ally of the Eskimo breed and was formerly used as a wolfdog, but has been much modified. The larger variety of the race has a sharp muzzle, upright pointed ears, and a bushy tail generally carried over the back. It varies in colour from black through grey to reddish brown and white. The smaller variety, sometimes known as the Spitz, was formerly in some repute as a fancy dog, a white variety with a black tip to the nose and a pure black variety being specially prized. Pomeranians have been given most attention in Germany and Belgium, while the so-called Spitz has been popular in England and America.

The sheepdogs and collies are still further removed from the wolf type, and have the tip of the ear pendent. The tail is thick and bushy, the feet and legs particularly strong, and there is usually a double dew-claw on each hind limb. The many varieties found in different countries have the same general characters. The bark is completely dog-like, and the primitive hunting instincts have been cultivated into a marvellous aptitude for herding sheep and cattle. The training takes place during the first year, and the work is learned with extreme facility. The Scotch collie is lighter and more elegant, and has a sharper muzzle. Since it became popular as a pet dog, its appearance has been greatly improved, and whilst it has lost its old sullen concentration, it has retained unusual intelligence and has become playful and affectionate. The wolfdogs all hunt chiefly by scent.

Greyhounds.—These are characterized by slight build, small ears falling at the tips, elongated limbs and tails and long narrow muzzles. They hunt entirely by sight, the sense of smell being defective. The English greyhound is the most conspicuous and best-known member of the group, and has been supposed to be the parent of most of the others. The animal is thoroughly adapted for extreme speed, the long, rat-like tail being used in balancing the body in quick turns. The favourite colour is a uniform sandy, or pale grey tone, but characters directly related to capacity for speed have received most attention. The Italian greyhound is a miniature greyhound, still capable of considerable speed but so delicate that it is almost unable to pull down even a rabbit, and is kept simply as a pet. The eyes are large and soft, and a golden fawn is the colour most prized. The Scotch deerhound is a larger and heavier variety of the English greyhound, with rough and shaggy hair. It has been used both for deer stalking and for coursing, and several varieties exist. The Irish wolfhound is now extinct, but appears to have been a powerful race heavier than the deerhound but similar to it in general characters. Greyhounds have been bred from time immemorial in Eastern Europe and Western Asia, while unmistakable representatives are figured on the monuments of ancient Egypt. The existing Oriental varieties are in most cases characterized by silky hair. The hairless dogs of Central Africa are greyhounds employed chiefly in hunting antelopes, and there are somewhat similar varieties in China, Central and South America.

The whippet is a local English dog, used chiefly in rabbit coursing and racing, and is almost certainly a cross between greyhounds and terriers.

The lurcher is a dog with the general shape of a greyhound, but with a heavier body, larger ears and rougher coat. Lurchers are cross-bred dogs, greyhounds and sheepdogs, or deerhounds and collies, being the parents.

Spaniels are heavily built dogs with short and very wide skulls rising suddenly at the eyes. The brain is relatively large and the intelligence high. The muzzle is short, the ears large and pendent, the limbs relatively short and heavy, and the coat thick and frequently long. It is supposed, from their name, that they are of Spanish origin. They may be divided into field spaniels, water spaniels and the smaller breeds kept as pets. Field spaniels are excellent shooting dogs, and are readily trained to give notice of the proximity of game. The Clumber, Sussex, Norfolk and Cocker breeds are the best established. The Clumber is long, low and heavy. It is silent when hunting, and has long ears shaped like vine leaves. The ground colour of the coat is white with yellow spots. The Sussex is a lighter, more noisy animal, with a wavy, golden coat. The Cockers are smaller spaniels, brown, or brown-and-white in the Welsh variety, black in the more common modern English form. The head is short, 378 and the coat silky and wavy. Of the water spaniels the Irish breeds are best known. They are relatively large dogs, with broad splay feet, and silky oily coats.

The poodle is probably derived from spaniels, but is of slighter, more graceful build, and is pre-eminent even among spaniels for intelligence. The best known pet spaniels are the King Charles and the Blenheim, small dogs with fine coats, probably descended from Cockers.

Setters owe their name to their having been trained originally to crouch when marking game, so as to admit of the net with which the quarry was taken being drawn over their heads. Since the general adoption of shooting in place of netting or bagging game, setters have been trained to act as pointers. They are pre-eminently dogs for sporting purposes, and special strains or breeds adapted to the peculiarities of different kinds of sporting have been produced. Great Britain is probably the country where setters were first produced, and as early as the 17th century spaniels were used in England as setting dogs. It is probable that pointer blood was introduced in the course of shaping the various breeds of setter. The English setter should have a silky coat with the hair waved but not curly; the legs and toes should be hairy, and the tail should have a bushy fringe of hairs hanging down from the dorsal border. The colour varies much, ranging according to the strains, from black-and-white through orange-and-white and liver-and-white to pure white, whilst black, white, liver, and red or yellow self-coloured setters are common. The Irish setter is red without trace of black, but occasionally flecked with white. The Gordon setter, the chief Scottish variety, is a heavier animal with coarser hair, black-and-tan in colour. The Russian setter has a woolly and matted coat.

The retriever is a large dog used for retrieving game on land, as a water spaniel is used for the same purpose in water. The breed is almost certainly derived from water-spaniels, with a strong admixture of Newfoundland blood. The colour is black or tan, and the hair of the face, body and tail is close and curly, although wavy-coated strains exist.

The Newfoundland is simply an enormous spaniel, and shows its origin by the facility with which it takes to water and the readiness with which it mates with spaniels and setters. It has developed a definite instinct to save human beings from drowning, this probably being an evolution of the retrieving instinct of the original spaniels. The true Newfoundland is a very large dog and may reach 31 in. in height at the shoulder. The coat is shaggy and oily, and is preferred with as little white as possible, but the general black coloration may have rusty shades. The eyes and ears are relatively small, and the forehead white and dome-shaped, giving the face the well-known appearance of benignity and intelligence. Although these dogs were originally brought to Great Britain from Newfoundland and are still bred in the latter country, greater size, perfection and intelligence have been attained in England, where Newfoundlands for many years have been the most popular large dogs. They are easily taught to retrieve on land or water, and their strength, intelligence and fidelity make them specially suitable as watchdogs or guardians. The Landseer Newfoundland is a black and white variety brought into notice by Sir Edwin Landseer, but the exact ancestry of which is unknown. The Labrador Newfoundland is a smaller black variety with a less massive head. It occurs both in Newfoundland and England, and has been used largely in producing crosses, being almost certainly one parent of the retriever.

The St Bernard is a large breed taking its name from the monastery of Mount St Bernard in the Alps, and remarkable for high intelligence and use in rescuing travellers from the snow. The origin of the breed is unknown, but undoubtedly it is closely related to spaniels. The St Bernard attains as great a size as that of any other breed, a fine specimen being between 60 and 70 in. from the tip of the nose to the root of the tail. The colour varies, but shades of tawny-red and white are more frequent than in Newfoundlands. In the rough-haired breed the coat is long and wavy, but there exists a smooth breed with a nearly smooth coat.

Hounds.—These are large dogs, hunting by smell, with massive structure, large drooping ears, and usually smooth coats, without fringes of hair on the ears, limbs or tail. The bloodhound is probably the stock from which all the English races of hounds have been derived. The chief character is the magnificent head, narrow and dome-like between the huge pendulous ears, and with transverse puckers on the forehead and between the eyes. The prevailing colour is tan with large black spots. Bloodhounds, or, as they are sometimes termed, sleuthhounds, have been employed since the time of the Romans in pursuing and hunting down human beings, and a small variety, known as the Cuban bloodhound, probably of Spanish origin, was used to track fugitive negroes in slaveholding times. Bloodhounds quest slowly and carefully, and when they lose the scent cast backwards until they recover the original trail and make a fresh attempt to follow it.

Staghounds are close derivatives of the bloodhound, and formerly occurred in England in two strains, known respectively as the northern and southern hounds. Both breeds were large and heavy, with pendulous ears and thick throats with dewlaps. These strains seem to be now extinct, having been replaced by foxhounds, a large variety of which is employed in stag-hunting.

The modern English foxhound has been bred from the old northern and southern hounds, and is more lightly built, having been bred for speed and endurance. The favourite and most common colour is black-white-and-tan. The ears are usually artificially clipped so as to present a rounded lower margin. Their dash and vigour in the chase is much greater than that of the bloodhound, foxhounds casting forwards when they have lost the trail.

Harriers are a smaller breed of foxhounds, distinguished by their pointed ears, as it is not the custom to trim these. They are used in the pursuit of hares, and, although they are capable of very fast runs, have less endurance than foxhounds, and follow the trail with more care and deliberation.

Otterhounds are thick, woolly harriers with oily underfur. They are savage and quarrelsome, but are naturally excellent water-dogs.

Beagles are small foxhounds with long bodies and short limbs. They have a full bell-like cry and great cunning and perseverance in the tracking of hares and rabbits. They are relatively slow, and are followed on foot.

Turnspits were a small, hound-like race of dogs with long bodies, pendulous ears, out-turned feet and generally black-and-tan coloration. They were employed as animated roasting jacks, turning round and round the wire cage in which they were confined, but with the employment of mechanical jacks their use ceased and the race appears to be extinct.

Basset hounds are long and crooked-legged dogs, with pendulous ears. They appear to have been produced in Normandy and the Vendée, where they were employed for sporting purposes, and originally were no very definite breed. In comparatively recent times they have been adopted by English fanciers, and a definite strain with special points has been produced.

The dachshund, or badger hound, is of German origin, and like the basset hound was originally an elongated distorted hound with crooked legs, employed in baiting and hunting badgers, but now greatly improved and made more definite by the arts of the breeder. The colour is generally black-and-tan or brownish, the body is extremely long and cylindrical; the ears are large and pendulous, the legs broad, thick and twisted, with everted paws. The coat is short, thick and silky, and the tail is long and tapering.

The pointers, of which there are breeds slightly differing in most European countries, are descendants of the foxhound which have been taught to follow game by general body scent, not by tracking, nose to the ground, the traces left by the feet of the quarry, and, on approaching within sight of the game, to stand rigid, “pointing” in its direction. The general shape is like that of the foxhound, but the build is lighter and better knit, and the coat is soft, whilst white and spotted colorations are preferred. Pointers are employed to mark game for guns, and are especially useful in low cover such as that afforded by turnip fields.

Plate III.

BORZOI. GREYHOUND.
DEERHOUND. BLOODHOUND.
FOX HOUND. HARRIER. OTTER HOUND.
AUSTRALIAN TERRIER. SKYE TERRIER. SCOTCH TERRIER. BEDLINGTON TERRIER.
(From Photos by Bowden Bros.)
TYPICAL SPORTING DOGS.

Plate IV.

Photo, Bowden Bros.
POMERANIAN.
Photo, Thos. Fall.
ITALIAN GREYHOUND.
Photo, Bowden Bros.
TOY BULL TERRIER.
Photo, Bowden Bros.
TOY SPANIEL.
Photo, Walker.
BLENHEIM.
Photo, Thos. Fall.
PAPILLON.
Photo, Bowden Bros.
SCHIPPERKE.
Photo, Bowden Bros.
MALTESE.
Photo, Thos. Fall.
TOY BLACK AND TAN.
Photo, Bowden Bros.
YORKSHIRE TERRIER.
Photo, Bowden Bros.
PUG.
Photo, Bowden Bros.
GRIFFON.
Photo, Bowden Bros.
JAPANESE.
Photo, Bowden Bros.
PEKINGESE.
TYPICAL TOY DOGS.

379

The Dalmatian or coach dog (sometimes called the plum-pudding dog) is a lightly built pointer, distinguished by its spotted coloration, consisting of evenly disposed circular black spots on a white ground. The original breed is said to have been used as a pointer in the country from which it takes its name, but has been much modified by the fancier’s art, and almost certainly the original strain has been crossed with bull-terriers.

Mastiffs are powerful, heavily built dogs, with short muzzles, frequently protruding lower jaws, skulls raised above the eyes, ears erect or pendulous, pendulous upper lips, short coats and thin tails. The English mastiff is a huge and powerful dog with pendent ears but short and silky coat. Fawn and brindle are the colours preferred. The Tibetan mastiff is equally powerful, but has still larger pendent ears, a shaggy coat and a long brush-like tail. Mastiffs are employed for fighting or as watchdogs, and for the most part are of uncertain temper and not high intelligence.

The bulldog is a small, compact but extremely heavily built animal of great strength, vigour and tenacity. The lower jaw should be strongly protruding, the ears should be small and erect, the forehead deeply wrinkled with an indentation between the eyes, known as the “stop.” The coat should be thick, short and very silky, the favourite colours being white and white marked with brindle. Bulldogs were formerly employed in bull-baiting, and the tenacity of their grip is proverbial. Their ferocious appearance, and not infrequently the habits of their owners, have given this breed a reputation for ferocity and low intelligence. As puppies, however, bulldogs are highly intelligent and unusually docile and affectionate, and if well trained retain throughout life an unusual sweetness of disposition, the universal friendliness of which makes them of little use as guardians.

The German boarhound is one of the largest races of dogs, originally used in Germany and Denmark for hunting boars or deer, but now employed chiefly as watchdogs. The build is rather slighter than that of the English mastiff, and the ears are small and carried erect.

The Great Dane is somewhat similar in general character, but is still more gracefully built, with slender limbs and more pointed muzzle. The ears, naturally pendent at the tips, are always cropped. It is probable that the strain contains greyhound blood.

The bull-terrier, as its name implies, is a cross between the bulldog and the smooth terrier. It is a clever, agile and powerful dog, extremely pugnacious in disposition.

The pugdog is a dwarf race, probably of mastiff origin, and kept solely as a pet. The Chinese pug is slender legged, with long hair and a bushy tail.

Terriers are small dogs of agile and light build, short muzzles, and very highly arched skulls. The brains are large, and the intelligence and educability extraordinarily high. The number of breeds is very large, the two extreme types being the smooth fox-terrier with compact shape, relatively long legs, and the long-bodied, short-legged Skye terrier, with long hair and pendent ears.

All the well-known breeds of dogs are highly artificial and their maintenance requires the constant care of the breeder in mating, and in rejecting aberrant progeny. The frequency with which even the most highly cultivated strains produce degenerate offspring is notorious, and is probably the reason for the profound belief in telegonic action asserted by most breeders. When amongst the litter of a properly mated, highly bred fox-terrier, pups are found with long bodies and thick short legs and feet, breeders are disposed to excuse the result by the supposition that the bitch has been contaminated by some earlier mating. There is ample evidence, however, that such departures from type are equally frequent when there was no possibility of earlier mismating (see Telegony).

Glossary of Points of the Dog.

Apple Head. A rounded head, instead of flat on top.

Blaze. A white mark up the face.

Brisket. The part of body in front of the chest.

Brush. The tail, usually applied to sheepdogs.

Butterfly Nose. A spotted nose.

Button Ear. Where the tip falls over and covers the orifice.

Cat Foot. A short round foot, knuckles high and well developed.

Cheeky. When the cheek bumps are strongly defined.

Chest. Underneath a dog from brisket to belly.

Chops. The pendulous lip of the bulldog.

Cobby. Well ribbed up, short and compact in proportion.

Couplings. Space between tops of shoulder blades and tops of hip joints.

Cow Hocks. Hocks that turn in.

Dew Claw. Extra claw, found occasionally on all breeds.

Dewlap. Pendulous skin under the throat.

Dish Faced. When nose is higher than muzzle at the stop.

Dudley Nose. A yellow or flesh-coloured nose.

Elbow. The joint at the top of the forearm.

Feather. The hair at the back of the legs and under the tail.

Flag. A term for the tail, applied to a setter.

Flews. The pendulous lips of the bloodhound and other breeds.

Forearm. Part of foreleg extending from elbow to pastern.

Frill. A mass of hair on the chest, especially on collies.

Hare Foot. A long narrow foot, carried forward.

Haw. Red inside eyelid, shown in bloodhounds and St Bernards.

Height. Measured at the shoulder, bending head gently down.

Hocks. The hock joints.

Hucklebones. Tops of the hip joints.

Knee. The joint attaching fore-pastern and forearm.

Leather. The skin of the ear.

Occiput. The projecting bone or bump at the back of the head.

Overshot. The upper teeth projecting beyond the under.

Pastern. Lowest section of leg, below the knee or hock.

Pig Jaw. Exaggeration of overshot.

Pily. A term applied to soft coat.

Rose Ear. Where the tip of ear turns back, showing interior.

Septum. The division between the nostrils.

Smudge Nose. A nose which is not wholly black, but not spotted.

Stifles. The top joints of the hind legs.

Stop. The indentation below the eyes, most prominent in bulldogs.

Tulip Ear. An erect or pricked ear.

Undershot. The lower teeth projecting in front of the upper ones.

(W. B.; P. C. M.)

DOGE (a modified form of the Ital. duca, Lat. dux, a leader, or duke), the title of the chief magistrate in the extinct republics of Venice and Genoa.

In Venice the office of doge was first instituted about 700. John the Deacon, referring to this incident in his Chronicon Venetum, written about 1000, says “all the Venetian cities (omnes Venetiae) determined that it would be more honourable henceforth to be under dukes than under tribunes.” The result was that the several tribunes were replaced by a single official who was called a doge and who became the head of the whole state. The first doge was Paolo Lucio Anafesto, and some authorities think that the early doges were subject to the authority of the emperors of Constantinople, but in any case this subordination was of short duration. The doge held office for life and was regarded as the ecclesiastical, the civil and the military chief; his duties and prerogatives were not defined with precision and the limits of his ability and ambition were practically the limits of his power. About 800 his independence was slightly diminished by the appointment of two assistants for judicial work, but these officers soon fell into the background and the doge acquired a greater and more irresponsible authority. Concurrently with this process the position was entrusted to members of one or other of the powerful Venetian families, while several doges associated a son with themselves in the ducal office. Matters reached a climax after the fall of the Orseole family in 1026. In 1033, during the dogeship of Dominico Flabianico, this tendency towards a hereditary despotism was checked by a law which decreed that no doge had the right to associate any member of his family with himself in his office, or to name his successor. It was probably at this time also that two councillors were appointed to advise the doge, who must, moreover, invite the aid of prominent citizens when discussing important matters of state. In 1172 a still more important change was introduced. The ducal councillors were increased in number from two to six; universal suffrage, which theoretically still existed, was replaced by a system which entrusted the election of the doge to a committee of eleven, who were chosen by a great council of 480 members, the great council being nominated annually by twelve persons. When a new doge was chosen he was presented to the people with the formula “this is your doge, if it please you.” Nominally the citizens confirmed the election, thus maintaining as a constitutional fiction the right of the whole people to choose their chief magistrate. Five years 380 later this committee of eleven gave way to a committee of forty who were chosen by four persons selected by the great council. After the abdication of Doge Pietro Ziani in 1229 two commissions were appointed which obtained a permanent place in the constitution and which gave emphatic testimony to the fact that the doge was merely the highest servant of the community. The first of these commissions consisted of five Correttori della promissione ducale, whose duty was to consider if any change ought to be made in the terms of the oath of investiture (promissione) administered to each incoming doge, this oath, which was prepared by three officials, being a potent factor in limiting the powers of the doge. The second commission consisted of three inquisitori sopra il doge defunto, their business being to examine and pass judgment upon the acts of a deceased doge, whose estate was liable to be mulcted in accordance with their decision. In consequence of a tie at the election of 1229 the number of electors was increased from forty to forty-one. The official income of the doge was never large, and from early times many holders of the office were engaged in trading ventures. One of the principal duties of the doge was to celebrate the symbolic marriage of Venice with the sea. This was done by casting a precious ring from the state ship, the “Bucentaur,” into the Adriatic. In its earlier form this ceremony was instituted to commemorate the conquest of Dalmatia by Doge Pietro Orseole II. in 1000, and was celebrated on Ascension day. It took its later and more magnificent form after the visit of Pope Alexander III. and the emperor Frederick I. to Venice in 1177.

New regulations for the elections of the doge were introduced in 1268, and, with some modifications, these remained in force until the end of the republic. Their object was to minimize as far as possible the influence of the individual families, and this was effected by a very complex machinery. Thirty members of the great council, chosen by lot, were reduced, again by lot, to nine; the nine chose forty and the forty were reduced by lot to twelve, who chose twenty-five. The twenty-five were reduced by lot to nine and the nine elected forty-five. Then the forty-five were reduced by lot to eleven, and the eleven chose the forty-one, who actually elected the doge. As the oligarchical element in the constitution developed, the more important functions of the ducal office were assigned to other officials, or to administrative boards, and he who had once been the pilot of the ship became little more than an animated figurehead, properly draped and garnished. On state occasions he was surrounded by an increasing amount of ceremonial, and in international relations he had the status of a sovereign prince of the first rank. But he was under the strictest surveillance. He must wait for the presence of other officials before opening despatches from foreign powers; he was forbidden to leave the city and was not allowed to possess any property in a foreign land. To quote H. F. Brown, “his pomp was splendid, his power limited; he appears as a symbol rather than as a factor in the constitution, the outward and visible sign of the impersonal oligarchy.” The office, however, was maintained until the closing days of the republic, and from time to time it was held by men who were able to make it something more than a sonorous title. The last doge was Lodovico Manin, who abdicated in May 1797, when Venice passed under the power of Napoleon.

In Genoa the institution of the doge dates from 1339. At first he was elected without restriction and by popular suffrage, holding office for life; but after the reform effected by Andrea Doria in 1528 the term of his office was reduced to two years. At the same time plebeians were declared ineligible, and the appointment of the doge was entrusted to the members of the great and the little councils, who employed for this purpose a machinery almost as complex as that of the later Venetians. The Napoleonic Wars put an end to the office of doge at Genoa.

See Cecchetti, Il Doge di Venezia (1864); Musatti, Storia della promissione ducale (Padua, 1888); and H. F. Brown, Venice: a Historical Sketch (1893).


DOG-FISH, a name applied to several species of the smaller sharks, and given in common with such names as hound and beagle, owing to the habit these fishes have of pursuing or hunting their prey in packs. The small-spotted dog-fish or rough hound (Scyllium canicula) and the large-spotted or nurse hound (Scyllium catulus) are also known as ground-sharks. They keep near the sea bottom, feeding chiefly on the smaller fishes and Crustacea, and causing great annoyance to the fishermen by the readiness with which they take bait. They differ from the majority of sharks, and resemble the rays in being oviparous. The eggs are enclosed in semi-transparent horny cases, known on the British coasts as “mermaids’ purses,” and these have tendril-like prolongations from each of the four corners, by means of which they are moored to sea-weed or some other fixed object near the shore, until the young dog-fish is ready to make its exit. The larger of these species attains a length of 4 to 5 ft., the smaller rarely more than 30 in. The picked dog-fish (Acanthias vulgaris, formerly known as Squalus acanthias) is pre-eminently the dog-fish. It is the most abundant of the British sharks, and occurs in the temperate seas of both northern, and southern hemispheres. It attains a length of 4 ft., but the usual length is 2 to 3 ft., the female, as in most sharks, being larger than the male. The body is round and tapering, the snout projects, and the mouth is placed ventrally some distance from the end of the snout. There are two dorsal fins, each of which is armed on its anterior edge with a sharp and slightly curved spine, hence its name “picked.” This species is viviparous, the female producing five to nine young at a birth; the young when born are 9 to 10 in. long and quite similar to the parents in all respects except size. It is gregarious, and is abundant at all seasons everywhere on the British coasts. In 1858 an enormous shoal of dog-fish, many square miles in extent, appeared in the north of Scotland, when, says J. Couch, “they were to be found floating in myriads on the surface of every harbour.” They are the special enemies of the fisherman, injuring his nets, removing the hooks from his lines, and spoiling his fish for the market by biting pieces out of them as they hang on his lines. They are however eaten, both fresh and salted, by fishermen, especially on the west coast of England, and they are sold regularly in the French markets.


DOGGER BANK, an extensive shoal in the North Sea, about 60 m. E. of the coast of Northumberland, England. Over its most elevated parts there is a depth of only about six fathoms, but the depth is generally from ten to twenty fathoms. It is well known as a fishing ground. The origin of the name is obscure; but the middle Dutch dogger signifies a trawling vessel, and was formerly applied generally to the two-masted type of vessel employed in the North Sea fisheries, and also to their crews (doggermen) and the fish taken (dogger-fish). Off the south end of the bank an engagement took place between English and Dutch fleets in 1781. On the night of the 21st of October 1904 during the Russo-Japanese War, some British trawlers of the Hull fishing fleet were fired upon by vessels of the Russian Baltic fleet under Admiral Rozhdestvensky on its voyage to the Far East, one trawler being sunk, other boats injured, two men killed and six wounded. This incident created an acute crisis in the relations between Russia and England for several days, the Russian version being that they had seen Japanese torpedo-boats, but on the 28th Mr Balfour, the English prime minister, announced that the tsar had expressed regret and that an international commission would investigate the facts with a view to the punishment of any responsible parties. The terms were settled on 25th November, the commission being composed of five officers (British, Russian, American and French, and one selected by them), to meet in Paris. On the 22nd of December the four original members, Vice-admiral Sir Lewis Beaumont, Vice-admiral Kaznakov (afterwards replaced by Vice-admiral Dubassov), Rear-admiral Davis and Vice-admiral Fournier, met and chose Admiral Baron von Spaun (Austria-Hungary) as the fifth. Their report was issued on the 25th of February 1905. While recognizing that the information received as to a possible attack led the admiral to mistake the trawlers for the enemy, the majority of the commissioners held Rozhdestvensky responsible for the firing and its results, and “being of opinion that there were no torpedo-boats either among the trawlers nor anywhere near” concluded that “the opening of fire was not justifiable,” though they absolved him and his squadron from 381 discredit either to their “military qualities” or their “humanity.” The affair ended in compensation being paid by the Russian government.


DOGGETT (or Dogget), THOMAS (d. 1721), English actor, was born in Dublin, and made his first appearance in London in 1691 as Nincompoop in D’Urfey’s Love for Money. In this part, and as Solon in the same author’s Marriage-hater matched, he gained the favour of the public. He followed Betterton to Lincoln’s Inn Fields, creating the part of Ben, especially written for him, in Congreve’s Love for Love, with which the theatre opened (1695); and next year played Young Hobb in his own The Country Wake. He was associated with Cibber and others in the management of the Haymarket and Drury Lane, and he continued to play comedy parts at the former until his retirement in 1713. Doggett is highly spoken of by his contemporaries, both as an actor and as a man, and is frequently referred to in The Tatler and Spectator. It was he who in 1715 founded the prize of “Doggett’s Coat and Badge” in honour of the house of Hanover, “in commemoration of his Majesty King George’s happy Accession to the Brittish Throne.” The prize was a red coat with a large silver badge on the arm, bearing the white horse of Hanover, and the race had to be rowed annually on the 1st of August on the Thames, by six young watermen who were not to have exceeded the time of their apprenticeship by twelve months. Although the first contest took place in 1715, the names of the winners have only been preserved since 1791. The race is still rowed each year, but under modified conditions.

See Thomas Doggett, Deceased (London, 1908).


DOGMA (Gr. δόγμα, from δόκεῖν, to seem; literally “that which seems, sc. good or true or useful” to any one), a term which has passed through many senses both general and technical, and is now chiefly used in theology. In Greek constitutional history the decision of—“that which seemed good to”—an assembly was called a δόγμα (i.e. decree), and throughout its history the word has generally implied a decision, or body of decisions or opinions, officially adopted and regarded by those who make it as possessing authority. As a technical term in theology, it has various shades of meaning according to the degree of authority which is postulated and the nature of the evidence on which it is based. Thus it has been used broadly of all theological doctrines, and also in a narrower sense of fundamental beliefs only, confession of which is insisted upon as a term of church communion. By sceptics the word “dogma” is generally used contemptuously, for an opinion grounded not upon evidence but upon assertion; and this attitude is so far justified from the purely empirical standpoint that theological dogmas deal with subjects which, by their very nature, are not susceptible of demonstration by the methods of physical science. Again, popularly, an unproved ex cathedra statement of any kind is called “dogmatic,” with perhaps an insinuation that it is being obstinately adhered to without, or beyond, or in defiance of, obtainable evidence. But again to “dogmatize” may mean simply to assert, instead of hesitating or suspending judgment.

Three pre-Christian or extra-ecclesiastical usages are recorded by a half-heretical churchman, Marcellus of Ancyra (in Eusebius of Caesarea, Contra Marcellum, i. 4);—words which Adolf Harnack has placed on the title-page of his larger History of Dogma. First there is a medical usage—empirical versus dogmatic medicine. On this old-world technical controversy we need not dwell. Secondly, there is a philosophical usage (e.g. Cicero, Seneca and others). First principles—speculative or practical—are δόγματα, Lat. decreta, scita or placita. The strongest statement regarding the inviolability of such dogmas is in Cicero’s Academics, ii. chap. 9. But we have to remember that this is dialogue; that the speaker, Hortensius, represents a more dogmatic type of opinion than Cicero’s own; that it is the maxims of “wisdom,” not of any special school, which are described as unchangeable.1 Marcellus’s third type of dogma is legal or political, the decree (says Marcellus) of the legislative assembly; but it might also be of the emperor (Luke ii. 1; Acts xvii. 7), or of a church gathering (Acts xvi. 4), or of Old Testament law; so especially in Philo the Jew, and in Flavius Josephus (even perhaps at Contra Apionem, i. 8).

While the New Testament knows only the political usage of δόγμα, the Greek Fathers follow one which is more in keeping with philosophical tradition. With few and early exceptions, such as we may note in the Epistle of Greek Fathers. Barnabas, chap, i., they confine the word to doctrine. Either dogma (sing.) or dogmas (plural) may be spoken of. Actually, as J. B. Lightfoot points out, the best Greek commentators among the Fathers are so dominated by this new usage, that they misinterpret Col. ii. 14 (20) and Eph. ii. 15 of Christian doctrines. Along with this goes the fundamental Catholic view of “dogmatic faith”—the expression is as old as Cyril of Jerusalem (died 386), if not older—according to which it consists in obedient assent to the voice of authority. All doctrines are “dogmas” to the Greek Fathers, not simply the central teachings of their system, as with the philosophers. Very noteworthy is Cyril of Jerusalem’s fourth Catechetical Discourse on the “Ten Dogmas” (we might render “Ten Great Doctrines”). The figure ten may be taken from the commandments,2 as in Gregory Nazianzen’s later, and more incidental, decalogue of belief. In any case, Cyril marks out the way for the subsequent division of the creeds into twelve or fourteen “articles” or heads of belief (see below). In saying that all doctrines rank as “dogmas” during the Greek period, we ought to add a qualification. They do so, in so far as they are held to be of authority. Clement of Alexandria or Origen would not call his speculations dogmas. Yet these audacious spirits start from a basis of authority, and insist upon ὀρθοτομία δογμάτων (Stromata, vii. 763). The “dogma” or “dogmas” of heretics are frequently mentioned by orthodox writers. There can be no question of confining even orthodox “dogma” to conciliar decisions in an age when definition is so incomplete; still, we do meet with references to the Nicene “dogma” (e.g. letter in Theodoret, H.E. ii. 15). But dogma is not yet technical for what is Christian or churchly. The word which emerges in Greek for that purpose is “orthodox,” “orthodoxy,” as in John of Damascus (d. 760), or as in the official title still claimed by the Holy Orthodox Church of the East.

Latin Fathers borrow the word “dogma,” though sparingly, and employ it in all the Greek usages. Something novel is added by Jerome’s phrase (in the De viris illustribus, cc. xxxi., cix.) ecclesiastica dogmata,—found again in the Latin Fathers. title of the treatise now generally ascribed to Gennadius, and occurring once more in another writer of southern Gaul.3 The phrase is a serviceable one, contrasting church teachings with heretical “dogmas.” But the main Latin use of dogma in patristic times is found in Vincent of Lerins (d. c. 450) in his brief but influential Commonitorium; again from southern Gaul. Medieval usages. Thereafter the usage gradually drops. In Thomas Aquinas4 it does not once occur. On the other hand Thomas has his own technical name—doctrine (sing.) or rather sacra doctrina; and this expression holds its ground, though the usage of Abelard, Theologia, was destined to an even more important place (see Theology). Another medieval usage of importance is the division of the creed into twelve articles corresponding to the number of the apostles, who, according to a legend already found in Rufinus (d. 410) On the Apostles’ Creed, composed that formula by contributing each a single sentence. 382 The division is found applied also to the “Nicene-Constantinopolitan” creed, both in East and West. Sometimes fourteen articles are detected (in either creed), 7 + 7; the sacred number twice over.5

The Reformation set up a new idea of faith, or recurred to one of the oldest of all. Faith was not belief in authoritative teachings; it was trust in the promises of God and in Jesus Christ as their fulfilment. But the Protestant view The Reformation. was apt to seem intangible, and the influence of the learned tradition was strong—for a time, indeed, doctrine was more cultivated among Protestants than in the Church of Rome. The result was a structure which is well named the Protestant scholasticism. The new view of faith is bracketed with the old, and practically neutralized by it; as was already the case in Melanchthon’s theological definitions in the 1552-1553 edition of Loci Communes, also printed in other works by him. This brings back again the Catholic view of “dogmatic faith.”

The word “article” for a time holds the field. Pope Leo X. in 1520 condemns among other propositions of Martin Luther’s the twenty-seventh—”Certum est in manu Papae, aut ecclesiae, prorsus non esse statuere articulos fidei (imo nec Article. leges morum seu bonorum operum).” The Augsburg Confession (1530) is divided into numerous “articles,” while Luther’s Lesser Catechism gathers Christianity under three “articles”—Creation, Redemption, Sanctification. Where moderns would speak of the “doctrine” of this or that, Lutherans especially, but also churchmen of other communions, wrote upon this or that “article.” Nikolaus Hunnius (διάσκεψις, &c., 1626), A. Quenstedt (c. 1685) and others—in a controversial interest, to blacken the Calvinists still more—distinguished which articles were “fundamental.” Modern Lutheranism (G. Thomasius, Dogmengeschichte, 1874-1876, influenced by T. F. D. Kliefoth 1839) speaks rather of “central dogmas”;6 and the Roman Catholic J. B. Heinrich7 is willing to speak of “fundamental dogmas,” those which must be known for salvation; those for which “implicit” faith does not suffice. When Addis and Arnold’s Catholic Dictionary denounces the conception of central dogmas, what they desire to exclude as uncatholic is the belief that dogmas lying upon the circumference may be questioned or perhaps denied.8 This suggests the great ambiguity both in Roman Catholic and Protestant writers of the 17th century as to the relation between “articles” and “dogmas.” Many writers in each communion felt that an “article” is a higher thing. Others, in each communion, made the identification absolute. Perhaps the Roman theologians of that age were more concerned than the Protestants to draw a line round necessary truths. This attempt was made by Dr Henry Holden (Div. Fidei Analysis, 1652) in connexion with the word “articles.9

Another term to be considered is decretum, the old Latin equivalent for δόγμα. Another of Luther’s assertions branded by the pope in 1520—the twenty-ninth—claimed liberty judicandi conciliorum decreta. On the other Decreta. hand, the Augsburg Confession protests its loyalty to the decretum of Nice. What Protestantism saw in the distant past, Trent naturally recognized in the present. Every one of its own findings is a decretum—except five, among the sacramental chapters, each of which is headed doctrina. Holden again quotes the (indefinite) decretum of the Council of Basel regarding the Immaculate Conception.

The word “dogma” was however to revive, and, with more or less success, to differentiate itself from “doctrine.” Early writers of the modern period, Protestant or Roman Catholic, use it frequently of heretics; thus the Augsburg Confession protests Dogmata in revived use. that the Protestants have carefully avoided nova dogmata. A Roman Catholic writer, Jan Driedo of Louvain, revives the reference to Ecclesiastica dogmata—De ecclesiasticis scripturis et dogmatibus (1533)—using the word, though not exclusively yet emphatically, of teachings extra canonem scripturae sacrae. Philip Melanchthon’s preface to his Loci communes (ed. 1535) protests that he has not expressed himself de ullo dogmate—on any point of doctrine—without careful consideration of what has been said before him. Richard Hooker (d. 1600) in bk. viii. of Eccl. Polity (pub. 1648 or perhaps 1651) quotes Thomas Stapleton, the Roman Catholic (De principiis doctrinalibus fidei, 1579), on the royal right or duty to enforce “dogmas,” and adds a gloss of his own—“very articles of the faith,”—a surprising and probably isolated usage. Many identified Dogmas and Articles by levelling down or broadening out; but Hooker levels up. The statement of the Council of Trent (1545-1562) may be quoted here. The Council will rely chiefly upon Scriptures10 in reformandis dogmatibus et instaurandis in ecclesia moribus; the Roman reply to the two sets of articuli of Augsburg, and the Roman counterpart to the (later) Protestant assertion that the Bible11 is the “only rule of faith and practice.” At Trent, therefore, once more, dogma means doctrine. It still means “doctrine” when the collected decreta of Trent bear on their title-page (1564) reference to an Index dogmatum et reformationis; but here “dogma” is already verging towards the narrower and more precise sense—truth defined by church authority. In other words, it is already edging away from its identification with (all or any) doctrines. On the Protestant side the identity is still clear in the Lutheran Formula of Concord (1577). This creed formulates its relation to Scripture over and over, as the one regula by which all dogmata are to be tried. That characteristic Protestant assertion had been still earlier pushed to the front in “Reformed” creeds, e.g. the First Helvetic Confession (1536), and more notably in the Second (1566).

Protestant creeds had clearly affirmed that nothing possessed authority which was not in Scripture: in a short time, Protestant theologians—following an impulse common to all Christian communions—define more sharply the Definition in Protestant scholasticism. identity of what is authoritative with the letter of Scripture, and call these entire contents dogmas. Here then, under Protestant scholasticism (Lutheran and Reformed), we have the first perfectly definite conception of dogma, and the most definite ever reached. Dogma is the whole text of the Bible, doctrinal, historical, scientific, or what not. Thus dogma is revealed and is infallibly true. Dogma is doctrine, viz. that body of doctrines and related facts which God Himself has propounded for dogmatic faith. Every true dogma, says Johann Gerhard12—the most representative figure of Lutheran scholasticism—occurs in plain terms somewhere in Scripture.

Over against these sweeping assumptions and deductions, the Roman Catholic Church had to build up its own statement of the basis of belief. Its early controversialists—like Driedo or Cardinal Bellarmine—meet assertions such as Roman Catholic replies. Gerhard’s with a flat denial. The great dogmas are not, literally and verbally, in the Bible. Along with the Bible we must accept unwritten traditions; the Council of Trent makes this perfectly clear. But not any and every tradition; only such as the church stamps with her approval. And that raises the question whether the church has not a further part to play? A. M. Fairbairn holds that D. Petavius’s great work De theologicis dogmatibus (especially the 1st vol., 1644) made the word “dogma” current for doctrines which were authoritative as formulated by the church. We must keep in mind, however, that the question is not simply one as to the meaning of a word. The equation holds, more firmly than ever; dogma=the contents of 383 faith. It has to be established on the Roman Catholic side that faith (or dogma; the two are inseparable) deals with divine truths historically revealed long ago but now administered with authority, according to God’s will, by the church. The Englishman Henry Holden (see above), the Frenchman Veronius (François Veron, S.J., 1575-1649) in his Règle générale de la foy catholique (1652), the German Philipp Neri Chrismann,13 in his Regula fidei catholicae et collectio dogmatum credendorum (1792),14 all work at this task. Dogmas or articles of faith (taken as synonymous) depend upon revelation in Scripture or tradition, as confirmed by the church whether acting in general councils or through the pope (in some undefined way; Holden)—in general councils or by universal consent (Chrismann; of bishops? the definite Gallican theory?). Veronius is willing to waive the difficult point of church infallibility as the Council of Trent did not define it. Holden insists strongly upon infallibility. Church traditions are infallible; and church dogmas reach us (from the original revelation) through an infallible medium, the Catholic Church, which the Protestants sadly lack. In Chrismann the word “dogma” has superseded the word “article”; Holden uses both, though “article” has the preponderance. All three writers seek to draw a sharp line round what is “of faith.” Hence in Chrismann (who is in other respects the most definite of the three) we have a view of dogma almost as clear-cut as that of the Protestant schoolmen. Dogmas are revealed; dogmas are infallible; the church is infallible on dogmas (for this statement he cites Muratori) and on nothing else.

This whole period of theology, Protestant and Roman Catholic, is statical. Men are defining and protecting the positions they have inherited; they do not think of progress. And yet the Roman Catholic Church had upon its hands one great unsettled question—the thesis of the Immaculate Conception of the Virgin. This became the standing type of an assertion which, while favoured by the church and on the very verge of dogma, was yet not a dogma15—till the definition came through Pius IX. in 1854. Here then the frontier of dogma had unquestionably moved forward. Its conception must become dynamic; there was need of some theory of development like J. H. Newman’s (1845). It does not happen, however, that the papal definition of 1854 employs the word “dogma”; that honour was withheld from the word until the Vatican decrees of 1870 affirmed the personal infallibility of the pope as divinitus revelatum dogma. With this, one line of tendency in Roman Catholic doctrine reached its climax; the pope and the council use “dogma” in a distinctive sense for what is definitely formulated by authority. But there is another line of tendency. The same council defines not indeed dogma but faith—inseparable from dogma—as16 (1) revealed, (a) in Scripture or (b) in unwritten tradition, and (2) taught by the church, (a) in formulated decrees, or (b) in her ordinary magisterium. This is a correction of Chrismann. Not only does the correction involve the substitution of papal authority for a universal consent of “pastors” and “the faithful”; it also deliberately ranks the unformulated teachings of the church on points of doctrine as no less de fide than those formulated. This amounts to a serious warning against trying to draw a definite line round dogma. The modern Roman Catholic temper must be eager to believe and eager to submit. New dogmas have been precipitated more than once during the 19th century; there may still be others held in solution in the church’s teaching. If so, these are likely one day to crystallize into full dogmas; and, even while not yet “declared,” they have the same claim upon faith.

Thus there seems to be a measure of uncertainty as to what the Church of Rome now calls “dogma”—only in part relieved by the distinction between “dogmas strictly” and mere “dogmatic truths.” Again, the assertion that the church is infallible upon some questions, not belonging to the area of revelation (properly so-called in Roman Catholic theology), destroys the identification of “dogmas” with “infallible certainties” which we noted both in the Protestant schoolmen and in Chrismann. The identification of dogma with revelation remains, with another distinction in support of it, between “material dogmas” (all scriptural or traditional truth) and “formal” or ecclesiastically formulated dogmas.17 On the other hand, there is absolute certainty on a point long disputed. Questions about church authority are henceforth questions about the pope’s authority. What he calls heresy, under the sanction of excommunication or that more formal excommunication known as anathema, is heresy. What he finds it necessary to condemn even in milder terms as bad doctrine is infallibily condemned; that is certain, Roman Catholic theologians tell us, though not yet de fide.

Finally we have to glance at a new list of definitions which perhaps in some cases seek more or less to formulate modern Protestant ideas, but which in general represent rather the world of disinterested historical scholarship. That world of the learned offers us non-dogmatic definitions, drawn up from the outside; definitions which do not share the root assumptions either of Catholicism or of post-Reformation Protestant orthodoxy. It might have been best to surrender the term “dogma” to the dogmatists; but few scholars have consented to do so.

1. We may brush aside the view18 for which J. C. Döderlein, J. A. A. Tittmann, and more recently C. F. A. Kahnis are quoted. According to this definition, “dogma” means the opinion of some individual theologian of distinction. That might be a conceivable development of usage. It has been said that persons who dislike authority often show great devotion to “authorities”; and the word dogma might make a similar transition. But, in its case, such a usage would constitute a violent break with the past.

2. Though there is no formal definition in the passage, it is worth recording that, towards the end of his Chief End of Revelation (1881), A. B. Bruce sharply contrasts “dogmas of theology” with “doctrines of faith.”19 While he manifests no wholesale dislike to doctrine, such as is seen in the Broad Church school, Bruce inverts the Catholic estimate. Dogma stands lowest, not highest. It seems hardly better than a caput mortuum, out of relation to the original faith or the original facts that are held to have given it birth. There is more than a touch of Matthew Arnold in this; though, while Arnold held nothing in religious experience beyond morality to be objectively genuine, Bruce believed in God’s “gracious” purpose.20

3. Much more like Chrismann’s view is the “generally accepted position” among Protestant scholars, as its leading representative to-day, F. Loofs, has called it;21 the doctrine enforced within any one church community is dogma. This definition is significant. It means that historians recognize the peculiar importance of those beliefs which are constitutive of church agreement; and it finds some support from the philosophical and political associations of ancient “dogma.” Also Roman Catholic writers could accept the definition in so far as 384 their own church’s authoritative teachings are concerned. But can a historian separate the opinions which rose to authority in the church from the other opinions which succumbed? Or the accepted modifications of a theory from those which were rejected? Again, can we substitute church authority for that which is always the background of “dogma” as interpreted from inside—divine authority?22 Or, again, can we say definitely which doctrines are “enforced” in Protestant communions and so are “dogmas”? It has even been asserted by A. Schweizer (Christliche Glaubenslehre nach prot. Grundsätzen, 1863-1872) that Protestantism ought not to speak of dogmas at all, except as things of its imperfect past.23 And historically it seems plain that—since the age of Protestant scholasticism—there has been nothing in Protestant church life to which the name “dogma” can be assigned, without dropping a good deal of its original connotation. Dogma is no longer24 held to be of immediate divine authority. Hence Catholic, and scientific or historical, definitions of dogma are on different planes. They never properly meet.25

4. A. Harnack varies in his usage. He is not prepared to exclude the great medieval pronouncements, or the modern Roman Catholic definitions, from the list of dogmas; but on the whole he prefers to keep in view “one historical species”—Loofs suggests that he ought perhaps rather to say one individual type—that greatest group of Christian dogmas which “was created by the Greek spirit upon the soil of the gospel” (Hist. of Dogma, Eng. tr., vol. i. pp. 17, 21, 22). Thus Harnack agrees with Catholic theologians in holding that, in the fullest sense, there is no dogma except the Catholic. He differs, of course, in holding dogma to be obsolete now. While Protestants, he thinks, have undermined it by a deeper conception of faith,26 Roman Catholics have come to attach more value to obedience and “implicit belief” than to knowledge; and even the Eastern Church lives to-day by the cultus more than by the vision of supernatural truth. Again, Harnack gravely differs from Catholic dogmatists in assigning a historical origin to what in their view is essentially divine—supernatural in origin, supernatural even in its declaration by the church. If they do not deny that Greek philosophy has entered into Christian doctrine, they consider it a colourless medium used in fixing the contents of revelation. In all this, Harnack speaks from a point of view of his own. He is no friend of Catholicism or of dogma. Perhaps his detachment makes for clearness of thought; Loofs’s friendliness towards dogma, but in a much humbler sense than the Catholic, involves the risk of confusion.

Both Loofs and Harnack contrast with “dogma” the work of individual thinkers, calling the latter “theology.” Hence they and other authorities wish to see “History of Dogma” supplemented by “Histories of Theology.” Our usual English phrase “History of Doctrine” ignores that distinction.

5. A place must be made for the definition proposed by a philosopher, J. M. E. McTaggart. In Some Dogmas of Religion (1906), he uses “dogma” of affirmations, whether supported by reasoning or merely asserted, if they claim “metaphysical” value, metaphysics being defined as “the systematic study of the ultimate nature of reality.” Briefly, a dogma is what claims ultimate, not relative, truth. This agrees with one feature in ordinary literary usage—the contrast between “dogmatizing” and suspending judgment, or taking refuge in conjecture. But it ignores another quality marked out in common speech—that in respect of which “dogmatism” is opposed to proof. Also it omits the political or social reference so much insisted on by Loofs and others. There are materials for misunderstanding here.

6. A very different view is implied in the symbolo-fidéisme of Athanase Sabatier and some other French Protestants: religious dogma consists of symbols in contrast to a scientific gnosis of reality. This is a radical version of the early Protestant idea of faith, and yields a theory of what in English we call “doctrine.” More precisely, it is a theory of what doctrine ought to be, or a deeper analysis of its nature; it is not a statement of what doctrine has been held to be in the past. And therefore the definition does not proceed from historical scholarship. Nor yet does it throw light upon “dogma,” if dogma is to be distinguished—somehow—from doctrine.

Literature.—Matthew Arnold’s Literature, and Dogma (1873) is important for literary usage: cf. A. B. Bruce, op. cit. Classical and early Christian usages, E. Hatch, Hibbert Lect. (1888), pp. 119, 120; J. B. Lightfoot on Colossians ii. 14 (20); W. Schmidt, Dogmatik, vol. i. (1895)—many quotations in extenso; C. Stange, Das Dogma und seine Beurteilung in der neueren Dogmengeschichte (1898)—a pamphlet protesting against what Loofs terms the “generally accepted view.” Articles in the (Roman Catholic) Kirchenlexikon of Wetzer and Welte, 2nd ed; (by Hergenröther and Kaulen), 1882-1901, Arts. “Dogmatik” (J. Köstlin), “Dogmengeschichte” (F. Loofs) in Herzog-Hauck’s Encykl. f. prot. Theol. (vol. iv., 1898). Art. “Glaubensartikel” in previous ed. (Herzog-Plitt, vol. v., 1879) by C. F. Kling and L. F. Schoeberlein. For works on the history of dogma see Theology. See also Dogmatic Theology.

(R. Ma.)

1 Sextus Empiricus (c. a.d. 240) denounces all forms of dogmatism, even perhaps the scepticism of definite denial. Blaise Pascal and Immanuel Kant, among others, have Sextus’s grouping in mind when they oppose themselves to “dogmatism” and “scepticism” alike. A new shade of condemnation for dogmas as things merely assumed comes to be noticeable here, especially in Kant.

2 But there is a variant reading—eleven—supported by a different arrangement.

3 Quoted by C. H. Turner in Journal of Theol. Studies (Oct. 1906, and cf. Oct. 1905). G. Elmenhorst’s statement, that Musanus and Didymus in an earlier age wrote treatises with the name De ecclesiasticis dogmatibus, seems a plain blunder, if we compare Jerome’s Latin with Eusebius’s Greek.

4 ”So viel uns bekannt”—J. B. Heinrich, “Dogma,” in Wetzer and Welte’s (Catholic) Kirchenlexikon.

5 See G. Hoffmann, Fides implicita, vol. i. (1903), pp. 82, &c.; and cf. the 17th-century creed of Bishop Mogilas adopted by the whole Greek Church.

6 A. Schweizer’s Protestant Central Dogmas (1854-1856) was an historical study of Reformed, i.e. Calvinist-Zwinglian theology.

7 “Dogma,” &c., in Wetzer and Welte’s Kirchenlexikon.

8 The distinction of pure and mixed articles—those of revelation and those taught in common by revelation and natural theology—reappears in modern Roman Catholic theology as a distinction between pure and mixed dogmas.

9 Luther’s Schmalkalden Articles and the Thirty-Nine Articles of the Church of England should also be mentioned.

10 That seems to be what is meant.

11 Early Protestantism lived too much in the thought of justification to mark out the boundaries of creed with this scholastic precision.

12 Loci communes (1610-1622), on Interpretation of Sacred Scripture, ix. 149.

13 Three writers mentioned in Wetzer’s and Welte’s Kirchenlexikon.

14 Also quoted as having appeared 1745, but that is an error; he quotes F. A. Blau, On the Rule of Faith (Mainz, 1780). See further the sketch of Chrismann in Allgemeine deutsche Biographie, supplement.

15 G. Perrone, e.g. De immaculato B. V. Mariae conceptu; an dogmatico decreto definiri possit? (1847).

16 These divisions and subdivisions are not numbered in the Decrees, as for clearness they have been numbered above.

17 Three zones apparently (1) the church’s formal decrees, (2) the church’s general teaching, (3) points of revelation which the church may not yet have overtaken. Per contra, much that was only “implicit” in the deposit of faith has become “explicit” in dogma. (The reader must note that “implicit” is used here in a different sense from that referred to earlier in this article. Here, church dogma has explicated what was implicit in revelation. There, the unlearned accept by implication, i.e. by a general acceptance of church belief and teaching, dogmas they perhaps have never heard of. Both usages are current in Roman Catholic theology.)

18 Or the view of D. Schenkel, that dogma is what is enforced by civil and criminal law.

19 Cf. also preface to 2nd ed. pp. ix., x.

20 Cf. pp. 279, 280; the undogmatic words of religious emotion are “thrown out,” not at “a cloud mistaken for a mountain,” but at a “majestic” and “veritable mountain range.”

21 See art. “Dogmengeschichte” in Herzog-Hauck’s Realencykl. für prot. Theol. Cf. also Prof. Loofs’s Leitfaden zum Studium der Dogmengeschichte.

22 It should be noted that Loofs does not speak merely as a historian. He places himself in a sense within the dogmatic circle by his declaration that guidance is to be expected from developments—in a “free Protestant evangelical spirit”—out of the old confessions of the Protestant churches. This belief may be called what Loofs has called Harnack’s definition of dogma—individuell berechtigt, and perhaps nur individuell. Others, who hold no less strongly to theological progress by evolution, not revolution, will hesitate to grant that the line of advance passes through the symbolical books.

23 Cf. Dogmatic Theology, and the footnote above.

24 Unless in certain confined circles.

25 When Loofs declares (art. “Dogmengeschichte” in Herzog-Hauck’s Realencykl., 1898) that dogma is historically equivalent to regula fidei, he is in flat contradiction to the “dogma” of his own church as stated in the Formula of Concord. See above.

26 Here perhaps Harnack speaks from inside his own type of religious faith; but not from inside dogma.


DOGMATIC THEOLOGY, the name usually given in modern times to the systematic study of Christian doctrine or of dogma in the widest sense possible (see Dogma). Among the many terms used in the early days of Protestant theology to denote the great systems, three deserve special notice—Thetic Theology, Positive Theology, Dogmatic Theology. “Thetic theology” is connected with academic life. It recalls the literal and original meaning of graduation “theses,” also Martin Luther’s memorable theses and the replies made to him. “Thetic theology,” a name now obsolete, naturally included the whole of doctrine, i.e. whatever would be argued for or against; and “dogmatic theology” came into use absolutely as a synonymous expression. “Positive theology” is also a term employed by Petau (De theologicis dogmatibus, 1644-1650), and more or less current even to-day in Roman Catholic scholarship (e.g. Joseph Turmel, Histoire de la théologie positive, 1906). “Dogmatic theology” proved to have most vitality in it. After some partial precedents of early date (e.g. F. Turrianus—one of the papal theologians at the Council of Trent,—Dogmaticus (liber?) de Justificatione, 1557), the title was used in 1659 by the Lutheran Lukas Friedrich Reinhard (1623-1688), professor of theology at Altdorf (Synopsis theologiae dogmaticae, eds. 1659, 1660, 1661), and his influence is already seen on the Reformed theologian Andreas van Essen (Essenius, 1618-1677), who, in 1659, published his Systematis theologiae pars prior, the tomus secundus in 1661, but Systematis dogmatici tomus tertius et ultimus in 1665. The same author published a shorter Compendium theologiae dogmaticum in 1669. A. M. Fairbairn holds that it was the fame of Petau which gave currency to the new coinage “dogmatic theology”; and though the same or kindred phrases had been used repeatedly by writers of less influence since Reinhard and Essenius, F. Buddeus (Institutiones theol. dogmat., 1723; Compendium, 1728) is held to have given the expression its supremacy. Noël Alexandre, the Gallican divine, possibly introduced it in the Roman Catholic Church (1693; Theologia dogmatica et moralis). Both Roman Catholic and Protestant authorities agree that the expression was connected with the new habit of distinguishing dogmatics from Christian ethics or moral theology, though A. Schweizer denies this of Reinhard. In another direction dogmas and dogmatic theology were also contrasted with truths of reason and natural theology.1 F. E. D. Schleiermacher, in his Kurze Darstellung des theologischen Studiums, and again in his great System, Der christliche Glaube ... dargestellt, ingeniously proposed to treat dogmatic as an historical statement, or report, of beliefs held in 385 the writer’s communion at the time of writing. He also insisted, however, upon personal conviction in writers on dogmatic. The expression Glaubenslehre—doctrine of faith—which he did much to bring into a wider currency, and which Schweizer, the most loyal of all his disciples, holds to be alone fitted for Protestant use, emphasizes the latter requirement. But “dogmatic” has also continued in use among Protestant theologians of the Left no less than among the orthodox. When we consider the different attitude towards dogma of Roman Catholicism, we feel constrained to question whether the expression “dogmatic theology” can be equally suitable for both communions. Roman theologians may properly define dogmatic as the scientific study of dogmas; Protestant scholars have come to use “dogma” in ways which make that impossible. Indeed, many of them bid us regard “dogmatic” as falling under the history of theology and not of dogma (see Dogma). Still, usage is decisive. It will be impossible to uproot the phrase “dogmatic theology” among Protestants. When A. Harnack2 praises Schleiermacher’s description of dogmatic as “historical,” he rather strains the meaning of the remark, and creates fresh confusion. Harnack’s point is that “dogmatic theology” ought to be used in a sense corresponding to what he regards as the true meaning of “dogma”—Christian belief in its main traditional outlines. This claim is an innovation, and finds no precedent in Schleiermacher. The latter regarded dogmatic as stating in scientific connexion “the doctrine prevailing in a (single) Christian church at a given time”—as “not merely historical (geschichtlich),” but containing an “apologetic element”—as “not confined to the symbolical books, but” including all—even local expressions of the common faith which produce no breach of harmony—and as having for its “very business and task” to “purify and perfect” doctrine (Der christliche Glaube, § 19). The one merit which “dogmatic” may claim as a term in Protestant theology is that it contrasts positive statements of belief with mere reports (e.g. Biblical theology; history of doctrine) of what has been taught in the past. (See Dogma; and Theology.)


1 For “mixed articles” see Dogma.

2 Hist. of Dogma; Eng. trans. i. p. 21, footnote.


DOGRA, a race of Hill Rajputs in India, inhabiting Kashmir and the adjacent valleys of the Himalayas. They form the ruling race in Kashmir. “Dogra” is the name given to the country round Jammu, and is said to be derived from a word meaning the “two lakes,” as the original home of the Dogra people was situated between the lakes of Siroensar and Mansar. There are numerous castes in the Dogra country, and the Hindu, Mahommedan and Sikh religions are represented. All, whether Hindus or Mahommedans, whether high-born Rajputs of the Maharaja’s caste or low-born menials, are known as Dogras. At the time of the first Sikh War the Dogras had a great reputation as soldiers, which they have worthily maintained in the ranks of the Indian native army. They are classed as fighting men with the Sikh and Punjabi Mahommedan. They distinguished themselves in the Hunza Nagar Expedition and the affair at Chilas in 1891, and in the Tirah campaign of 1897-98.


DOGS, ISLE OF, a district of London, England, on the north bank of the Thames, which surrounds it on three sides. It falls within the metropolitan borough of Poplar. It is occupied by docks, riverside works and poor houses. The origin of the name is not known. The suggestion that it is corrupted from the Isle of Docks falls to the ground on the question of chronology; another, that there were royal kennels here, is improbable, though they were situated at Deptford in the 17th century. (See Poplar.)


DOG-TOOTH (the French dent-de-scie), in architecture, an ornament found in the mouldings of medieval work of the commencement of the 12th century, which is thought to have been introduced by the Crusaders from the East. The earliest example is found in the hall at Rabbath-Ammon in Moab (c. a.d. 614) built by the Sassanians, where it decorates the arch moulding of the blind arcades and the string courses. In the apse of the church at Murano, near Venice, it is similarly employed. In the 12th and 13th centuries it was further elaborated with carving, losing therefore its primitive form, but constituting a most beautiful decorative feature. In Elgin cathedral the dog-tooth ornament in the archivolt becomes a four-lobed leaf, and in Stone church, Kent, a much more enriched type of flower. The term has been supposed to originate in a resemblance to the dog-tooth violet, but the original idea of a projecting tooth is a sufficient explanation.


DOGWOOD (i.e. wood of the dog-tree; referred by the New English Dictionary to “dog,” apparently as indicating inferiority; but by others connected with “dag,” “dagger,” and by Prior with A.S. dolc, a brooch-pin), the name applied to plants of the genus Cornus, of the natural order Cornaceae. The common dogwood, prick-wood, skewer-wood, cornel or dogberry, C. sanguinea, is a shrub reaching a height of 8 or 9 ft., common in hedges, thickets and plantations in Great Britain. Its branches are dark red; the leaves egg-shaped, pointed, about 2 in. long by 1½ broad, and turning red in autumn; the flowers are dull white, in terminal clusters. The berries are small, of a black-purple, bitter and one-seeded, and contain a considerable percentage of oil, which in some places is employed for lamps, and in the manufacture of soap. The wood is white and very hard, and like that of other species of the genus is used for making ladder-spokes, wheel-work, skewers, forks and other implements, and gunpowder charcoal. The red berries of the dwarf species, C. suecica, of the Scottish Highlands, are eaten, and are reputed to be tonic in properties. C. mas, the Cornelian cherry, a native of Europe and Northern Asia, bears a pulpy and edible fruit, which when unripe contains much tannin. It is a good garden plant, as is also the North American species C. florida, one of the commonest trees of the deciduous forests of the middle and southern states. Professor C. S. Sargent (Silva of North America) describes it as “one of the most beautiful of the small trees of the American forests, which it enlivens in early spring with the whiteness of its floral leaves and in autumn with the splendour of its foliage and the brilliancy of its fruit. No tree is more desirable in the garden or park in regions where the summer’s sun is sufficiently hot to ensure the production of its flowers through the perfect development of the branchlets.” The Jamaica dogwood, the root-bark of which is poisonous, is the species Piscidia Erythrina, of the natural order Leguminosae.


DOL, a town of north-western France, in the department of Ille-et-Vilaine, 36 m. N. of Rennes on the Western railway. Pop. (1906) 3543. Dol is situated to the south-west of the rich agricultural district known as the marsh of Dol, where market-gardening is especially flourishing. The streets are still rendered picturesque by houses of the 14th and 15th centuries, which form deep arcades by the projection of their upper storeys: and, high above all, rises the grey granite of the cathedral, mainly of the 13th century, which in the middle ages ranked as the metropolitan church of all Brittany, and still keeps fresh the name of Bishop St Samson, who, having fled, as the legend tells, from the Saxon invaders of England, selected this spot as the site of his monastery. To the architect it is interesting for the English character of its design, and to the antiquarian, for its stained-glass windows of the 13th century, and for the finely sculptured tomb of Bishop Thomas James (d. 1504). About 1½ m. from the town is the pierre de Champ Dolent, a menhir some 30 ft. in height; not far off stands the great granite rock of Mont Dol, over 200 ft. in height, surmounted by the statue and chapel of Notre-Dame de l’Espérance. Dol has trade in grain, vegetables and fruit, tobacco is cultivated in the neighbourhood and there are salt-marshes. Tanning and leather-currying are carried on in the town. The town was unsuccessfully besieged by William the Conqueror, taken by Henry II. in 1164 and by Guy de Thouars in 1204. In 1793 it witnessed the defeat of the republican forces by the Vendeans who had taken refuge within its walls. The bishopric established in the 6th century was suppressed in 1790.


DOLABELLA, PUBLIUS CORNELIUS, Roman general and son-in-law of Cicero, was born about 70 b.c. He was by far the most important of the Dolabellae, a family of the patrician gens Cornelia. In the civil wars he at first took the side of Pompey, but afterwards went over to Caesar, and was present at the battle of Pharsalus. To escape the urgent demands of his creditors, he 386 introduced (as one of the tribunes) a bill proposing that all debts should be cancelled. This was strongly resisted by his colleagues, and led to serious disturbances in the city. Caesar, on his return from Alexandria, seeing the expediency of removing Dolabella from Rome, took him as one of his generals in the expedition to Africa and Spain. On Caesar’s death Dolabella seized the insignia of the consulship (which had already been conditionally promised him), and, by making friends with Brutus and the other assassins, was confirmed in his office. When, however, M. Antonius offered him the command of the expedition against the Parthians and the province of Syria he changed sides at once. His journey to the province was marked by plundering, extortion and the murder of C. Trebonius, proconsul of Asia, who refused to allow him to enter Smyrna. He was thereupon declared a public enemy and superseded by C. Cassius (the murderer of Caesar), who attacked him in Laodicea. On the capture of the place, Dolabella ordered one of his soldiers to kill him (43). Throughout his life he was a profligate and a spendthrift.

See Cicero’s Letters (ed. Tyrrell and Purser); G. Boissier, Cicero and his Friends (Eng. trans., 1897); Orelli, Onomasticon Tullianum; Dio Cassius xli. 40, xlii. 29, xliii. 51, xliv. 22, xlvi. 40, xlvii. 30; Appian, Bell. civ. iii. 7, iv. 60.


DOLBEN, JOHN (1625-1686), English divine, was the son of William Dolben (d. 1631), prebendary of Lincoln and bishop-designate of Gloucester. He was educated at Westminster under Richard Busby and at Christ Church, Oxford. He fought on the royalist side at Marston Moor, 1644. Subsequently he took orders and maintained in private the proscribed Anglican service. At the Restoration he became canon of Christ Church (1660) and prebendary of St Paul’s, London (1661). As dean of Westminster (1662-1683) he opposed an attempt to bring the abbey under diocesan rule. In 1666 he was made bishop of Rochester, and in 1683 archbishop of York; he distinguished himself by reforming the discipline of the cathedrals in these dioceses. His son John Dolben (1662-1710) was a barrister and politician; he was M.P. for Liskeard from 1707 to 1710 and manager of Sacheverell’s impeachment in 1709.


DOLCE, LUDOVICO, or Luigi (1508-1568 or 1569), Italian writer, was a native of Venice, and belonged to a family of honourable tradition but decadent fortune. He received a good education, and early undertook the task of maintaining himself by his pen. Translations from Greek and Latin epics, satires, histories, plays and treatises on language and art followed each other in rapid succession, till the whole number amounted to upwards of seventy works. But he is now mainly memorable as the author of Marianna, a tragedy from the life of Herod, which was recast in French by Tristan and by Voltaire, and still keeps a place on the stage. Four licentious comedies, Il Ragazzo (1541), Il Capitano (1545), Il Marito (1560), Il Ruffiano (1560), and seven of Seneca’s tragedies complete the list of his dramatic efforts. In one epic—to translate the title-page—“he has marvellously reduced into ottava rima and united into one narrative the stories of the Iliad and the Aeneid”; in another he devotes thirty-nine cantos to a certain Primaleone, son of Palmerius; in a third he celebrates the first exploits of Count Orlando; and in a fourth he sings of the Paladin Sacripante. A life of the emperor Charles V. and a similar account of Ferdinand I., published respectively in 1560 and 1566, are his chief historical productions; and among his minor treatises it is enough to mention the Osservazioni sulla lingua volgare (1550); the Dialogo della pittura (1557); and the Dialogo nel quale si ragiona del modo di accrescar la memoria (1552).


DOLCI, CARLO, or Carlino (1616-1686), Italian painter, was born in Florence in May 1616. He was the grandson of a painter on the mother’s side, and became a disciple of Jacopo Vignali; and when only eleven years of age he attempted a whole figure of St John, and a head of the infant Christ, which received extraordinary approbation. He afterwards painted a portrait of his mother, and displayed a new and delicate style which brought him into notice, and procured him extensive employment at Florence (from which city he hardly ever moved) and in other parts of Italy. Dolci used his pencil chiefly in sacred subjects, and bestowed much labour on his pictures. In his manner of working he was remarkably slow. It is said that his brain was affected by seeing Luca Giordano, in 1682, despatch more business in four or five hours than he could have executed in as many months, and that he hence fell into a state of hypochondria, which compelled him to relinquish his art, and soon brought him to the grave. His works are not very numerous. He generally painted in a small size, although there are a few pictures by him as large as life. He died in Florence in January 1686, leaving a daughter (Agnese), who arrived at some degree of excellence in copying the works of her father.

Carlo Dolci holds somewhat the same rank in the Florentine that Sassoferrato does in the Roman school. Without the possession of much genius, invention or elevation of type, both these artists produced highly wrought pictures, extremely attractive to some tastes. The works of Dolci are easily distinguishable by the delicacy of the composition, and by an agreeable tint of colour, improved by judicious management of the chiaroscuro, which gives his figures a striking relief; he affected the use of ultramarine, much loaded in tint. “His pencil,” says Pilkington, “was tender, his touch inexpressibly neat, and his colouring transparent; though he has often been censured for the excessive labour bestowed on his pictures, and also for giving his carnations more of the appearance of ivory than the look of flesh.” All his best productions are of a devout description; they frequently represent the patient suffering of Christ or the sorrows of the Mater Dolorosa. Dolci was, in fact, from early youth, exceedingly pious; it is said that during passion week every year he painted a half-figure of the Saviour. His sacred heads are marked with pathetic or at least strongly sentimental emotion. There is a want of character in his pictures, and his grouping lacks harmonious unison, but the general tone accords with the idea of the passion portrayed. Among the best works of this master are the “St Sebastian”; the “Four Evangelists,” at Florence; “Christ Breaking the Bread,” in the marquess of Exeter’s collection at Burleigh; the “St Cecilia” in Dresden; an “Adoration of the Magi”; and in especial “St Andrew praying before his Crucifixion,” in the Pitti gallery, his most important composition, painted in 1646; also several smaller pictures, which are highly valued, and occupy honourable places in the richest galleries.

(W. M. R.)

DOLDRUMS (a slang term, dol = dull; cf. tantrum), the region of calms near the equator where the trade-winds die away, a region of constant precipitation in which the weather is close, hot, vaporous and extremely dispiriting. In the old days of sailing vessels, a becalmed ship sometimes lay helpless for weeks. A letter from this region saying “we are in the doldrums” (“in the dumps”) seems to have been regarded as written from “The Doldrums,” which thus became the name of this undesirable locality.


DÔLE, a town of eastern France, capital of an arrondissement in the department of Jura, 29 m. S.E. of Dijon on the Paris-Lyon railway. Pop. (1906) 11,166. It occupies the slope of a hill overlooking the forest of Chaux, on the right bank of the Doubs, and of the canal from the Rhone to the Rhine which accompanies that river. The streets, which in general are steep and narrow, contain many old houses recalling, in their architecture, the Spanish occupation of the town. The principal buildings are the church of Notre Dame, a Gothic structure of the 16th century; the college, once a Jesuit establishment, which contains the library and a museum of paintings and has a chapel of the Renaissance period; the Hôtel-Dieu and hôtel de ville, both 17th-century buildings; and the law court occupying an old convent of the Cordeliers. In the courtyard of the hôtel de ville there stands an old tower dating from the 15th century. The birth of Louis Pasteur (1822) in the town is commemorated by a monument, and there is also a monument to Jules Grévy. Dôle is the seat of a sub-prefect and has tribunals of first instance and of commerce and a communal college. Metal-founding and the manufacture of fire-pumps, kitchen-ranges and other iron goods, chemical products, machinery, leather, liqueurs and pastry, are among the industries. There is a good trade in agricultural produce and 387 live stock, and in wood, iron, coal and the stone of the vicinity. Wine is largely grown in the district.

Dôle, the ancient Dola, was in Roman times the meeting place of several roads, and considerable remains have been found there; in the later middle ages and till 1648 it was the capital of Franche Comté and seat of a parlement and a university; but in the year 1479 the town was taken by the forces of Louis XI., and so completely sacked that only the house of Jean Vurry, as it is still called, and two other buildings were left standing. It subsequently came into the hands of Maximilian of Austria, and in 1530 was fortified by Charles V. In 1668 and 1674 it was captured by the French and lost its parlement and its university, both of which were transferred by Louis XIV. to Besançon.


DOLE (from Old Eng. dal, cf. mod. “deal”), a portion, a distribution of gifts, especially of food and money given in charity. The derivation from O. Fr. doel, Late Lat. dolium, “grief,” suggested by the custom of funeral doles, is wrong. In early Christian days, St Chrysostom says: “doles were used at funerals to procure the rest of the soul of the deceased, that he might find his judge propitious.” The distribution of alms to the local poor at funerals was a universal custom in the middle ages. The amount of doles was usually stated in the will. Thus in 1399 Eleanor, duchess of Gloucester, ordered that fifteen poor men should carry torches at her funeral, “each having a gown and hood lined with white, breeches of blue cloth, shoes and a shirt, and twenty pounds amongst them.” Later doles usually took the form of bequests of land or money, the interest or rent of which was to be annually employed in charity. Often the distribution took place at the grave of the donor. Thus one William Robinson of Hull at his death in 1708 left money to buy annually a dozen loaves, costing a shilling each, to be given to twelve poor widows at his grave every Christmas. Lenten doles were also formerly common. A will of 1537 bade a barrel of white herrings and a case of red herrings be given yearly to the poor of Clavering, Essex, to help them tide over the fast. One or two London doles are still distributed, e.g. that of St Peter’s, Walworth, where a Christmas dinner is each year served to 300 parish poor in the crypt. No one under sixty is eligible, and the dinner is unique in that it is cooked in the church. A pilgrim’s dole of bread and ale can be claimed by all wayfarers at the Hospital of St Cross, Winchester. This is said to have been founded by William of Wykeham. Emerson, when visiting Winchester, claimed and received the dole. What were known as Scrambling Doles, so called because the meat and bread distributed were thrown among the poor to be scrambled for, were not uncommon in England. Such a dole existed at St Briavel’s, Gloucestershire, baskets of bread and cheese cut into small squares being thrown by the churchwardens from the gallery into the body of the church on Whit Sunday. At Wath near Ripon a testator in 1810 ordered that forty penny loaves should be thrown from the church leads at midnight on every Christmas eve. The best known dole in the United States is the “Leake Dole of Bread.” John Leake, a millionaire dying in 1792, left £1000 to Trinity Church, New York, the income to be laid out in wheaten loaves and distributed every Sabbath morning after service. The dole still survives, though the day has been altered to Saturday, each week sixty-seven loaves being given away.


DOLERITE (from Gr. δολερός, deceptive), in petrology, the name given by Haüy to those basaltic rocks which are comparatively coarse grained and nearly, if not quite, holocrystalline. As may be inferred from their highly crystalline state they are very often intrusive, and occur as dikes and sills, but many of them form lava flows. Their essential minerals are those of basalt, viz. olivine, augite and plagioclase felspar, while hornblende, ilmenite, apatite and biotite are their commonest accessory ingredients. The chemical and microscopic features of these minerals agree generally with those presented in the basalts, and only their exceptional peculiarities need be mentioned here. Many dolerites are porphyritic and carry phenocrysts of olivine, augite and plagioclase felspar (or of one or more of these). Others, probably the majority, are non-porphyritic, and these are generally coarser grained than the ground-mass of the former group, though lacking their large conspicuous phenocrysts. The commonest type of structure in dolerite is the ophitic, which results from the felspar of the rock having crystallized before the augite; the latter mineral forms shapeless masses in which the idiomorphic felspars lie. The augite enclosing the felspars is well crystallized, though its continuity is interrupted more or less completely by the numerous crystals of felspar which it envelops, and in polarized light the former often behaves as a single individual over a considerable area, while the latter mineral consists of independent crystals. This structure may be so coarse as to be easily detected by the unaided eye, or so fine that it cannot be seen except in microscopic sections. Some of the porphyritic dolerites have ophitic ground-masses; in others this structure is imperfect (subophitic); while in many the augite, like the felspar, occurs as small and distinct individuals, which react differently on polarized light, and have the outlines of more or less perfectly shaped crystals. Ophitic structure is commonest in olivine-dolerites, though the olivine takes no part in it.

The quartz-dolerites are an important group, hardly less common than the olivine-dolerites. They contain a small amount of quartz, and often micropegmatite, as the last element to consolidate, filling up little angular interspaces between the felspars and pyroxenes, which had previously crystallized. They rarely contain olivine, but pleochroic hypersthene is by no means rare in them (hypersthene-dolerites). Some contain larger individuals of pale green, rather pleochroic augite (the so-called sahlite), and a little brown mica, and brownish-green hornblende may also be present.

Allied to these are olivine-free dolerites with more or less of interstitial glassy base (tholeites, &c.). In the rocks of this group ophitic structure is typically absent, and the presence of an interstitial finely crystalline or amorphous material gives rise to the structure which is known as “intersertal.” Transitions to the porphyritic dolerites and basalts arise by increase in the proportion of this ground-mass. The edges of dolerite sills and dikes often contain much dark brown glass, and pass into tachylytes, in which this material preponderates.

Another interesting group of doleritic rocks contains analcite. They may be ophitic, though often they are not, and they usually contain olivine, while their augite has distinctly purple shades, and a feeble dichroism.

Their characteristic feature is the presence of a small amount of analcite, which never shows crystalline outlines but fills up the interspaces between the other minerals. Some writers held that this mineral has resulted from the decomposition of nepheline; others regard it as a primary mineral. Usually it can be clearly shown to be secondary to some extent, but there is reason to suppose that it is really a pneumatolytic deposit. These rocks are known as teschenites, and have a wide distribution in England, Scotland, on the continent and in America. Often they are comparatively rich in brown hornblende. This last-named mineral is not usually abundant in dolerites, but in a special group, the proterobases, it to a large extent replaces the customary augite. A few dolerites contain much brown mica (mica-dolerites). Nepheline may appear in these rocks, as in the basalts. Typical nepheline-dolerites are scarce, and consist of idiomorphic augite, surrounded by nepheline. Examples are known from the Tertiary volcanic districts of the Rhine.

Dolerites have a very wide distribution, as they are found wherever basalts occur in any number. It is superfluous to cite localities for them as they are among the commonest of igneous rocks. They are much employed for road-mending and for kerbstones, though their dark colour and the tendency they have to weather with a dingy brown crust make them unsuitable for the better classes of architectural work.

(J. S. F.)

DOLET, ÉTIENNE (1509-1546), French scholar and printer, was born at Orleans on the 3rd of August 1509. A doubtful tradition makes him the illegitimate son of Francis I.; but it is evident that he was at least connected with some family of rank and wealth. From Orleans he was taken to Paris about 1521; and after studying under Nicolas Bérauld, the teacher of Coligny, he proceeded in 1526 to Padua. The death of his friend and 388 master, Simon de Villanova, led him, in 1530, to accept the post of secretary to Jean de Langeac, bishop of Limoges and French ambassador to the republic of Venice; he contrived, however, to attend the lectures of the Venetian scholar Battista Egnazio, and found time to write Latin love poems to some Venetian Elena. Returning to France soon afterwards he proceeded to Toulouse to study law; but there he soon became involved in the violent disputes between the different “nations” of the university, was thrown into prison, and finally banished by a decree of the parlement. In 1535 he entered the lists against Erasmus in the famous Ciceronian controversy, by publishing through Sebastien Gryphe (Gryphius) at Lyons a Dialogus de imitatione Ciceroniana; and the following year saw the appearance of his two folio volumes Commentariorum linguae Latinae. This work was dedicated to Francis I., who gave him the privilege of printing during ten years any works in Latin, Greek, Italian or French, which were the product of his own pen or had received his supervision; and accordingly, on his release from an imprisonment occasioned by his justifiable homicide of a painter named Compaing, he began at Lyons his typographical and editorial labours. That he was not altogether unaware of the dangers to which he was exposed from the bigotry of the time is shown not only by the tone of his mottoes—Préserve moi, Seigneur, des calomnies des hommes, and Durior est spectatae virtutis quam incognitae conditio—but also by the fact that he endeavoured first of all to conciliate his opponents by publishing a Cato christianus, or Christian moralist, in which he made profession of his creed. The catholicity of his literary appreciation, in spite of his ultra-Ciceronianism, was soon displayed by the works which proceeded from his press—ancient and modern, sacred and secular, from the New Testament in Latin to Rabelais in French. But before the term of his privilege expired his labours were interrupted by his enemies, who succeeded in imprisoning him (1542) on the charge of atheism. From a first imprisonment of fifteen months Dolet was released by the advocacy of Pierre Duchâtel, bishop of Tulle; from a second (1544) he escaped by his own ingenuity; but, venturing back from Piedmont, whither he had fled in order that he might print at Lyons the letters by which he appealed for justice to the king of France, the queen of Navarre and the parlement of Paris, he was again arrested, branded as a relapsed atheist by the theological faculty of the Sorbonne, and on the 3rd of August 1546 put to the torture, strangled and burned in the Place Maubert. On his way thither he is said to have composed the punning pentameter—Non dolet ipse Dolet, sed pia turba dolet.

Whether Dolet is to be classed with the representatives of Protestantism or with the advocates of anti-Christian rationalism has been frequently disputed; by the principal Protestants of his own time he was not recognized, and by Calvin he is formally condemned, along with Agrippa and his master Villanova, as having uttered execrable blasphemies against the Son of God; but, to judge by the religious character of a large number of the books which he translated or published, such a condemnation is altogether misplaced. His repeated advocacy of the reading of the Scriptures in the vulgar tongue is especially noticeable. A statue of Dolet was erected on the Place Maubert in 1889.

See J. F. Née de la Rochelle, Vie d’Étienne Dolet (1779); Joseph Boulmier, E. Dolet, sa vie, ses œuvres, son martyre (1857); A. F. Didot, Essai sur la typographie (1852) and article in the Nouvelle Biographie générale; L. Michel. Dolet: sa statue, place Maubert: ses amis, ses ennemis (1889); R. C. Christie, Étienne Dolet, the Martyr of the Renaissance (2nd ed., 1889), containing a full bibliography of works published by him as author or printer; O. Galtier, Étienne Dolet (Paris, 1908). The procès, or trial, of Dolet was published (1836) by A. H. Taillandier from the registers of the parlement of Paris.


DOLGELLEY (Dolgellau, dale of hazels), a market town and the county town of Merionethshire, North Wales, situated on the streams Wnion and Aran at the north base of Cader Idris, on the Cambrian and Great Western railways, 232 m. from London. Pop. of urban district (1901) 2437. It consists of small squares and narrow streets, with a free grammar school (1665), market hall, assize hall, county gaol, &c. The so-called parliament house (1404) of Owen Glendower’s members has been demolished. There is some trade in coarse flannel and tweed. Glendower’s treaty with Charles of France (Owinus D.G. princeps Walliae ... Datum apud Dolguelli ...) was dated here. The families of county rank in the neighbourhood include those of Nannau, Hengwrt (the famous Hengwrt Welsh MSS. are at Peniarth), Caerynwch, Fronwnion, Bron-y-gadair, Brynygwin, Brynadda, Abergwynnant, Garthangharad. The county family, Vaughan, claims descent from Rodric Fawr, king of North Wales, Glendower’s kinsman and enemy lived at Nannau. Scott (Marmion, vi. canto, note) refers to the demon oak at Nannau in 1813. Among neighbouring hills are Moel Offrwm (or Orthrwm—of sacrifice or of oppression) and Moel Cynwch.


DOLGORUKI, VASILY LUKICH, Count (1672-1739), Russian diplomatist and minister, was one of the first batch of young Russians whom Peter the Great sent abroad to be educated. From 1687 to 1700 he resided at Paris, where he learned thoroughly the principal European languages, acquired the superficial elegance of the court of Versailles, and associated with the Jesuits, whose moral system he is said to have appropriated. On his return home he entered the diplomatic service. From 1706 to 1707 he represented Russia in Poland; and from 1707 to 1720 he was her minister at Copenhagen, where he succeeded in persuading King Frederick IV. to join the second coalition against Charles XII. At the end of 1720 he was transferred to Versailles, in order to seek the mediation of France in the projected negotiations with Sweden and obtain the recognition of Peter’s imperial title by the French court. In 1724 he represented Russia at Warsaw and in 1726 at Stockholm, the object of the latter mission being to detach Sweden from the Hanoverian alliance, in which he did not succeed. During the reign of Peter II. (1727-1730) Dolgoruki was appointed a member of the supreme privy council, and after procuring the banishment of Menshikov he appropriated the person of the young emperor, whom he would have forced to marry his niece Catherine but for Peter’s untimely death. He then drew up a letter purporting to be the last will of the emperor, appointing Catherine Dolgoruki his successor, but shortly afterwards abandoned the nefarious scheme as impracticable, and was one of the first to support the election of Anne of Courland to the throne on condition that she first signed nine “articles of limitation,” which left the supreme power in the hands of the Russian council. Anne, who repudiated the “articles” on the first opportunity, never forgave Dolgoruki for this. He was deprived of all his offices and dignities on the 17th of April 1730, and banished first to his country seat and then to the Solovetsky monastery. Nine years later the charge of forging the will of Peter II. was revived against him, and he was tortured and then beheaded at Novgorod on the 8th of November 1739.

See Robert Nisbet Bain, The Pupils of Peter the Great (London, 1895).

(R. N. B.)

DOLHAIN, the most eastern town of Belgium, situated on the Vesdre, N. E. of Verviers and close to the Prussian frontier. Pop. (1904) 4757. It is quite a modern town, occupying the site of the lower town of the ancient city of Limburg, which was destroyed by Louis XIV. in 1675. On a rocky eminence above Dolhain are still to be seen the fine ruins of the old castle of Limburg, the cradle of the ancient family of that name from which sprang the Luxemburg family and several emperors of Germany. The Gothic church of St George of the 13th century has been restored. At a short distance from Dolhain is the famous dam of the Gileppe, the vast reservoir constructed to supply Verviers with water free from lime for its cloth manufactures. The aqueduct from Gileppe to Verviers is nearly 5½ m. in length.


DOLICHOCEPHALIC (long-headed), a term invented by Andreas Retzius to denote (as opposed to “brachycephalic”) those skulls the diameter of which from side to side, or the transverse diameter, is small in comparison with the longitudinal diameter or that from front to back. Retzius, though inventing the term, did not define it precisely. Paul Broca applied it to skulls having a cephalic index of seventy-five and under, and this limit is generally adopted. Dolichocephaly, according to Retzius, was the distinctive cranial feature of the earliest inhabitants of Europe. To-day it is characteristic of the negro races, of the 389 Papuans, the Polynesians and the Australians, though among the negritos and some of the pigmy races of Africa brachycephalic skulls are the rule. Of the yellow races the Eskimo is the most dolichocephalic. Of white races the Arabs and Kabyles of Algeria, and the Guanchos of the Canary Islands, are most notable for dolichocephalic tendency. Dolichocephaly is sometimes frontal, as among adult whites, sometimes occipital or confined to the back of the head, as among inferior negro-races, Australians, Papuans and newly-born whites.


DOLL, a child’s plaything in the shape of a human figure or taken as representing one. The word “doll” was not in common use in the middle ages, “children’s babies” and other terms being substituted for it; the commonly accepted view is that it is abbreviated from the name Dorothy (cf. Scottish “Doroty”). “Idol” has also been connected with it; but the accent is held to tell against this. Another derivation is from Norse daul (woman), with which may be compared O.H.G. toccha, M.H.G. docke, a girl, doll, used also in the sense of butterfly, nightmare, &c., thus connecting the doll with magic and superstition. The same connexion is found in Asia Minor, South India, among the Pueblo peoples and in South Africa; philology apart, therefore, the derivation from “idol” has much to recommend it, and some side influence from this word may well have caused the selection of the form “doll.” Dolls proper should be distinguished from (a) idols, (b) magical figurines, (c) votive offerings, (d) costume figures. The festival figures of Japan, like the bambino of Italy, given to the child only on certain saints’ days, hardly come within the category of dolls.

Dolls were known in ancient Egypt (XVIIIth Dynasty) and Asia Minor; they were common both in Greece and Rome; Persius mentions that girls vowed them to Venus when they got married; dolls found in the catacombs are preserved in the Vatican and the Museum Carpegna. The νευρόσπαστον (Lat. crepundia) of Greek finds of the 6th and later centuries b.c. was a marionette. Dolls were in use among the Arabs at the time of Mahomet, and the prophet’s nine-year-old wife Ayesha is said to have induced him to join her in her play with them. Although Mahommedanism prohibits the making of figures in human shape, dolls do not seem to have disappeared from Mahommedan countries, though substitutes for them are perhaps more common there than elsewhere.

Dolls are extremely common in Africa. There seem to be forms peculiar to different regions, such as the flat, spade-shaped figure on the Gold Coast. Among the Wasaramo the girls carry from the age of puberty till the birth of their first child an object indistinguishable from the ordinary doll; it is called mwana ya kiti (stool-child) because it is placed on a stool at home; it probably has a magical significance. The same may be said of the Australian figurines; others, made of cane, are undoubtedly children’s dolls; excellently moulded wax figures are also found. In Asia dolls properly so-called are apparently rare; but there are specimens in museums from the Malay peninsula, Persia and South India, and in Asia Minor children use cushions, &c., as surrogates. They are found in Alaska among the Eskimo. Most Red Indian tribes had them; a mother who has lost her child carries its dolls and other playthings. Cortes is said to have found Montezuma and his court playing with elaborate dolls; they have been dug up from prehistoric Peruvian graves. In the Gran Chaco metacarpal bones of the rhea are in use, wrapped in a blanket when they represent male, in a petticoat when they are female.

But little attention has been paid to the psychological side of dolls. Though many boys play with them, dolls are mainly confined to girls; and female dolls predominate in the proportion of twelve to one. The culmination of the doll instinct is between the age of eight and nine; but they are not entirely dropped till much later; in fact unmarried and childless women sometimes keep it up for years. In children it is said by Hall to be by no means always a manifestation of the maternal instinct; for dolls are not always regarded as children, and the proportion of adults increases with the age of the children. But the important point is whether the child regarded itself as older or younger than the doll. There is, on the other hand, a tendency to neglect dolls for babies and a reverse current of love of dolls which arises out of love of babies.

Bibliography.—For a list of works see A. MacDonald, Man and Abnormal Man (U. S. Senate Document, 1905, vol. ix. No. 187, p. 275); see also Andree, Ethnographische Parallelen N. F.; Schlegel, Indische Bibliothek. i. 139; Brandenburgia, xi. 28; Delineator, lviii. 927; Globus, lxxv. 354, lxxx. 205; Internat. Archiv f. Ethnog. vii. 45; Ladies’ Home Journ. xvi.; Westermann’s Monatshefte (Feb. 1899, &c.); Man (1903, No. 22). For the psychological side see Paedagogical Seminary, iv. 129, discussed in Contemporary Rev. lxxv. 58; Mrs F. H. Burnett, “The One I know best of all”; Sully, Studies of Childhood; G. Sand, Histoire de ma vie.

(N. W. T.)

DOLLAR, a town of Clackmannanshire, Scotland, 6 m. N.E. of Alloa by the North British railway, not far from the Devon. Pop. (1901) 1619. The village, which is beautifully situated, contains several handsome stone villas occupied by families attracted to the town by its educational facilities. The academy, housed in a fine mass of buildings of the Grecian order (opened about 1819), was founded by Captain John McNab (1732-1802), a native who began life as a herdboy, and afterwards became a rich shipowner. From the burn of Dollar (or Dolour), which runs through the ravine of Dollar Glen, the town draws its water-supply. On an isolated hill above the junction of the parent streams, named Sorrow and Care, stands the ruin of Castle Campbell, known also as Gloom Castle, an old stronghold of the Argyll family. The castle was burned by the Macleans in 1644, in the interest of the marquess of Montrose, and not again restored. Although a ruin it is carefully preserved. The Rev. Dr James Aitken Wylie (1808-1890), the historian of Protestantism, was a minister in Dollar for several years. Patrick Gibson, the etcher and landscape-painter, was drawing-master at the academy from 1824 to 1829, and William Tennant, the author of Anster Fair, was a teacher of classics from 1819 till 1834, when he was appointed to the chair of Hebrew in St Andrews University. Harviestoun Castle, about midway between Dollar and Tillicoultry, once belonged to the Tait family, and here Archibald Campbell Tait, archbishop of Canterbury, spent some of his boyhood.


DOLLAR, a silver coin at one time current in many European countries, and adopted under varying forms of the name elsewhere. The word “dollar” is a modified form of thaler, which, with the variant forms (daler, dalar, daalder, tallero, &c.), is said to be a shortened form of Joachimsthaler. This Joachimsthaler was the name given to a coin intended to be the silver equivalent of the gold gulden, a coin current in Germany from the 14th century. In 1516 a rich silver mine was discovered in Joachimsthal (Joachim’s dale), a mining district of Bohemia, and the count of Schlitz, by whom it was appropriated, caused a great number of silver coins to be struck (the first having the date 1518), bearing an effigy of St Joachim, hence the name. The Joachimsthaler was also sometimes known as the Schlickenthaler. The first use of the word dollar in English was as applied to this silver coin, the thaler, which was current in Germany at various values from the 16th century onwards, as well as, more particularly, to the unit of the German monetary union from 1857 to 1873, when the mark was substituted for the thaler. The Spanish piece-of-eight (reals) was also commonly referred to as a dollar. When the Bank of England suspended cash payments in 1797, and the scarcity of coin was very great, a large number of these Spanish coins, which were held by the bank, were put into circulation, after having been countermarked at the Mint with a small oval bust of George III., such as was used by the Goldsmiths’ Company for marking plate. Others were simply overstamped with the initials G.R. enclosed in a shield. In 1804 the Maundy penny head set in an octagonal compartment was employed. Several millions of these coins were issued. These Spanish pieces-of-eight were also current in the Spanish-American colonies, and were very largely used in the British North American colonies. As the reckoning was by pounds, shillings and pence in the British-American colonies, great inconveniences naturally arose, but these were to some extent lessened by the adoption of a tariff list, by which the various gold and silver coins circulating 390 were rated. In 1787 the dollar was introduced as the unit in the United States, and it has remained as the standard of value either in silver or gold in that country. For the history of the various changes in the weights and value of the coin see Numismatics. The Spanish piece-of-eight was also the ancestor of the Mexican dollar, the Newfoundland dollar, the British dollar circulating in Hong Kong and the Straits Settlements, and the dollar of the South American republics, although many of them are now dollars only in name.


DOLLING, ROBERT WILLIAM RADCLYFFE (1851-1902), English divine, known as Father Dolling, was born at Magheralin, Co. Down, and educated at Harrow and Cambridge. From 1878 to 1882 he was warden of one of the houses of the Postmen’s League, started by Father Stanton of St Alban’s, Holborn. He was ordained in 1883 to a curacy at Corscombe, Dorset, but resided in London as head of St Martin’s mission, Stepney. In 1885 a difficulty as to the relation of his mission to Holy Trinity parish, Stepney, led to his resignation, and he next accepted the charge of St Agatha’s, Landport, the Winchester College mission. The remarkable reforms he accomplished there may be ascertained from his Ten years in a Portsmouth slum (London 1896). In 1885 he again resigned, owing to the bishop of Winchester’s refusal to sanction the extreme ritual used in the service at St Agatha’s. In 1897 he visited America, where his preaching made a great impression. He returned to England in the following year as vicar of St Saviour’s, Poplar, and retained that living until his death.

An account of Dolling’s person and missionary work among the poor is given in The Life of Father Dolling (London, 1903), by the Rev. C. E. Osborne.


DÖLLINGER, JOHANN JOSEPH IGNAZ VON (1799-1890), German theologian and church historian, was born at Bamberg, Bavaria, on the 28th of February 1799. He came of an intellectual stock, his grandfather and father having both been physicians of eminence and professors of one or other of the branches of medical science; his mother too belonged to a family not undistinguished in intellectual power. Young Döllinger was first educated in the gymnasium at Wurzburg, and then began to study natural philosophy at the university in that city, where his father now held a professorship. In 1817 he began the study of mental philosophy and philology, and in 1818 turned to the study of theology, which he believed to lie beneath every other science. He particularly devoted himself to an independent study of ecclesiastical history, a subject very indifferently taught in Roman Catholic Germany at that time. In 1820 he became acquainted with Victor Aimé Huber (1800-1869), a fact which largely influenced his life. On the 5th of April 1822 he was ordained priest, after studying at Bamberg, and in 1823 he became professor of ecclesiastical history and canon law in the lyceum at Aschaffenburg. He then took his doctor’s degree, and in 1826 became professor of theology at Munich, where he spent the rest of his life. About this time Döllinger brought upon himself the animadversion of Heine, who was then editor of a Munich paper. The unsparing satirist described the professor’s face as the “gloomiest” in the whole procession of ecclesiastics which took place on Good Friday.

It has been stated that in his earlier years Döllinger was a pronounced Ultramontane. This does not appear to have been altogether the case; for, very early in his professorial career at Munich, the Jesuits attacked his teaching of ecclesiastical history, and the celebrated J. A. Möhler (q.v.) who afterwards became his friend, on being appealed to, pronounced on the whole in his favour. He also entered into relations with the well-known French Liberal Catholic Lamennais, whose views on the reconciliation of the Roman Catholic Church with the principles of modern society had aroused much suspicion in Ultramontane circles. In 1832 Lamennais, with his friends Lacordaire and Montalembert, visited Germany, and obtained considerable sympathy in their attempts to bring about a modification of the Roman Catholic attitude to modern problems. Döllinger seems to have regarded favourably the removal, by the Bavarian government, in 1841, of Professor Kaiser from his chair, because he had taught the infallibility of the pope. On the other hand, he published a treatise in 1838 against mixed marriages, and in 1843 wrote strongly in favour of requiring Protestant soldiers to kneel at the consecration of the Host when compelled officially to be present at Mass. Moreover, in his works on The Reformation (3 vols. Regensburg, 1846-1848) and on Luther (1851, Eng, tr., 1853) he is very severe on the Protestant leaders, and he also accepts, in his earlier works, the Ultramontane view then current on the practical condition of the Church of England, a view which in later days he found reason to change. Meanwhile he had visited England, where he was well received; and he afterwards travelled in Holland, Belgium and France, acquainting himself with the condition and prospects of the Roman Catholic Church. In 1842 he entered into correspondence with the leaders of the Tractarian movement in England, and some interesting letters have been preserved which were exchanged between him and Pusey, Gladstone and Hope Scott. When the last-named joined the Church of Rome he was warmly congratulated by Döllinger on the step he had taken. He, however, much regretted the gradual and very natural trend of his new English allies towards extreme Ultramontane views, of which Archdeacon, afterwards Cardinal, Manning ultimately became an enthusiastic advocate. In 1845 Döllinger was made representative of his university in the second chamber of the Bavarian legislature. In 1847, in consequence of the fall from power of the Abel ministry in Bavaria, with which he had been in close relations, he was removed from his professorship at Munich, but in 1849 he was invited to occupy the chair of ecclesiastical history. In 1848, when nearly every throne in Europe was shaken by the spread of revolutionary sentiments, he was elected delegate to the national German assembly at Frankfort,—a sufficient proof that at this time he was regarded as no mere narrow and technical theologian, but as a man of wide and independent views.

It has been said that his change of relations to the Papacy dated from the Italian war in 1859, but no sufficient reason has been given for this statement. It is more probable that, like Grosseteste, he had imbibed in early youth an enthusiastic sentiment of attachment to the Papacy as the only centre of authority, and the only guarantee for public order in the Church, but that his experience of the actual working of the papal system (and especially a visit to Rome in 1857) had to a certain extent convinced him how little correspondence there was between his ideal and the reality. He may also have been unfavourably impressed with the promulgation by Pius IX. in 1854 of the dogma of the Immaculate Conception of the Blessed Virgin. But whatever may have been his reasons, he ultimately became the leader of those who were energetically opposed to any addition to, or more stringent definition of, the powers which the Papacy had possessed for centuries. In some speeches delivered at Munich in 1861 he outspokenly declared his view that the maintenance of the Roman Catholic Church did not depend on the temporal sovereignty of the pope. His book on The Church and the Churches (Munich, 1861) dealt to a certain extent with the same question. In 1863 he invited 100 theologians to meet at Malines and discuss the question which Lamennais and Lacordaire had prematurely raised in France, namely, the attitude that should be assumed by the Roman Catholic Church towards modern ideas. His address to the assembled divines was “practically a declaration of war against the Ultramontane party.” He had spoken boldly in favour of freedom for the Church in the Frankfort national assembly in 1848, but he had found the authorities of his Church claiming a freedom of a very different kind from that for which he had contended. The freedom he claimed for the Church was freedom to manage her affairs without the interference of the state; the champions of the papal monarchy, and notably the Jesuits, desired freedom in order to put a stop to the dissemination of modern ideas. The addresses delivered in the Catholic congress at Malines were a declaration in the direction of a Liberal solution of the problem of the relations of Church and State. The pope for a moment seemed to hesitate, but there could be little doubt what course he would ultimately pursue, and after four days’ debate the assembly was closed at his command. On the 8th of December 1864 Pius IX. issued 391 the famous Syllabus, in which he declared war against modern science and progress (see Syllabus). It was in connexion with this question that Döllinger published his Past and Present of Catholic Theology (1863) and his Universities Past and Present (Munich, 1867).

We now approach the critical period of Döllinger’s life. It was about this time that some of the leading theologians of the Roman Catholic Church, conceiving that the best way of meeting present perils was to emphasize, as well as to define more clearly, the authority of the pope, advised him to make his personal infallibility a dogma of the Church, and urged strenuously on him the necessity of calling a council for that purpose. There was considerable opposition in various quarters. Many bishops and divines considered the proposed definition a false one. Others, though accepting it as the truth, declared its promulgation to be inopportune. But the headquarters of the opposition was Germany, and its leader was Döllinger, whose high reputation and vast stores of learning placed him far above any other member of the band of the theological experts who now gathered around him. Among them were his intimate friends Johann Friedrich (q.v.) and J. N. Huber, in Bavaria. In the rest of Germany he found many supporters, chiefly professors in the Catholic faculty of theology at Bonn: among these were the famous canonist von Schulte, Franz Heinrich Reusch, the ecclesiastical historian Joseph Langen, as well as J. H. Reinkens, afterwards bishop of the Old Catholic Church in Germany, Knoodt, and other distinguished scholars. In Switzerland, Professor Edward Herzog, who became Old (or, as it is sometimes called, Christ-) Catholic bishop in Switzerland, and other learned men supported the movement. Early in 1869 the famous Letters of Janus (which were at once translated into English; 2nd ed. Das Papsttum, 1891) began to appear. They were written by Döllinger in conjunction with Huber and Friedrich, afterwards professor at Munich. In these the tendency of the Syllabus towards obscurantism and papal despotism, and its incompatibility with modern thought, were clearly pointed out; and the evidence against papal infallibility, resting, as the Letters asserted, on the False Decretals, and accepted without controversy in an age of ignorance, was ably marshalled for the guidance of the council. When, on the 8th of December 1869, it had actually assembled, the world was kept informed of what was going on in the Letters of Quirinus, written by Döllinger and Huber while the debates of the council were proceeding. Some of these letters appeared in the German newspapers, and an English translation was published by Rivington. Augustin Theiner, the librarian at the Vatican, then in disgrace with the pope for his outspoken Liberalism, kept his German friends well informed of the course of the discussions. The proceedings of the council were frequently very stormy, and the opponents of the dogma of infallibility complained that they were not unfrequently interrupted, and that endeavours were made to put them down by clamour. The dogma was at length carried by an overwhelming majority, and the dissentient bishops, who—with the exception of two—had left the council before the final division, one by one submitted (see Vatican Council). Döllinger, however, was not to be silenced. He headed a protest by forty-four professors in the university of Munich, and gathered together a congress at Nuremberg, which met in August 1870 and issued a declaration adverse to the Vatican decrees. An immense ferment took place. In Bavaria, where Döllinger’s influence was greatest, the strongest determination to resist the resolutions of the council prevailed. But the authority of the council was held by the archbishop of Munich to be paramount, and he called upon Döllinger to submit. Instead of submitting, Döllinger, on the 28th of March 1871, addressed a memorable letter to the archbishop, refusing to subscribe the decrees. They were, he said, opposed to Holy Scripture, to the traditions of the Church for the first 1000 years, to historical evidence, to the decrees of the general councils, and to the existing relations of the Roman Catholic Church to the state in every country in the world. “As a Christian, as a theologian, as an historian, and as a citizen,” he added, “I cannot accept this doctrine.”

The archbishop replied by excommunicating the disobedient professor. This aroused fresh opposition. Döllinger was almost unanimously elected rector-magnificus of the university of Munich, and Oxford, Edinburgh and Marburg universities conferred upon him the honorary degree of doctor of laws and Vienna that of philosophy. The Bavarian clergy invited Bishop Loos of the Jansenist Church in Holland, which for more than 150 years had existed independent of the Papacy and had adopted the name of “Old Catholic,” to hold confirmations in Bavaria. The offer was accepted, and the bishop was received with triumphal arches and other demonstrations of joy. The three Dutch Old Catholic bishops declared themselves ready to consecrate a bishop, if it were desired. The momentous question was discussed at a meeting of the opponents of the Vatican decrees, and it was resolved to elect a bishop and ask the Dutch bishops to consecrate him. Döllinger, however, voted against the proposition, and withdrew from any further steps towards the promotion of the movement. This was the critical moment in the history of the resistance to the decrees. Had Döllinger, with his immense reputation as a scholar, as a divine and as a man, allowed himself to be consecrated bishop of the Old Catholic Church, it is impossible to say how wide the schism would have been. But he declined to initiate a schism. His refusal lost Bavaria to the movement; and the number of Bavarian sympathizers was still further reduced when the seceders, in 1878, allowed their priests to marry, a decision which Döllinger, as was known, sincerely regretted. The Old Catholic Communion, however, was formally constituted, with Reinkens at its head as bishop, and it still continues to exist (see Old Catholics).

Döllinger’s attitude to the new community was not very clearly defined. It may be difficult to reconcile the two declarations made by him at different times: “I do not wish to join a schismatic society; I am isolated,” and “As for myself, I consider that I belong by conviction to the Old Catholic community.” The latter declaration was made some years after the former, in a letter to Pastor Widmann. The nearest approach to a reconciliation of the two statements would appear to be that while, at his advanced age, he did not wish to assume the responsibility of being head of a new denomination, formed in circumstances of exceptional difficulty, he was unwilling to condemn those who were ready to hazard the new departure. “By conviction” he belonged to the Old Catholics, but he never formally joined them. Yet at least he was ready to meet their leaders, to address them, and to discuss difficult problems with them. His addresses on the reunion of the Churches, delivered at the Bonn Conference of 1872, show that he was by no means hostile to the newly formed communion, in whose interests these conferences were held. In 1874 and again in 1875, he presided over the Reunion Conferences held at Bonn and attended by leading ecclesiastics from the British Isles and from the Oriental Church, among whom were Bishop Christopher Wordsworth of Lincoln; Bishop Harold Browne of Ely; Lord Plunket, archbishop of Dublin; Lycurgus, archbishop of Syros and Tenos; Canon Liddon; and Professor Ossinine of St Petersburg. At the latter of these two conferences, when Döllinger was seventy-six years of age, he delivered a series of marvellous addresses in German and English, in which he discussed the state of theology on the continent, the reunion question, and the religious condition of the various countries of Europe in which the Roman Catholic Church held sway. Not the least of his achievements on this occasion was the successful attempt, made with extraordinary tact, ability, knowledge and perseverance, to induce the Orientals, Anglicans and Old Catholics present to accept a formula of concord, drawn from the writings of the leading theologians of the Greek Church, on the long-vexed question of the Procession of the Holy Spirit. This result having been attained, he passed the rest of his days in retirement, emerging sometimes from his retreat to give addresses on theological questions, and also writing, in conjunction with his friend Reusch, his last book, Geschichte der Moralstreitigkeiten in der römisch-katholischen Kirche seit dem sechzehnten Jahrhundert mit Beiträgen zur Geschichte und Charakteristik des Jesuitenordens (Nordlingen, 1889), in which he deals with the moral theology of St Alfonso de’ Liguori. He died 392 in Munich, on the 14th of January 1890, at the age of ninety-one. Even in articulo mortis he refused to receive the sacraments from the parish priest at the cost of submission, but the last offices were performed by his friend Professor Friedrich.

In addition to the works referred to in the foregoing sketch, we may mention The Eucharist in the First Three Centuries (Mainz, 1826); a Church History (1836, Eng. trans. 1840); Hippolytus and Callistus (1854, Eng. trans., 1876); First Age of Christianity (1860); Lectures on the Reunion of the Churches; The Vatican Decrees; Studies in European History (tr. M. Warre, 1890); Miscellaneous Addresses (tr. M. Warre, 1894).

See Life by J. Friedrich (3 vols. 1899-1901); obituary notice in The Times, 11th January 1890; L. von Kobell, Conversations of Dr Döllinger (tr. by K. Gould, 1892).

(J. J. L.*)

DOLLOND, JOHN (1706-1761), English optician, was the son of a Huguenot refugee, a silk-weaver at Spitalfields, London, where he was born on the 10th of June 1706. He followed his father’s trade, but found time to acquire a knowledge of Latin, Greek, mathematics, physics, anatomy and other subjects. In 1752 he abandoned silk-weaving and joined his eldest son, Peter Dollond (1730-1820), who in 1750 had started in business as a maker of optical instruments. His reputation grew rapidly, and in 1761 he was appointed optician to the king. In 1758 he published an “Account of some experiments concerning the different refrangibility of light” (Phil. Trans., 1758), describing the experiments that led him to the achievement with which his name is specially associated, the discovery of a means of constructing achromatic lenses by the combination of crown and flint glasses. Leonhard Euler in 1747 had suggested that achromatism might be obtained by the combination of glass and water lenses. Relying on statements made by Sir Isaac Newton, Dollond disputed this possibility (Phil. Trans., 1753), but subsequently, after the Swedish physicist, Samuel Klingenstjerna (1698-1765), had pointed out that Newton’s law of dispersion did not harmonize with certain observed facts, he began experiments to settle the question. Early in 1757 he succeeded in producing refraction without colour by the aid of glass and water lenses, and a few months later he made a successful attempt to get the same result by a combination of glasses of different qualities (see Telescope). For this achievement the Royal Society awarded him the Copley medal in 1758, and three years later elected him one of its fellows. Dollond also published two papers on apparatus for measuring small angles (Phil. Trans., 1753, 1754). He died in London, of apoplexy, on the 30th of November 1761.

An account of his life, privately printed, was written by the Rev. John Kelly (1750-1809), the Manx scholar, who married one of his granddaughters.


DOLMAN (from Turk. dōlāmān), originally a long and loose garment left unfastened in front, and with narrow sleeves. It is worn generally by the Turks, and is not unlike a cassock in shape. The name was given to the uniform jacket, worn by hussars, and slung from the shoulders with the sleeves hanging loose; and it is also used for a similar garment worn by ladies, with wide cape-like arrangements instead of sleeves.


DOLNJA TUZLA, or Donji Soli, the capital of the Dolnja Tuzla district, in Bosnia, beautifully situated on the Jala or Julla, a small stream flowing into the Spreča, which joins the Bosna at Doboj, 39 m. W.N.W.; and on a branch railway from Doboj. Pop. (1895) 10,227; almost all, including a permanent colony of gipsies, being Moslems. Dolnja Tuzla is the seat of a district court and an Orthodox bishop; with several churches, many mosques, a hospital, gymnasium and commercial school. Besides large alkali works, it has a vigorous trade in grain, livestock, timber and coal, from the surrounding hills, where there is a colony of Hungarian miners; while the salt springs, owned by the state both at Dolnja, or Lower, and Gornja, or Upper Tuzla, 6 m. E., are without a rival in the Balkan Peninsula.

Dolnja Tuzla was called by the Romans Ad Salinas. Constantine Porphyrogenitus mentions it, in the 10th century, as Salenes; in other medieval documents it appears as Sou, Sow or Soli. Its modern name is derived from the Turkish tuz, “salt.” In 1690 the Austrians routed the Turks at Gornja Tuzla, and removed the Franciscan friars, with about 3000 other Roman Catholics, into Slavonia.


DOLOMIEU, DÉODAT GUY SILVAIN TANCRÈDE GRATET DE (1750-1801), French geologist and mineralogist, was born at Dolomieu, near Tour-du-Pin, in the department of Isère in France, on the 24th of June 1750. He was admitted in his infancy a member of the Order of Malta. In his nineteenth year he quarrelled with a knight of the galley on which he was serving, and in the duel that ensued killed him. He was condemned to death for his crime, but in consideration of his youth the grand master granted him a pardon, which, at the instance of Cardinal Torrigiani, was confirmed by Pope Clement XIII., and after nine months’ imprisonment he was set at liberty. Throughout that period he had solaced himself with the study of the physical sciences, and during his subsequent residence at Metz he continued to devote himself to them. In 1775 he published his Recherches sur la pesanteur des corps à differentes distances du centre de la terre, and two Italian translations of mineralogical treatises by A. F. Cronstedt (1702-1765) and T. O. Bergman (1735-1784). These works gained for him the honour of election as a corresponding member of the Académie des Sciences at Paris. To obtain leisure to follow his favourite pursuits Dolomieu now threw up the commission which, since the age of fifteen, he had held in the carabineers, and in 1777 he accompanied the bailli (afterwards Cardinal L. R. E.) de Rohan to Portugal. In the following year he visited Spain, and in 1780 and 1781 Sicily and the adjacent islands. Two months of the year 1782 were spent in examining the geological structure of the Pyrenees, and in 1783 the earthquake of Calabria induced him to go to Italy. The scientific results of these excursions are given in his Voyage aux îles de Lipari (1783); Mémoire sur le tremblement de terre de la Calabre (1784); Mémoire sur les îles Ponces, et catalogue raisonné des produits de l’Etna (1788) and other works. In 1789 and 1790 he busied himself with an examination of the Alps, his observations on which form the subject of numerous memoirs published in the Journal de physique. The mineral dolomite, which was named after him, was described by Dolomieu in 1791. He returned to France in that year, bringing with him rich collections of minerals. On the 14th of September 1792 the duc de la Rochefoucauld, with whom he had been for twenty years on terms of the closest intimacy, was assassinated at Forges, and Dolomieu retired with the widow and daughter of the duke to their estate of Roche Guyon, where he wrote several important scientific papers. The events of the 9th Thermidor (July 27, 1794) having restored the country to some tranquillity, Dolomieu recommenced his geological tours, and visited various parts of France with which he had been previously unacquainted. He was in 1796 appointed engineer and professor at the school of mines, and was chosen a member of the Institute at the time of its formation. At the end of 1797 he joined the scientific staff which in 1798 accompanied Bonaparte’s expedition to Egypt. He had proceeded up the Nile as far as Cairo when ill-health made his return to Europe necessary, and on the 7th of March 1799 he set sail from Alexandria. His ship proving unseaworthy put into Taranto, and as Naples was then at war with France, all the French passengers were made prisoners. On the 22nd of May they were carried by ship to Messina, whence, with the exception of Dolomieu, they embarked for the coast of France. Dolomieu had been an object of the hatred of the Neapolitan court since 1783, when he revealed to the grand master of his order its designs against Malta, and the calumnies of his enemies on that island served now as a pretext for his detention. He was confined in a pestilential dungeon, where, clothed in rags, and having nothing but a little straw for a bed, he languished during twenty-one months. Dolomieu, however, did not abandon himself to despair. Deprived of writing materials, he made a piece of wood his pen, and with the smoke of his lamp for ink he wrote upon the margins of a Bible, the only book he still possessed, his treatise Sur la philosophie minéralogique et sur l’espèce minérale (1801). Friends entreated, but in vain, for his liberty; it was with difficulty that they succeeded in furnishing him with a little assistance, and it was only by virtue of a special clause in the treaty between France and Naples that, on the 15th of March 1801, he was released. On his arrival in France he commenced the duties of the chair of mineralogy at the museum 393 of natural history, to which, after the death of Daubenton, he had been elected in January 1800. His course of lectures concluded, he revisited Switzerland. Returning thence he reached the residence of his brother-in-law at Château-Neuf, in the department of Saône-et-Loire, where he was seized with a fever, to which in a few days he succumbed, on the 26th of November 1801.

Dolomieu’s geological theories are remarkable for originality and boldness of conception. The materials constituting the primordial globe he held to have arranged themselves according to their specific gravities, so as to have constituted a fluid central sphere, a solid crust external to this, next a stratum of water, and lastly the atmosphere. Where water penetrated through the crust, solidification took place in the underlying fluid mass, which enlarging in consequence produced rifts in the superincumbent rocks. Water rushing down through the rifts became decomposed, and the resulting effervescence occasioned submarine volcanoes. The crust of the earth he believed to be continually increasing in thickness, owing to the deposition of aqueous rocks, and to the gradual solidification of the molten interior, so that the volcanic eruptions and other geological phenomena of former must have been of far greater magnitude and frequency than those of recent times.

See Lacépède, “Éloge historique de Dolomieu,” in Mémoires de la classe des sciences de l’Institut (1806); Thomson, in Annals of Philosophy, vol. xii. p. 161 (1808).


DOLOMITE, a mineral species consisting of calcium and magnesium carbonate, CaMg(CO3)2, and occurring as rhombohedral crystals or large rock-masses. Analyses of most well-crystallized specimens correspond closely with the above formula, the two carbonates being present in equal molecular proportions (CaCO3, 54.35; MgCO3, 45.65%). Normal dolomite is thus not an isomorphous mixture of calcium and magnesium carbonates, but a double salt; and any variations in composition are to be explained by the isomorphous mixing of this double salt with carbonates of calcium, iron, magnesium, manganese, and rarely of zinc and cobalt.

Fig. 1.
Fig. 2.

In crystalline form dolomite is very similar to calcite, belonging to the same group of rhombohedral carbonates; the primitive rhombohedron, r (100), parallel to the faces of which there are perfect cleavages, has interfacial angles of 73° 45′, the angle of the cleavage rhombohedron of calcite being 74° 55′. A specially characteristic feature is that this rhombohedron is frequently the only form present on the crystals (in calcite it is rare except in combination with other forms); the faces are also usually curved (fig. 1), sometimes to an extraordinary degree giving rise to saddle-shaped crystals (fig. 2). Crystals with plane faces are usually twinned, there being an interpenetration of two rhombohedra with the vertical axes parallel. The secondary twin-lamination, parallel to the obtuse rhombohedron e (110), so common in calcite, does not exist in dolomite. In the degree of symmetry possessed by the crystals there is, however, an important difference between calcite and dolomite; the former has the full number of planes and axes of symmetry of a rhombohedral crystal, whilst the latter is hemihedral with parallel faces, having only an axis of triad symmetry and a centre of symmetry. This lower degree of symmetry, which is the same as that of dioptase and phenacite, is occasionally shown by the presence of an obliquely placed rhombohedron, and also by the want of symmetry in the etching and elasticity figures on the faces of the primitive rhombohedron.

Dolomite is both harder (H. = 3½-4) and denser (sp. gr. 2.85) than calcite. The two minerals may also be readily distinguished by the fact that dolomite is not acted upon by cold, dilute acids (see below, Dolomite Rock). Crystals of dolomite vary from transparent to translucent, and often exhibit a pearly lustre, especially when the faces are curved; the colour is usually white or yellowish.

The crystallized mineral was first examined chemically by P. Woulfe in 1779, and was named compound-spar by R. Kirwan in 1784; other early names are bitter-spar, rhomb-spar and pearl-spar (but these included other rhombohedral carbonates). The name dolomite (dolomie of N. T. de Saussure, 1792) is in honour of the French geologist, D. G. Dolomieu, who in 1791 noted that certain Tyrolese calcareous rocks and Italian marbles effervesce only slightly in contact with acid; this name was for many years applied to the rock only, but was later extended to the crystallized mineral, first in the form dolomite-spar.

In the white crystalline dolomite-rock of the Binnenthal near Brieg in Switzerland beautiful water-clear crystals of dolomite are found; and crystallized masses occur embedded in serpentine, talc-schist and other magnesian silicate rocks. The best crystallized specimens are, however, usually found in metalliferous deposits; for example, in the iron mines of Traversella near Ivrea in Piedmont (as large twinned rhombohedra) and Cleator Moor in Cumberland; in the deposits of lead and zinc ores at Alston in Cumberland, Laxey in the Isle of Man, Joplin in Missouri; and in the silver veins of Schemnitz in Hungary and Guanajuato in Mexico.

Several varieties of dolomite have been distinguished, depending on differences in structure and chemical composition. Miemite is a crystallized or columnar variety, of a pale asparagus-green colour, from Miemo near Volterra in Tuscany; taraspite is a similar variety from Tarasp in Switzerland. Gurhofite, from Gurhof near Aggsbach in Lower Austria, is snow-white, compact and porcellanous. Brossite, from the Brosso valley near Ivrea in Piedmont, and tharandite, from Tharand in Saxony, are crystallized varieties containing iron. Closely related is the species ankerite (q.v.).

(L. J. S.)

Dolomite Rock.—The rock dolomite, also known as dolomitic or magnesian limestone, consists principally of the mineral of the same name, but often contains admixture of other substances, such as calcite, quartz, carbonate and oxides of iron, argillaceous material, and chert or chalcedony. Dolomites when very pure and well crystallized may be snowy white (e.g. some examples from the eastern Alps), but are commonly yellow, creamy, brownish or grey from the presence of impurities. They tend to be crystalline, though on a fine scale, and appear under the microscope composed of small sharply angular rhombohedra, with a perfect cleavage and very strong double refraction. They can be often recognized by this, but are most certainly distinguished from similar limestones or marbles by tests with weak acid. Dolomite dissolves only very slowly in dilute hydrochloric acid in the cold, but readily when the acid is warmed; limestones are freely attacked by the acid in either state. Magnesian limestones, which contain both dolomite and calcite, may be etched by exposing polished surfaces for a brief time to cold weak acid; the calcite is removed, leaving small pits or depressions. The distribution of the calcite may be rendered more clear by using ferric chloride solution. This is decomposed, leaving a yellow stain of ferric hydrate where the calcite occurred. Alternatively, a solution of aluminium chloride will serve; this precipitates gelantinous alumina on contact with calcite and the film can be stained with aniline dyes (Lemberg’s solution). The dolomite is not affected by these processes.

Dolomites of compact structure have a higher specific gravity than limestones, but they very often have a cavernous or drusy character, the walls of the hollows being lined with small crystals of dolomite with a pearly lustre and rounded faces. They are also slightly harder, and for these and other reasons they last better as building stones and wear better when used for paving or road-mending. Dolomites are rarely fossiliferous, as the process of dolomitization tends to destroy any organic remains originally present. As compared with limestones they are less frequently well bedded, but there are exceptions to this rule. Many 394 dolomites, particularly those of the north of England, show a very remarkable concretionary structure. The beds look as if made up of rounded balls of all sizes from a foot or two in diameter downwards. Often they are stuck together like piles of shot or bunches of grapes. They are composed of fibrous radiate calcite crystals, which by some kind of concretionary action have segregated from the dolomitic material and grouped themselves together in this way. Other concretions from these beds resemble bunches of corals, tufts of plants, or present various strange imitative forms.

Dolomite, unlike calcite, is not secreted by marine animals to build up the hard parts of their skeletons, and it is generally agreed also that dolomite is only very rarely and under exceptional conditions deposited directly from solution in water. On the other hand, there is much evidence to show that limestones may absorb or be partly replaced by magnesium carbonate, and the double salt dolomite substituted for calcite by one of those processes which are described as “metasomatic.” Thus the Carboniferous limestones of various parts of Britain pass into dolomites along lines of joint, fissure or fault, or occasionally along certain bedding planes. At the same time the rock becomes crystalline, its minute structure is altered, its fossils are effaced, and as dolomite has a higher specific gravity than limestone, contraction results and cavities are formed. The prevalence of crystalline, concretionary and drusy structures in dolomite can thus be simply explained. The process may actually be studied in many “magnesian limestones,” in which by means of the microscope we may trace the gradual growth of dolomite crystals taking place simultaneously with the destruction of the original features of the limestone. Recent investigations in coral reefs show that these changes are going on at the present day at no considerable depths and in rocks which have not long consolidated.

All this goes to prove that the double carbonate of calcium and magnesium is under certain conditions a more stable salt than either of the simple carbonates, and that these conditions recur in nature with considerable frequency. Experiments have proved that at moderately high temperatures (100° to 200° C.) solutions of magnesium salts will convert calcite into dolomite in the laboratory, and that aragonite is even more readily affected than calcite. The analogy with dolomitization of limestones is strong but not complete, as the latter process must take place at ordinary temperatures and approximately under atmospheric pressures. No completely satisfactory explanation of the change, from the standpoint of the geologist, has as yet been advanced, though much light has been thrown upon the problem. Many limestones are rich in aragonite, but this in course of time tends to recrystallize as calcite. Magnesium salts are abundant in sea-water, and in the waters of evaporating enclosed coral lagoons and of many bitter lakes. Calcite is more soluble than dolomite in water saturated with carbonic acid and would tend to be slowly removed from a limestone, while the dolomite increased in relative proportion. Dolomite also being denser than calcite may be supposed to replace it more readily when pressure is increased. These and many other factors probably co-operate to effect the transmutation of limestones into dolomites.

Examples of dolomitization may be obtained in practically every geological formation in which limestones occur. The oldest rocks are most generally affected, e.g. the Cambrian limestones of Scotland, but the change occurs, as has already been stated, even in the upraised coral reefs of the Indian and Pacific oceans which are very recent formations. It is very interesting to note that dolomites are very frequent among rocks which indicate that desert or salt-lake conditions prevailed at the time of their deposit. The dolomite or magnesian limestone of the English Permian is an instance of this. The explanation may be found in the fact that the waters of bitter lakes are usually rich in magnesium salts which, percolating through beds of limestone, would convert them into dolomite. Among the most famous dolomites are those of the Dolomite Alps of Tirol. They are of Triassic age and yield remarkably picturesque mountain scenery; it is believed that some were originally coral reefs; they are now highly crystalline and often contain interesting minerals and ores. The galena limestone of the North American Trenton rocks is mostly a dolomite.

Dolomites furnish excellent building stones, and those of the north-east of England (Mansfield stone, &c.) have long been regarded with great favour on account of their resistance to decomposition. They vary a good deal in quality, and have not all proved equally satisfactory in practice. Part of the Houses of Parliament at Westminster is built of dolomite.

(J. S. F.)

DOLOMITES, THE, a mountain district in the South Tirolese Alps, though sometimes it is erroneously considered to form part of some other chain than the Alps. The distinguishing feature of this district is that it is composed of magnesian limestone, which rises in peaks of a most singular degree of sharpness and streaked by veins of the most startling colours. Nowadays it has become well known to tourists, who, however, keep mainly to a few great centres, though most of the more striking peaks were first ascended in the late sixties and early seventies of the 19th century by English mountaineers. Roughly speaking the Dolomite region lies between the Brenner railway from Franzensfeste to Trent (W.) and the road over the Monte Croce Pass from Innichen in the Drave valley by way of the Sexten glen and the Piave valley to Belluno and Feltre (E.). On the north it is limited by the railway line from Innichen to Franzensfeste, and on the south by the railway and road from Trent to Feltre. The highest summit is the Marmolata (10,972 ft.), but far more typical are the Sorapiss, the Cimon della Pala, the Langkofel, the Pelmo, the Drei Zinnen, the Sass Maor and the Rosengarten (see Alps). Among the chief tourist resorts are St Ulrich (in the Gröden valley), San Martino di Castrozza (near Primiero), Caprile and Cortina d’Ampezzo.

Besides the Dolomites included in the above region there are several other Dolomite groups (though less extensive) in the Alps. N.W. of Trent rises the Tosa group, while in Switzerland there are the Piz d’Aela group, S.W. of Bergün on the Albula Pass route, and the curious little group N. of the village of Splügen, besides other isolated peaks between the St Gotthard and Lukmanier Passes. In Dauphiné itself (the home of the geologist Dolomieu) the mountain districts of the Royannais, of the Vercors, and of the Dévoluy (all S.W. of Grenoble) are more or less Dolomitic in character.

See J. Gilbert and G. C. Churchill, The Dolomite Mountains (London, 1864); Miss L. Tuckett, Zigzagging among Dolomites (London, 1871); P. Grohmann, Wanderungen in den Dolomiten (Vienna, 1877); L. Sinigaglia, Climbing Reminiscences of the Dolomites (London, 1896); The Climbs of Norman-Neruda (London, 1899); V. Wolf von Glanvell, Dolomitenfuhrer (Vienna, 1898); J. Ball, Western Alps (new ed., London, 1898, section 9, Rte. P. French Dolomites).

(W. A. B. C.)

DOLPHIN, a name properly belonging to the common cetacean mammal known as Delphinus delphis, but also applied to a number of more or less nearly allied species. The dolphins, bottle-noses, or, as they are more commonly called, “porpoises,” are found in abundance in all seas, while some species are inhabitants of large rivers, as the Amazon. They are among the smaller members of the cetacean order, none exceeding 10 ft. in length. Their food is chiefly fish, for the capture of which their long narrow beaks, armed with numerous sharp-pointed teeth, are well adapted, but some also devour crustaceans and molluscs. They are mostly gregarious, and the agility and grace of their movements in the water are themes of admiration to the spectators when a “school of porpoises” is playing round the bows of a vessel at sea.

The Common Dolphin (Delphinus delphis).

The type of the group is the common dolphin (D. delphis) of the Mediterranean and Atlantic, which usually measures 6 to 8 ft. in length, and is thickest near the centre, where the back fin rises to 395 a height of 9 or 10 in., and whence the body tapers towards both extremities. The forehead descends abruptly to the base of the slightly flattened beak, which is about 6 in. long, and is separated from the forehead by a transverse depression. The mouth is armed with sharp, slightly curved teeth, of uniform size, varying in number from forty to fifty on each side of both jaws. The aperture of the ear is exceedingly minute; the eyes are of moderate size and the blow-hole is crescent-shaped. The colour of the upper surface is black, becoming lighter on the flanks, and perfectly white below. Dolphins are gregarious, and large herds often follow ships. They exhibit remarkable agility, individuals having been known to leap to such a height out of the water as to fall upon the deck. Their gambols and apparent relish for human society have attracted the attention of mariners in all ages, and have probably given rise to the many fabulous stories told of dolphins. Their appearance at sea was regarded as a good omen, for although it presaged a tempest, yet it enabled the sailors to steer for a place of safety. The dolphin is exceedingly voracious, feeding on fish, cuttlefishes and crustaceans. On the south coast of England it lives chiefly on pilchard and mackerel, and when in pursuit of these is often taken in the nets. The female brings forth a single young one, which she nurses most carefully. Her milk is abundant and rich, and during the operation of suckling, the mother floats in a slightly sidelong position, so as to allow of the necessary respiration in herself and her young. The dolphin was formerly supposed to be a fish, and allowed to be eaten by Roman Catholics when the use of flesh was prohibited, and it seems to have been esteemed as a delicacy by the French. Among the seafaring population of Britain the name “dolphin” is most usually given to the beautifully coloured fish Coryphaena hippuris—the dorado of the Portuguese, and it is to the latter the poet is alluding when he speaks of “the dying dolphin’s changing hues.”

Many other allied genera, such as Prodelphinus, Steno, Lagenorhynchus, &c., are also included in the family Delphinidae, some of which live wholly in rivers.

Beside these there is another group of largely freshwater species, constituting the family Platanistidae, and typified by the susu (Platanista gangetica), extensively distributed throughout nearly the whole of the river-systems of the Ganges, Brahmaputra and Indus, ascending as high as there is water enough to swim in, but never passing out to sea. It is about 8 ft. long, blind and feeds on small fish and crustaceans for which it gropes with its long snout in the muddy waters at the bottom. Inia geoffroyensis, the single species of its genus, frequents the Amazon, and reaches an extreme length of 8 ft. It is wholly pink or flesh-coloured, or entirely black, or black above and pink beneath. A third is the La Plata dolphin, Stenodelphis blainvillei, a species about 5 ft. in length. Its colour is palish brown, which harmonizes with the brown-coloured water of the estuary of the Rio de la Plata. See Cetacea.

(R. L.*)

DOMAT, or Daumat, JEAN (1625-1696), French jurisconsult, was born at Clermont in Auvergne, on the 30th of November 1625. He was closely in sympathy with the Port-Royalists, was intimate with Pascal, and at the death of that celebrated philosopher was entrusted with his private papers. He is principally known from his elaborate legal digest, in three volumes 4to, under the title of Lois civiles dans leur ordre naturel (1689),—an undertaking for which Louis XIV. settled on him a pension of 2000 livres. A fourth volume, Le Droit public, was published in 1697, a year after his death. This is one of the most important works on the science of law that France has produced. Domat endeavoured to found all law upon ethical or religious principles, his motto being L’homme est fait par Dieu et pour Dieu. Besides the Lois Civiles, Domat made in Latin a selection of the most common laws in the collections of Justinian, under the title of Legum delectus (Paris, 1700; Amsterdam, 1703); it was subsequently appended to the Lois civiles. His works have been translated into English. Domat died in Paris on the 14th of March 1696.

In the Journal des savants for 1843 are several papers on Domat by Victor Cousin, giving much information not otherwise accessible.


DOMBES, a district of eastern France, formerly part of the province of Burgundy, now comprised in the department of Ain, and bounded W. by the Saône, S. by the Rhone, E. by the Ain and N. by the district of Bresse. The region forms an undulating plateau with a slight slope towards the north-west, the higher ground bordering the Ain and the Rhone attaining an average height of about 1000 ft. The Dombes is characterized by an impervious surface consisting of boulder clay and other relics of glacial action. To this fact is due the large number of rain-water pools, varying for the most part from 35 to 250 acres in size which cover some 23,000 acres of its total area of 282,000 acres. These pools, artificially created, date in many cases from the 15th century, some to earlier periods, and were formed by landed proprietors who in those disturbed times saw a surer source of revenue in fish-breeding than in agriculture. Disease and depopulation resulted from this policy and at the end of the 18th century the Legislative Assembly decided to reduce the area of the pools which then covered twice their present extent. Drainage works were continued, roads cut, and other improvements effected during the 19th century. Large numbers of fish, principally carp, pike and tench are still reared profitably, the pools being periodically dried up and the ground cultivated.

The Dombes (Lat. Dumbae) once formed part of the kingdom of Arles. In the 11th century, when the kingdom began to break up, the northern part of the Dombes came under the power of the lords of Baugé, and in 1218, by the marriage of Marguerite de Baugé with Humbert IV. of Beaujeu, passed to the lords of Beaujeu. The southern portion was held in succession by the lords of Villars and of Thoire. Its lords took advantage of the excommunication of the emperor Frederick II. to assert their complete independence of the Empire. In 1400, Louis II., duke of Bourbon, acquired the northern part of the Dombes, together with the lordship of Beaujeu, and two years later bought the southern part from the sires de Thoire, forming the whole into a new sovereign principality of the Dombes, with Trévoux as its capital. The principality was confiscated by King Francis I. in 1523, along with the other possessions of the Constable de Bourbon, was granted in 1527 to the queen-mother, Louise of Savoy, and after her death was held successively by kings Francis I., Henry II. and Francis II., and by Catherine de’ Medici. In 1561 it was granted to Louis, duke of Bourbon-Montpensier, by whose descendants it was held till, in 1682, “Mademoiselle,” the duchess of Montpensier, gave it to Louis XIV.’s bastard, the duke of Maine, as part of the price for the release of her lover Lauzun. The eldest son of the duke of Maine, Louis Auguste de Bourbon (1700-1755), prince of Dombes, served in the army of Prince Eugene against the Turks (1717), took part in the War of the Polish Succession (1733-1734), and in that of the Austrian Succession (1742-1747). He was made colonel-general of the Swiss regiment, governor of Languedoc and master of the hounds of France. He was succeeded, as prince of Dombes, by his brother the count of Eu (q.v.), who in 1762 surrendered the principality to the crown. The little principality of Dombes showed in some respects signs of a vigorous life; the prince’s mint and printing works at Trévoux were long famous, and the college at Thoissey was well endowed and influential.

See A. M. H. J. Stokvis, Manuel d’histoire (Leiden, 1889); Guichenon, Histoire de Dombes (1863, 1872); and various works by M. C. Guigue, including Bibliotheca Dumbensis (with Valentin Smith) (1856-1885).


DOMBROWSKI, JAN HENRYK (1755-1818), Polish general, was born at Pierszowice in the palatinate of Cracow, on the 29th of August 1755. Brought up in Saxony, he served for some years in the Saxon army; but when, in 1791, the Polish diet recalled all Poles serving abroad, he returned to his native land. Under Poniatowski, he took part in the campaign of 1792 against the Russians. In 1794 he distinguished himself under Kosciusko in the defence of Warsaw. For two years thereafter he lived in retirement, declining the offers of high ranks in their armies made to him by Russia and Prussia. He then went to Paris, and in January 1797 was authorized by the government of the Cisalpine Republic to organize a Polish legion. This task he executed at 396 Milan. In command of his legion he played an important part in the war in Italy, entered Rome in May 1798, and distinguished himself greatly at the Trebbia (June 19, 1799), and in other battles and combats of 1799-1801. After the peace of Amiens he passed, as general of division, into the service of the Italian republic. Summoned by Napoleon in 1806 to promote a rising in Poland, he organized several divisions of Poles, and distinguished himself at Danzig and at Friedland. In 1809 he served in the Polish campaign and in 1812 he commanded a Polish division in the Grande Armée, being wounded at the passage of the Beresina. He fought under Marmont at the battle of Leipzig (1813), and in the following year returned to Poland. He was one of the generals entrusted by the tsar with the reorganization of the Polish army, and was named in 1815 general of cavalry and senator palatine of the new kingdom of Poland. He retired, however, in the following year, to his estates in Posen. General Dombrowski died at his seat of Wina-Gora in Posen on the 26th of June 1818. He wrote several military historical works in the Polish language.


DOME (Lat domus, house; Ital. duomo, cathedral), an architectural term, derived from a characteristic feature of Italian cathedrals, correctly applied only to a spherical or spheroidal vault, the horizontal plan of which is always a circle. It may be supported on a circular wall, as in the Pantheon at Rome; or on a drum, as in the later Byzantine churches and generally so in the Renaissance styles; or be carried over a square or polygonal area, in which case the base of the dome is connected to the lines of the main wall by pendentives, squinches, corbels or a series of concentric arches, or two of these combined. Its section may be semicircular, pointed, ovoid or segmental; in the latter case it is usually termed a cupola, although the pendentives which carry it continue, on the diagonal lines, the complete spherical dome, as in the entrance vestibule on the south side of the Sanctuary at Jerusalem, attributed to Herod, or in those crowning the bays of the Golden Gateway by Justinian. The dome may be constructed in horizontal courses, as in the “beehive” tombs at Mycenae, with joints radiating to the centre, or a compromise between the two, in a series of small segments of circles, as in the Temple of Jupiter in Diocletian’s palace at Spalato, or again with the lower portion in horizontal courses and the upper portion with arches, as in the Pantheon at Rome.

The dome is probably one of the earliest forms of covering invented by man, but owing probably to its construction in ephemeral materials, such as the unburnt bricks in Chaldaea, there are no examples existing. But in a bas-relief (see Architecture, fig. 10), brought by Layard from Kuyunjik, are representations of semicircular and ovoid domes, which show that the feature was well known in Assyria, and as they build domes of the same nature down to the present day and without centring of any kind, it suggests that they may have existed from the remotest ages. The most ancient examples in Europe are those of the “beehive” tombs at Mycenae and elsewhere in Greece, ascribed generally to the 11th century b.c. In a sense, they are not true domes, because they are built in horizontal courses of stone, which act like the voussoirs of an arch in resisting the thrust of the earth at the back. This did not exist in the Choragic Monument of Lysicrates or other circular buildings in Greece, because their vertical sections were not portions of circles. For this reason, the conical vault of the Baths in Pompeii is not a dome. The circular Laconicon in the Baths of Titus (a.d. 72) may have been domed, and the great hemicycles in the Thermae must certainly have been roofed with semi-domes.

The earliest Roman domes are those of the great circular halls at Baiae near Naples, described as temples, but really forming part of the immense bathing establishments there, the favourite place of resort of the Romans during the latter part of the Republic. The largest on the east side of the Lake of Avernus, known as the Temple of Apollo, is a circular hall with an internal diameter of 100 ft. Those of Diana, Mercury and Venus at Baiae, were 96, 66 and 60 ft. respectively. The vaults were all built in tufa with horizontal courses in brick and cement. Half of the dome of the Temple of Mercury had fallen down, showing the section to have been nearly that of an equilateral arch. From the fact that there were pierced openings or windows in all these domes, they probably constituted the frigidaria of the baths.

The first example still existing in Rome is that of the Pantheon (a.d. 112), where a circular dome, 142 ft. in diameter, rests on a circular wall, its height being about equal to its diameter. The lower courses of this dome, built in the Roman brick or tile, were, up to the top of the third coffer, all laid in horizontal courses; above that, the construction is not known for certain; externally a series of small arches is shown, but they rested on a shell already built. The so-called Temple of Minerva Medica (now recognized as the Nymphaeum of the Baths of Gallienus, a.d. 366) is the next dated example. The Nymphaeum was decagonal on plan, so that small pendentives were required to carry the brick dome.

The domed Laconicon of the Thermae of Diocletian (a.d. 302) still exists as the vestibule of the church of Santa Maria degli Angeli. Of Constantine’s time there are two small domed examples in the tomb of S. Costanza and the Baptistery of the Lateran, both in Rome, and one in the tomb of Galla Placidia at Ravenna (c. a.d. 450). From these we pass to the Sassanian domes at Serbistan and Firuzabad, of the 4th and 5th centuries respectively. These were built in brick and rested on square pendentives. In section they were ovoid. In Syria, the dome over the octagonal church at Esra, built in stone and dated a.d. 515, is also ovoid, its height being equal to its diameter, i.e. 28 ft. This, as well as the Sassanian domes, was built without centring. The next example is that of the church of Sta Sophia at Constantinople, the finest example existing, both in its conception and execution. It was built by Justinian (537-552) from the designs of Anthemius of Tralles and Isidorus of Miletus. The dome is 104 ft. in diameter, and is carried on pendentives over a square area. The construction is of brick and stone in alternate courses, and the lower part of the dome is pierced with forty windows, which give it an extraordinary lightness. The height from the pavement of the church to the soffit of the dome is 179 ft. No dome of similar dimensions was ever again attempted by the Byzantine architects, and the principal difference in later examples was the raising of the dome on a circular drum pierced with windows.

In order to lighten the dome erected over the church of San Vitale, at Ravenna, it was constructed with hollow cylindrical jars, fitted, the end of one into the mouth of the other; a similar contrivance was adopted in the tomb of the empress Helena (the Torre Pignatiara), the vaults of the Circus of Maxentius on the Via Appia, and the outer aisles of San Stefano, all at Rome, thus dispensing with the buttresses of Sta Sophia.

The domes of the earlier mosques in Cairo were built on the model of Sta Sophia, with windows pierced round the base of the dome and external buttresses between them; these domes were all built in brick coated over with cement or stucco. At a later date, and when built in stone, the upper portion was raised in height and terminated with a point on which a finial was placed. These are the domes inside and outside Cairo, which are carved with an infinity of geometrical patterns interwoven with conventional floral decoration. The upper portion of the dome is very thin, so that there is little weight and comparatively no thrust, and it is to these facts that we probably owe their preservation.

In India, in the “great mosque” of Jama Masjid (a.d. 1560) and the Gol Gumbaz, or tomb of Mahommed Adil Shah (a.d. 1630) at Bijapur, the domes are carried on pendentives consisting of arches crossing one another and projecting inwards, and their weight counteracts any thrust there may be in the dome. It is possibly for a similar reason that in the Jama Masjid of Shah Jahan at Delhi (1632-1638) and the Taj Mahal (a.d. 1630) the domes assume a bulbous form, the increased thickness of the dome below the haunches by its weight served as a counterpoise to any thrust the upper part of the dome might exert. The form is not much to be admired, and when exaggerated, as it is in the churches of Russia, where it was introduced by the Tatars, at times it became monstrous.

397

From these we pass to the domes of Périgord and La Charente, the earliest of which date from the commencement of the 11th century. Of the western dome of St Étienne at Périgueux (a.d. 14) only the pendentives remain, sufficient, however, with later examples, to show that these French domes were different from the Byzantine both in construction and form. The pendentives are built on horizontal courses of stone, and the voussoirs of the pointed arches which carried them form part of the pendentives; a few feet above the top of the arches is a moulding and a ledge, above which the dome, ovoid in section, is built. The principal examples following St Étienne are those of S. Jean-de-Cole, Cahors, Souillac, Solignac, Angoulême, Fontevrault, and lastly St Front at Périgueux, built about 1150, in imitation of St Mark’s at Venice. The domes of the latter church were introduced into the old basilica about 1063, and were based on the church of the Apostles at Constantinople, which was pulled down in the 15th century, so that we have only the clear description of Procopius to go by. The domes over the north and south transepts and the choir of St Mark’s are smaller than those over the nave and crossing, because they had to be fitted in between more ancient structures. The construction of the domes of St Mark’s is not known, but at St Front the general design only was copied, and they built them in the Périgordian manner. The masons from Périgord are also responsible for the domes of the Crusaders’ churches in Palestine and for some of the early churches still remaining in Cyprus. The domes of San Cyriaco at Ancona and Sant’ Antonio at Padua were based upon those of St Mark’s at Venice.

In central Italy we have the dome (elliptical in plan) of the cathedral of Pisa, and it was a favourite feature over the crossing of the churches throughout Italy, being generally carried on squinch pendentives. The domes of the baptisteries of Florence, Parma, Trieste and Piacenza, are only internal, being enclosed with vertical walls and a sloping roof. In Sicily, on account of the strong Saracenic influence, the squinches are simple versions of the stalactite pendentives described under Architecture: Mahommedan (q.v.), the earliest example being found in the church of San Giovanni-dei-Leprosi (a.d. 1072), all the domes being ovoid in section.

Except in Périgord and La Charente, domes are not found in the churches in France, but in Spain they were introduced over the crossing at Burgos, Tarragona and Salamanca cathedrals, and were made architectural features externally. This is rarely found in Germany, for although in the cathedrals of Worms, Spires and Mainz, and in the churches of St Martin and Sankt Maria im Capitol at Cologne, the crossings are covered by domes, always carried on squinch pendentives, externally they built lanterns round them.

In the Renaissance styles, the dome was at once accepted as the principal characteristic feature, and its erection over the crossing of Santa Maria del Fiore at Florence was the first important work entrusted to Brunelleschi. The dome was begun in 1422, and finished in 1431, with the exception of the lantern, begun the year of his death in 1444, and completed in 1471. The dome, which is octagonal on plan, is 139 ft. in diameter, and is built with an inner and outer casing, concentric one with the other, tied together by ribs between them: the lower portion is stone, the upper part is brick.

The double shell was also employed by Michelangelo in the dome of St Peter’s at Rome, the outer shell being raised higher than the lower and connected by ribs one with the other. The diameter is 140 ft. and the construction in brick, similar to that at Florence, but the ribs are in stone from Tivoli. In both these cases the weight of the lantern was a very important consideration, and is responsible for the repeated repairs required and the introduction of additional ties.

In this respect Sir Christopher Wren solved the difficulty at St Paul’s cathedral, London, in another way: he provided three shells, the lower one with an eye in the centre forming the inner dome as seen from the interior; the middle one of conical form, and the outer one framed in timber and covered with lead. The conical shell carries the lantern, the weight of which is carried direct to the base, bound with iron ties, with such additional strength as may be given by the portico round.

In all these cases these domes are built on lofty drums, so that externally they present quite a different appearance to those of the Pantheon at Rome, or Sta Sophia in Constantinople.

Of other examples, the domes of the Invalides in Paris, by Mansard (1706), and of the Panthéon by Soufflot (1735), have each three shells, the former having a graceful outline. In Spain the dome of the cathedral at Granada (1530) and the Escurial (1563); in Italy those of Sta Maria della Salute at Venice, the small example of Bramante at Todi (1480) and of the Carignano at Genoa, are worth recording, as also the dome of the Suleimanie mosque at Constantinople (1550). See plates illustrating Architecture; and Indian Architecture.

(R. P. S.)

DOMENICHINO (or Domenico), ZAMPIERI (1581-1641), Italian painter, born at Bologna, on the 21st of October 1581, was the son of a shoemaker. The diminutive form of Christian name by which he is constantly known indicates his short stature. He was placed, when young, under the tuition of Denis Calvart; but having been treated with great severity by that master, he left him, and became a pupil in the academy of the Caracci, under Agostino. Towards the beginning of the 17th century he went to Rome, at the invitation of his fellow-pupil and intimate Albani, and prosecuted his studies under Annibale Caracci. The faculty of Domenichino was slow in its development. He was at first timid and distrustful of his powers; while his studious, unready and reserved manners were misunderstood by his companions for dulness, and he obtained the nickname of the “Ox” (Bue). But Annibale Caracci, who observed his faculties with more attention, predicted that the apparent slowness of Domenichino’s genius would in time produce what would be an honour to the art of painting. When his early productions had brought him into notice, he studied with extreme application, and made such advance as to raise his works into a comparison with those of the most admired masters of the time. From his acting as a continual censor of his own works, he became distinguished amongst his fellow-pupils as an accurate and expressive designer; his colours were the truest to nature; Mengs, indeed, found nothing to desire in his works, except a somewhat larger proportion of elegance. That he might devote his whole powers to the art, Domenichino shunned all society; or, if he occasionally sought it in the public theatres and walks, this was in order better to observe the play of the passions in the features of the people—those of joy, anger, grief, terror and every affection of the mind—and to commit them vividly to his tablets; thus, says Bellori, it was that he succeeded in delineating the soul, in colouring life, and calling forth heartfelt emotions, at which all his works aim. In personal character he is credited with temperance and modesty; but, besides his want of sociability, he became somewhat suspicious, and jealous of his master.

In Rome, Domenichino obtained employment from Cardinals Borghese, Farnese and Aldobrandini, for all of whom he painted works in fresco. The distinguished reputation which he had acquired excited the envy of some of his contemporaries. Lanfranco in particular, one of his most inveterate enemies, asserted that his celebrated “Communion of St Jerome” (painted for the church of La Carità towards 1614, for a pittance of about ten guineas, now in the Vatican Gallery, and ordinarily, but most irrationally, spoken of as the second or third best oil picture in the world) was an imitation from Agostino Caracci; and he procured an engraving of this master’s picture of the same subject (now in the Gallery of Bologna), copies of which were circulated for the purpose of proving that Domenichino was a plagiarist. There is in truth a very marked resemblance between the two compositions. The pictures which Zampieri painted immediately afterwards, representing subjects from the life of St Cecilia, only increased the alarm of his competitors, and redoubled their injustice and malignity. Disgusted with these cabals, he left Rome for Bologna, where he remained until he was recalled by Pope Gregory XV., who appointed him principal painter and architect to the pontifical palace. In this architectural post he seems to have done little or nothing, although he 398 was not inexpert in the art. He designed in great part the Villa di Belvedere at Frascati, and the whole of the Villa Ludovisi, and some other edifices. From 1630 onwards Domenichino was engaged in Naples, chiefly on a series of frescoes (never wholly completed) of the life of St Januarius in the Cappella del Tesoro. He settled in that city with his family, and opened a school. There the persecution against him became far more shameful than in any previous instance. The notorious so-called “Cabal of Naples”—the painters Corenzio, Ribera and Caracciolo—leagued together as they were to exclude all alien competition, plagued and decried the Bolognese artist in all possible ways; for instance, on returning in the morning to his fresco work, he would find not infrequently that someone had rubbed out the performance of the previous day. Perpetual worry is believed to have brought the life of Domenichino to a close; contemporary suspicion did not scruple to speak broadly of poison, but this has remained unconfirmed. He died in Naples, after two days’ illness, on the 15th of April 1641.

Domenichino, in correctness of design, expression of the passions, and simplicity and variety in the airs of his heads, has been considered little inferior to Raphael; but in fact there is the greatest gulf fixed between the two. Critics of the 18th century adulated the Bolognese beyond all reason or toleration; he is now regarded as commonplace in mind and invention, lacking any innate ideality, though undoubtedly a forcible, resolute and learned executant. “We must,” says Lanzi, “despair to find paintings exhibiting richer or more varied draperies, details of costume more beautifully adapted, or more majestic mantles. The figures are finely disposed both in place and action, conducing to the general effect; whilst a light pervades the whole which seems to rejoice the spirit, growing brighter and brighter in the aspect of the best countenances, whence they first attract the eye and heart of the beholder. The persons delineated could not tell their tale to the ear more plainly than they speak it to the eye. The ‘Scourging of St Andrew,’ which he executed in competition with Guido Reni at Rome (a fresco in the church of San Gregorio), is a powerful illustration of this truthful expression. Of the two works of these masters, Annibale Caracci preferred that of Domenichino. It is said that in painting one of the executioners the artist actually wrought himself into a passion, using threatening words and actions, and that Annibale Caracci, surprising him at that moment, embraced him, exclaiming with joy, ‘To-day, my dear Domenichino, thou art teaching me.’ So novel, and at the same time so natural, it appeared to him that the artist, like the orator, should feel within himself all that he is representing to others.” Domenichino is esteemed the most distinguished disciple of the Caracci, or second only to Guido Reni. Algarotti preferred him to the greatest masters; and Nicolas Poussin considered the painter of the “Communion of St Jerome” to be the first after Raphael. His pictures of “Adam and Eve,” and the “Martyrdom of St Agnes,” in the Gallery of Bologna, are amongst his leading works. Others of superior interest are his first known picture, a fresco of the “Death of Adonis,” in the Loggia of the Giardino Farnese, Rome; the “Martyrdom of St Sebastian,” in Santa Maria degli Angeli; the “Four Evangelists,” in Sant’ Andrea della Valle; “Diana and her Nymphs,” in the Borghese gallery; the “Assumption of the Virgin,” in Santa Maria di Trastevere; and frescoes in the neighbouring abbey of Grotta Ferrata, lives of SS. Nilus and Bartholomew. His portraits are also highly reputed. It is admitted that in his compositions he often borrowed figures and arrangements from previous painters. Domenichino was potent in fresco. He excelled also in landscape painting. In that style (in which he was one of the earliest practitioners) the natural elegance of his scenery, his trees, his well-broken grounds, the character and expression of his figures, gained him as much public admiration as any of his other performances.

See Bolognini, Life of Domenichino (1839); C. Landon, Works of Domenichino, with a Memoir (1823).

(W. M. R.)

DOMESDAY BOOK, or simply Domesday, the record of the great survey of England executed for William the Conqueror. We learn from the English Chronicle that the scheme of this survey was discussed and determined in the Christmas assembly of 1085, and from the colophon of Domesday Book that the survey (descriptio) was completed in 1086. But Domesday Book (liber) although compiled from the returns of that survey, must be carefully distinguished from them; nor is it certain that it was compiled in the year in which the survey was made. For the making of the survey each county was visited by a group of royal officers (legati), who held a public inquiry, probably in the great assembly known as the county court, which was attended by representatives of every township as well as of the local lords. The unit of inquiry was the Hundred (a subdivision of the county which had then an administrative entity), and the return for each Hundred was sworn to by twelve local jurors, half of them English and half Normans. What is believed to be a full transcript of these original returns is preserved for several of the Cambridgeshire Hundreds, and is of great illustrative importance. The Inquisitio Eliensis, the “Exon Domesday” (so called from the preservation of the volume at Exeter), and the second volume of Domesday Book, also all contain the full details which the original returns supplied.

The original MS. of Domesday Book consists of two volumes, of which the second is devoted to the three eastern counties, while the first, which is of much larger size, comprises the rest of England except the most northerly counties. Of these the north-westerly portion, which had Carlisle for its head, was not conquered till some years after the survey was made; but the omission of Northumberland and Durham has not been satisfactorily explained. There are also no surveys of London, Winchester and some other towns. For both volumes the contents of the returns were entirely rearranged and classified according to fiefs. Instead of appearing under the Hundreds and townships they now appeared under the names of the local “barons,” i.e. those who held the lands directly of the crown in fee. In each county the list opened with the holding of the king himself (which had possibly formed the subject of separate inquiry); then came those of the churchmen and religious houses; next were entered those of the lay tenants-in-chief (barones); and last of all those of women, of the king’s serjeants (servientes), of the few English “thegns” who retained land, and so forth. In some counties one or more principal towns formed the subject of a separate section; in some the clamores (disputed titles to land) were similarly treated apart. But this description applies more specially to the larger and principal volume; in the smaller one the system is more confused, the execution less perfect. The two volumes are distinguished even more sharply by the exclusion, in the larger one, of certain details, such as the enumeration of the live stock, which would have added greatly to its size. It has, indeed, been suggested that the eastern counties’ volume represents a first attempt, and that it was found impossible, or at least inconvenient, to complete the work on the same scale.

For the object of the survey we have three sources of information: (1) the passage in the English Chronicle, which tells us why it was ordered, (2) the list of questions which the jurors were asked, as preserved in the Inquisitio Eliensis, (3) the contents of Domesday Book and the allied records mentioned above. Although these can by no means be reconciled in every detail, it is now generally recognized that the primary object of the survey was to acertain and record the fiscal rights of the king. These were mainly (1) the national land-tax (geldum), paid on a fixed assessment, (2) certain miscellaneous dues, (3) the proceeds of the crown lands. After a great political convulsion such as the Norman conquest, and the wholesale confiscation of landed estates which followed it, it was William’s interest to make sure that the rights of the crown, which he claimed to have inherited, had not suffered in the process. More especially was this the case as his Norman followers were disposed to evade the liabilities of their English predecessors. The Domesday survey therefore recorded the names of the new holders of lands and the assessments on which their tax was to be paid. But it did more than this; by the king’s instructions it endeavoured to make a national valuation list, estimating the annual value of all the 399 land in the country, (1) at the time of King Edward’s death, (2) when the new owners received it, (3) at the time of the survey, and further, it reckoned, by command, the potential value as well. It is evident that William desired to know the financial resources of his kingdom, and probable that he wished to compare them with the existing assessment, which was one of considerable antiquity, though there are traces that it had been occasionally modified. The great bulk of Domesday Book is devoted to the somewhat arid details of the assessment and valuation of rural estates, which were as yet the only important source of national wealth. After stating the assessment of the manor, the record sets forth the amount of arable land, and the number of plough-teams (each reckoned at eight oxen) available for working it, with the additional number (if any) that might be employed; then the river-meadows, woodland, pasture, fisheries (i.e. weirs in the streams), water-mills, saltpans (if by the sea) and other subsidiary sources of revenue; the peasants are enumerated in their several classes; and finally the annual value of the whole, past and present, is roughly estimated. It is obvious that, both in its values and in its measurements, the survey’s reckoning is very crude.

Apart from the wholly rural portions, which constitute its bulk, Domesday contains entries of interest concerning most of the towns, which were probably made because of their bearing on the fiscal rights of the crown therein. These include fragments of custumals, records of the military service due, of markets, mints, and so forth. From the towns, from the counties as wholes, and from many of its ancient lordships, the crown was entitled to archaic dues in kind, such as honey. The information of most general interest found in the great record is that on political, personal, ecclesiastical and social history, which only occurs sporadically and, as it were, by accident. Much of this was used by E. A. Freeman for his work on the Norman Conquest. Although unique in character and of priceless value to the student, Domesday will be found disappointing and largely unintelligible to any but the specialist. Even scholars are unable to explain portions of its language and of its system. This is partly due to its very early date, which has placed between it and later records a gulf that is hard to bridge.

But in the Dialogus de scaccario (temp. Hen. II.) it is spoken of as a record from the arbitrament of which there was no appeal (from which its popular name of “Domesday” is said to be derived). In the middle ages its evidence was frequently invoked in the law-courts; and even now there are certain cases in which appeal is made to its testimony. To the topographer, as to the genealogist, its evidence is of primary importance; for it not only contains the earliest survey of a township or manor, but affords in the majority of cases the clue to its subsequent descent. The rearrangement, on a feudal basis, of the original returns (as described above) enabled the Conqueror and his officers to see with ease the extent of a baron’s possessions; but it also had the effect of showing how far he had enfeoffed “under-tenants,” and who those under-tenants were. This was of great importance to William, not only for military reasons, but also because of his firm resolve to make the under-tenants (though the “men” of their lords) swear allegiance directly to himself. As Domesday normally records only the Christian name of an under-tenant, it is vain to seek for the surnames of families claiming a Norman origin; but much has been and is still being done to identify the under-tenants, the great bulk of whom bear foreign names.

Domesday Book was originally preserved in the royal treasury at Winchester (the Norman kings’ capital), whence it speaks of itself (in one later addition) as Liber de Wintonia. When the treasury was removed to Westminster (probably under Henry II.) the book went with it. Here it remained until the days of Queen Victoria, being preserved from 1696 onwards in the Chapter House, and only removed in special circumstances, as when it was sent to Southampton for photozincographic reproduction. It was eventually placed in the Public Record Office, London, where it can be seen in a glass case in the museum. In 1869 it received a modern binding. The ancient Domesday chest, in which it used to be kept, is also preserved in the building.

The printing of Domesday, in “record type,” was begun by government in 1773, and the book was published, in two volumes fol. in 1783; in 1811 a volume of indexes was added, and in 1816 a supplementary volume, separately indexed, containing (1) the “Exon Domesday” (for the south-western counties), (2) the Inquisitio Eliensis, (3) the Liber Winton (surveys of Winchester early in the 12th century), and (4) the Boldon Book—a survey of the bishopric of Durham a century later than Domesday. Photographic facsimiles of Domesday Book, for each county separately, were published in 1861-1863, also by government.

Bibliography.—The following are the more important works to be consulted:—R. Kelham, Domesday Book, illustrated (1788); H. Ellis, General Introduction to Domesday Book (1833), 2 vols., containing valuable indexes to the names of persons; N. E. S. A. Hamilton, Inquisitio Cantabrigiensis (1876), containing the only transcripts of the original returns and the text of the Inquisitio Eliensis; E. A. Freeman, History of the Norman Conquest, vols. iv. and v.; F. Seebohm, The English Village Community (1883); Domesday Studies, 2 vols. (1888, 1891), on the occasion of the Domesday Commemoration (1886), by various writers, with bibliography to date; J. H. Round, Feudal England (1895); F. W. Maitland, Domesday Book and Beyond (1897); P. Vinogradoff, Villainage in England (1892) and Growth of the Manor; A. Ballard, The Domesday Boroughs (1904) and The Domesday Inquest (1906), an excellent summary; W. H. Stevenson, “A contemporary description of the Domesday Survey” in The English Historical Review (the general index to which should be consulted) (1907). The Victoria County History contains a translation of the Domesday text, a map, and an explanatory introduction for each county.

(J. H. R.)

DOMESTIC RELATIONS, a term used to express the legal relations subsisting between the various units that comprise the family or domestic group. Those units which go to build up the domestic structure of modern society are parent, child, husband, wife, master and servant. The law which deals with the various relations subsisting between them is made up largely of the law of agency, of contract and of tort. See Husband and Wife; Master and Servant; Children, Law relating to; Infant.


DOMETT, ALFRED (1811-1887), British colonial statesman and poet, was born at Camberwell Grove, Surrey, on the 20th of May 1811. He entered St John’s College, Cambridge, but left the university in 1833. He published one or two volumes of poetry and contributed several poems to Blackwood’s Magazine, one of which, “A Christmas Hymn,” attracted much admiring attention. For ten years he lived a life of ease in London, where he became the intimate friend of Robert Browning, of whose poem “Waring” he was the subject. An interesting account of the friendship between the two men appeared in The Contemporary Review for January 1905, by W. H. Griffin. (See also Robert Browning and Alfred Domett, edited by F. G. Kenyon, 1906). In 1842 Domett emigrated to New Zealand where he filled many important administrative posts, being colonial secretary for New Munster in 1848, secretary for the colony in 1851, and prime minister in 1862. He returned to England in 1871, was created C.M.G. in 1880, and died on the 2nd of November 1887. Among his books of poetry, Ranolf and Amohia, a South Sea Day Dream, is the best known (1872), and Flotsam and Jetsam (1877) is dedicated to Browning.


DOMFRONT, a town of north-western France, capital of an arrondissement in the department of Orne, 43 m. W.N.W. of Alençon by rail. Pop. (1906) of the town, 2215; of the commune, 4663. The town, which is picturesquely situated on a bluff overlooking the Varenne, has a church, Notre-Dame-sur-l’Eau, dating from the 11th century. In the middle ages it was one of the chief strongholds in Normandy, and there still remain several towers of its ramparts, and ruins of the keep of its castle built in 1011, rebuilt in the 12th century by Henry II., king of England, and dismantled at the end of the 16th century. The town is the seat of a sub-prefect, and has a tribunal of first instance and a communal college. Cloth is manufactured, and there are granite quarries in the vicinity. Domfront is said to have grown up in the 6th century round the oratory of the hermit St Front, and played an important part in the wars against the 400 English and the Religious Wars. In 1574 it was occupied by the Protestant leader Gabriel de Montgomery, who after a stubborn siege was forced to yield it to Jacques Goyon, count of Matignon.


DOMICILE (Lat. domicilium, from domus, home), in law, a term which may be defined generally as the place of a man’s permanent abode; a precise definition is a matter of acknowledged difficulty. Its use in Roman jurisprudence was to fix the jurisdiction to which a person was subject generally, not by reason of a particular circumstance, as the place where a contract was made or where property is situate. Hence it was admitted that a person might have as many domiciles as he had residences possessing some degree of permanence. In the middle ages, when a great diversity of laws had arisen, questions concerning personal status, as the age of majority or the capacity to contract a given marriage, came naturally to depend on the law to which the person was subject by reason of the general jurisdiction over him; and questions relating to the various items of his movable property grouped together, as those of his testamentary capacity or of the succession on his intestacy, had to be considered from a similarly personal point of view. There resulted a general agreement that a man’s legal character, so to speak, should be determined by his domicile, and this introduced a stricter notion of domicile, allowing each person to have but one. He might be subjected without great inconvenience to more than one jurisdiction, but not to more than one law. This is the position which domicile now holds in English jurisprudence. It is the criterion of the law applicable in a large class of cases, and it must be single for each person; and English courts have continually to struggle with the difficulty of selecting his domicile from among the various places in any of which he may be said to reside.

Since the beginning of the 19th century most of the leading continental states have unified their internal laws; and attachment to a province by domicile having thus become an unnecessary consideration, they have adopted political nationality as the criterion of the law to be applied in most of the questions which used to depend on domicile. Thus as between themselves they have greatly simplified the determination of those questions, but a similar elimination of domicile is impossible in what concerns British subjects, because the British empire continues to include a great variety of laws, as those of England, Scotland, the province of Quebec, the Cape Colony, &c. Within the British dominions domicile is the only available criterion of the legal character of a British subject, and all British courts continue to apply the same criterion to British subjects outside those dominions and to foreigners, so that, for example, the age of majority of a British subject or of a Frenchman domiciled in Germany would be referred by a British court to German law. Indeed so deeply is the principle of domicile seated in British law that only legislative action could allow a British court to substitute a new principle. And even a French, Italian or German court, applying political nationality as its new criterion to the legal character of a British subject, could obtain no definite result unless it supplemented that criterion by the old one, domicile, in order to connect the person in question with one of the legal systems existing in the British dominions.

Again, so long as the change of the criterion has not become universal, a new question is introduced by its having been made in some countries only. Denmark being one of those European states which still adhere to the principle of domicile, we will take it as an example in order not to complicate the illustration by such differences of internal law as exist in the British dominions. Suppose that a Danish court has to decide on the age of majority of a Danish subject domiciled in France, Italy or Germany. Its rule refers the question to the law of the domicile, and the law of the domicile refers it back to the law of the political nationality. What is to be done? This and all other questions relating to the application of the principle of domicile, which has been only summarily indicated, are treated under International Law (Private). Here we shall deal briefly with the determination of domicile itself.

The Roman jurists defined domicile to be the place “ubi quis larem rerumque ac fortunarum summam constituit; unde rursus non sit discessurus si nihil avocet: unde cum profectus est, peregrinari videtur: quo si rediit peregrinari jam destitit.” This makes that place the domicile which may be described as the headquarters of the person concerned; but a man’s habits of life may point to no place, or may point equally to two places, as his headquarters, and the connexion of domicile with law requires that a man shall always have a domicile, and never more than one. The former of these difficulties is met in the manner described by Lord Westbury in Udny v. Udny (Law Reports, 1 House of Lords, Scottish Appeals). “It is,” he said, “a settled principle that no man shall be without a domicile, and to secure this end the law attributes to every individual as soon as he is born the domicile of his father, if the child be legitimate, and the domicile of his mother, if the child be illegitimate. This is called the domicile of origin, and is involuntary. It is the creation of the law, not of the party. It may be extinguished by act of law, as for example by sentence of death or exile for life, which destroys the status civilis of the criminal; but it cannot be destroyed by the will and act of the party. Domicile of choice is the creation of the party. When a domicile of choice is acquired, the domicile of origin is in abeyance, but is not absolutely extinguished or obliterated. When a domicile of choice is abandoned, the domicile of origin revives, a special intention to revert to it not being necessary. A natural-born Englishman may domicile himself in Holland, but if he breaks up his establishment there and quits Holland, declaring that he will never return, it is absurd to suppose that his Dutch domicile clings to him until he has set up his tabernacle elsewhere.” If to this we add that legitimate minors follow the changes of the father’s domicile and a married woman follows the domicile of her husband, also that compulsory detention will not create a domicile, the outlines of involuntary domicile will have been sufficiently sketched.

For the establishment of a domicile of choice there must be both animus and factum, intention and fact. The fact need not be more than arrival in the territory of the new domicile if there be the necessary intention, while any number of years’ continuance there will not found a domicile if the necessary intention is absent. As the result of the most recent English and Scottish cases it may be laid down that the necessary intention is incompatible with the contemplation by the person in question of any event on the occurrence of which his residence in the territory in question would cease, and that if he has not formed a fixed and settled purpose of settling in that territory, at least his conduct and declarations must lead to the belief that he would have declared such a purpose if the necessity of making an election between that territory and his former one had arisen. The word territory, meaning a country having a certain legal system, is used advisedly, for neither the intention nor the fact need refer to a locality. It is possible that a Scotsman or a foreigner may have clearly established a domicile of choice in England, although it may be impossible to say whether London, Brighton or a house in the country is his true or principal residence. What is here laid down has been gradually attained. In the older English cases an intention to return to the former domicile was not excluded, if the event on which the return depended was highly uncertain and regarded by the person in question as remote. Afterwards a tendency towards the opposite extreme was manifested by requiring for a domicile of choice the intention to associate oneself with the ideas and habits of the new territory—Quatenus in illo exuere patriam, not in the political sense, which it was never attempted to connect with change of domicile, but in the social and legal sense. At present it is agreed that the only intention to be considered is that of residence, but that, if the intention to reside in the territory be proved to amount to what has been above stated, a domicile will be acquired from which the legal consequences will follow, even defeating intentions about them so clearly expressed as, for instance, by making a will which by reason of the change of domicile is invalid. The two most important cases are Douglas v. Douglas, 1871, L. R. 12 Equity 617, before Vice-chancellor Wickens, and Winans v. Att. Gen., 1904, Appeal Cases 287, before the House of Lords.

When the circumstances of a person’s life point to two territories 401 as domiciles, the selection of the one which alone can fill that character often leads to appeals even up to the highest court. The residence of a man’s wife and family as contrasted with his place of business, his exercise of political or municipal functions, and any conduct which tends to connect his children with a given country, as by their education or the start given them in life, as well as other indications, are often cited as important; but none of them are in themselves decisive. The situation must be considered as a whole. When the question is between the domicile of origin and an alleged one of choice, its solution is rendered a little easier than it is when the question is between two alleged domiciles of choice, the burden of proof lying on the party which contends that the domicile of origin has been abandoned.

In the state of the law which has been described it will not be found surprising that an act of parliament, 24 & 25 Vict. c. 121, recites that by the operation of the law of domicile the expectation and belief of British subjects dying abroad with regard to the distribution of their property are often defeated, and enacts that when a convention to that effect has been made with any foreign country, no British subject dying in such country shall be deemed to have acquired a domicile therein, unless he has been resident in such country for one year previous to death and has made a declaration in writing of his intention to become domiciled; and that British subjects so dying without having so resided and made such declaration shall be deemed for all purposes of testate or intestate succession as to movables to retain the domicile they possessed at the time of going to reside in such foreign country. Similar exemptions are conferred on the subjects of the foreign state dying in Great Britain or Ireland. But the act does not apply to foreigners who have obtained letters of naturalization in any part of the British dominions. It has not been availed of, and is indeed an anachronism, ignoring as it does the fact that domicile has no longer a world-wide importance, owing to the substitution for it of political nationality as a test of private law in so many important countries. The United States of America is not one of those countries, but there the importance of domicile suffers from the habit of referring questions of capacity to the law of the place of contract instead of to any personal law.

(Jno. W.)

DOMINIC, SAINT (1170-1221), founder of the Dominican Order of Preaching Friars, was born in 1170 at Calaroga in Old Castile. He spent ten or twelve years in study, chiefly theological, at Palencia, and then, about 1195, he was ordained and became a canon in the cathedral chapter of Osma, his native diocese. The bishop induced his canons to follow the Rule of St Augustine and thus make themselves Augustinian Canons (q.v.); and so Dominic became a canon regular and soon the prior or provost of the cathedral community. The years from 1195 to 1203 have been filled up with fabulous stories of missions to the Moors; but Dominic stayed at Osma, preaching much in the cathedral, until 1203, when he accompanied the bishop on an embassy in behalf of the king of Castile to “The Marches.” This has commonly been taken as Denmark, but more probably it was the French or Italian Marches. When the embassy was over, the bishop and Dominic repaired to Rome, and Innocent III. charged them to preach among the Albigensian heretics in Languedoc. For ten years (1205-1215) this mission in Languedoc was the work of Dominic’s life.

The Albigenses (q.v.) have received much sympathy, as being a kind of pre-Reformation Protestants; but it is now recognized that their tenets were an extreme form of Manichaeism. They believed in the existence of two gods, a good (whose son was Christ) and an evil (whose son was Satan); matter is the creation of the evil principle, and therefore essentially evil, and the greatest of all sins is sexual intercourse, even in marriage; sinful also is the possession of material goods, and the eating of flesh meat, and many other things. So great was the abhorrence of matter that some even thought it an act of religion to commit suicide by voluntary starvation, or to starve children to death (see article “Neu-Manichäer” by Otto Zöckler in ed. 3 of Herzog’s Realencyklopädie für protestantische Theologie (1903); or c. iii. of Paul Sabatier’s Life of St Francis). Such tenets were destructive not only of Catholicism but of Christianity of any kind and of civil society itself; and for this reason so unecclesiastical a person as the emperor Frederick II. tried to suppress the kindred sects in Italy. In 1208, after the murder of a papal legate, Innocent III. called on the Christian princes to suppress the Albigensian heresy by force of arms, and for seven years the south of France was devastated by one of the most bloodthirsty wars in history, the Albigenses being slaughtered by thousands and their property confiscated wholesale.

During this time, it is the judgment of the most recent Protestant writer on St Dominic that, though keeping on good terms with Simon de Montfort, the leader, and praying for the success of the crusaders’ arms during the battle of Muret, “yet, so far as can be seen from the sources, Dominic took no part in the crusade, but endeavoured to carry his spiritual activity on the same lines as before. The oldest trustworthy sources know nothing of his having exercised the office of Inquisitor during the Albigensian war” (Grützmacher). This verdict of a fair-minded and highly competent Protestant church historian on the most controverted point of Dominic’s career is of great value. His method was to travel over the country on foot and barefooted, in extreme poverty, simplicity and austerity, preaching and instructing in highways and villages and towns, and in the castles of the nobility, controverting and discussing with the heretics. He used often to organize formal disputations with Albigensian leaders, lasting a number of days. Many times plots were laid against his life. Though in his ten years of preaching a large number of converts were made, it has to be said that the results were not such as had been hoped for, and after it all, and after the crusade, the population still remained at heart Albigensian. A sense of failure appears in Dominic’s last sermon in Languedoc: “For many years I have exhorted you in vain, with gentleness, preaching, praying and weeping. But according to the proverb of my country, ‘where blessing can accomplish nothing, blows may avail.’ We shall rouse against you princes and prelates, who, alas, will arm nations and kingdoms against this land ... and thus blows will avail where blessings and gentleness have been powerless.” The threat that seems to be conveyed in these words, of trying to promote a new crusade, was never carried out; the remaining years of Dominic’s life were wholly given up to the founding of his order.

The Order of Dominicans grew out of the little band of volunteers that had joined Dominic in his mission among the Albigenses. He had become possessed with the idea of addressing wider circles and of forming an order whose vocation should be to preach and missionize throughout the whole world. By 1214 the nucleus of such an institute was formed round Dominic and was known as the “Holy Preaching.” In 1215 the bishop of Toulouse, Dominic’s great friend, established them in a church and house of the city, and Dominic went to Rome to obtain the permission of Innocent III. to found his order of preachers. The course of events is traced in the article Dominicans. After three years, in 1218, the full permission he desired was given by Honorius III. These last years of his life were spent in journeying backwards and forwards between Toulouse and Rome, where his abode was at the basilica of Santa Sabina on the Aventine, given to him by the pope; and then in extended journeys all over Italy, and to Paris, and into Spain, establishing friaries and organizing the order wherever he went. It propagated and spread with extraordinary rapidity, so that by Dominic’s death in 1221, only five or six years after the first practical steps towards the execution of the idea, there were over 500 friars and 60 friaries, divided into 8 provinces embracing the whole of western Europe. Thus Dominic was at his death able to contemplate his great creation solidly established, and well launched on its career to preach to the whole world.

It appears that at the end of his life Dominic had the idea of going himself to preach to the heathen Kuman Tatars on the Dnieper and the Volga. But this was not to be; he was worn out by the incessant toils and fatigues and austerities of his laborious life, and he died at his monastery at Bologna, on the 402 6th of August 1221. He was canonized in 1234 by Gregory IX., who, as Cardinal Ugolino, had been the great friend and supporter both of Dominic and of Francis of Assisi. As St Dominic’s character and work do not receive the same general recognition as do St Francis of Assisi’s, it will be worth while to quote from the appreciation by Prof. Grützmacher of Heidelberg:—“It is certain that Dominic was a noble personality of genuine and true piety.... Only by the preaching of pure doctrine would he overcome heretics.... He was by nature soft-hearted, so that he often shed tears through warm sympathy.... In the purity of his intention and the earnestness with which he strove to carry out his ideal, he was not inferior to Francis.”

The chief sources for St Dominic’s life are the account by Jordan of Saxony, his successor as master-general of the order, and the evidence of the witnesses at the Process of Canonization,—all in the Bollandists’ Acta sanctorum, Aug. 4. Probably the best modern Life is that by Jean Guiraud, in the series Les Saints (translated into English by Katharine de Mattos, 1901); the bibliography contains a useful list of the chief sources for the history of St Dominic and the order, and of the best modern works thereon. See also the article “Dominicus” in ed. 2 of Wetzer and Welte, Kirchenlexicon, and Grützmacher’s excellent article “Dominikus,” in ed. 3 of Herzog, Realencyklopadie für protestantische Theologie, already referred to.

(E. C. B.)

DOMINICA, the largest of the five presidencies in the colony of the Leeward Islands, British West Indies. It lies in 15° 30′ N. and 61° 20′ W., between the French islands of Martinique and Guadeloupe, at a distance of about 25 m. from each, is 29 m. long, has a maximum breadth of 16 m. and an area of 291 sq. m. A range of lofty rugged mountains traverses the island from N. to S., broken in the centre by a narrow plain drained by the rivers Layou and Pagoua, flowing W. and E. respectively. The highest point is Morne Diablotin (5314 ft.), situated in the northern half of the range. Signs of volcanic activity abound in the shape of solfataras, subterranean vapours and hot springs; while in the south is the greatest natural curiosity, the renowned Boiling Lake. It lies on the mountain side, 2300 ft. above the sea, its banks are steep and its depth unknown, being more than 300 ft. at a short distance from the margin. Its seething waters are often forced 3 ft. above the normal level by the pressure of the escaping gases; and the fumes rising from the lake are occasionally poisonous. The island is botanically remarkable for its great number of peculiar species, offering in this respect a marked contrast to the poverty of the adjacent islands. The hills are covered with valuable timber, while coffee, limes, oranges, india-rubber trees, spices and all tropical fruits grow luxuriantly in the rich brown mould of the lowlands. There are some thirty streams of considerable size, besides numerous mountain torrents, and this abundance of water renders the island very fertile. The fisheries are productive, and honey and wax are furnished by wild bees, originally introduced from Europe. The temperature varies from 78° to 86° F. in the hot season from August to October, and from 72° to 84° in the cooler months; the rainfall varies in different parts from 50 to 162 in. per annum, but the porous soil soon absorbs the rain, rendering the atmosphere dry and invigorating.

The manufactures include sugar, lime-juice and essential oils; the exports are coffee, cocoa, sugar, limes and lime-juice, essential oils and fruit of all kinds. The inhabitants in 1901 numbered 28,894. The majority are negroes; the whites are of French and British descent. There are also a few Caribs, the remnant of the aboriginal population. A French patois is the language of the peasantry, but English is generally understood. The capital, Roseau (5764), is a fortified town and a port; Portsmouth, the only other town, possesses the better harbour in Prince Rupert’s Bay on the north-west. In religion the Roman Catholics predominate, and a bishop resides at Roseau, but there is no established church. Education is free and compulsory, and the Cambridge local examinations are held annually.

Dominica was so named on its discovery by Columbus in 1493, in commemoration of the date, Sunday (Dies Dominica) the 3rd of November. Dominica was included in the grant of various islands in the Caribbean Sea made in 1627 by Charles I. to the earl of Carlisle, but the first European settlers (1632) were French. They brought with them negro slaves and lived on terms of friendship with the Caribs, who were then a numerous body. In 1660 a treaty appears to have been made between the French, British and the natives assigning St Vincent and Dominica to the Caribs, but shortly afterwards attempts were made by the British to gain a foothold in the island. These attempts failed, and in 1748 it was once more agreed by France and Great Britain that Dominica should be left in the undisturbed possession of the natives. Nevertheless the French settlers increased, and the island came under the rule of a French governor. It was captured by the British in 1761 and formally ceded by France at the peace of Paris, 1763, French settlers being secured in their estates. In 1778 a French force from Martinique seized the island. Rodney’s victory over De Grasse in the neighbouring sea in 1782 was followed by the restoration of the island to Britain in 1783; in the interval the trade of Dominica had been ruined. In 1795 a force from Guadeloupe made an unsuccessful descent on the island, and in 1805 the French general La Grange, at the head of 4000 troops, took Roseau and pillaged the island—an event now remembered as the most memorable in its history. The French were, however, unable to make good their hold, and Dominica has remained since undisturbed in British possession. Its later history presents few features not common to the other British West Indian islands.

Since 1872 Dominica has formed part of the colony of the Leeward Islands, but local affairs are in the hands of an administrator, aided by an executive council of ten members. In 1898 the local legislature, in consideration of pecuniary assistance from Great Britain, passed an act abrogating the semi-elective constitution and providing for a legislative council of twelve nominated members, six of whom sit ex officio.


DOMINICANS, otherwise called Friars Preachers, and in England Black Friars, from the black mantle worn over a white habit, an order of friars founded by St Dominic (q.v.). Their first house was in Toulouse, where the bishop established them at the church of St Romain, 1215. Dominic at once went to Rome to obtain permission to found an order of preachers whose sphere of activity should be the whole world, but Innocent III. said they must adopt one of the existing rules. Dominic returned to Toulouse and it was resolved to take the Rule of St Augustine, Dominic himself having been an Augustinian canon at Osma (see Augustinian Canons). Dominic went again to Rome, and during the year 1216 he obtained from Honorius III. a series of confirmations of the community at Toulouse as a congregation of Canons Regular of St Augustine with a special mission to preach. Early in 1218 an encyclical bull was issued to the bishops of the whole Catholic world recommending to them the “Order of Friars Preachers,” followed in 1221 by another ordering them to give to the friars faculties to preach and hear confessions in their dioceses. Already in 1217 Dominic had scattered the little band of seventeen over the world—to Paris, into Spain, and one he took with himself to Rome. Within a few months there were forty friars in Rome, at Santa Sabina on the Aventine, and thirty in Paris; and before Dominic’s death in 1221 friaries had been established at Lyons, Limoges, Reims, Metz, Poitiers and Orleans; at Bologna, Milan, Florence, Verona, Piacenza and Venice; at Madrid, Palencia, Barcelona and Seville; at Friesach in Carinthia; at Cracow and Prague; and friars were on their way to Hungary and England.

The order took definite shape at the two general chapters held at Bologna in 1220 and 1221. At first it had been but a congregation of canons regular and had worn the canons’ black cassock with white linen rochet. But now a white woollen habit with a black cloak or mantle was assumed. The Rule of St Augustine was supplemented by a body of regulations, adopted mostly from those of the Premonstratensian canons. At the head of the order was the master-general, elected for life until recent times, when the term of office was limited to six and then to twelve years; he enjoys supreme power over the entire order, both houses and individuals, all of whom are directly subject to him. He dwells in Rome and is assisted by a council. The order is divided into provinces and over each is a provincial, elected for four years. Each friary has its prior, elected by the community 403 every four years. The friars belong not to the house or province in which they make their profession, but to the order; and it rests with the master-general to assign to each his place of residence. The manner of life was very austere—midnight office, perpetual abstinence from meat, frequent disciplines, prolonged fasts and silence. At St Dominic’s suggestion, and under his strong pressure, but not without considerable opposition, the general chapter determined that the poverty practised in the order should be not merely individual, as in the monastic orders, but corporate, as among the Franciscans; so that the order should have no possessions, except the monastic buildings and churches, no property, no fixed income, but should live on charity and by begging. Thus, doubtless in imitation of the Franciscans, the Dominicans became a mendicant order.

The extraordinarily rapid propagation of the institute suffered no diminution through the founder’s death; this was mainly due to the fact that his four immediate successors in the generalate were men of conspicuous ability and high character. In a few years the Dominicans penetrated into Denmark, Sweden, Russia, Prussia and Poland, preaching and missionizing in the still pagan districts of these countries; and soon they made their way to Greece and Palestine and thence to central Asia. St Hyacinth, a Pole received by St Dominic, during missionary journeys extending over thirty-five years travelled over the north and east of Europe and into Tatary, Tibet and northern China. In 1252 the pope addressed a letter to the Dominicans who were preaching “among the Saracens, Greeks, Bulgarians, Kumans, Syrians, Goths, Jacobites, Armenians, Jews, Tatars, Hungarians.” From the 14th century until the middle of the 17th the Dominicans had numerous missions in Persia, India and China, and in the northern parts of Africa. They followed the Spanish and Portuguese explorers and conquerors both to the East and to the West, converting, protecting and civilizing the aborigines. On these missionary enterprises great numbers of Dominicans laid down their life for the Gospel.

Another conspicuous field of work of the Dominicans lay in the universities. It had been St Dominic’s policy to aim at founding houses first of all in the great university towns—at Paris, Bologna, Palencia, Oxford. This policy was adhered to, and the Dominicans soon became a power in the universities, occupying chairs in those just named and in Padua, Cologne, Vienna, Prague and Salamanca. The scholastic doctors Albert the Great and Thomas Aquinas were the leaders in this side of Dominican activity, and the order’s influence on the course of medieval theological development was exercised mainly by these doctors and by the Dominican school of theology, which to this day has maintained the principles and methods elaborated by St Thomas.

The Dominican name is in an especial way associated with the Inquisition, the office of Inquisitor in all countries, including Spain, having usually been held by Dominicans. The vicissitudes of the order have been much like those of other orders—periods of relaxation being followed by periods of revival and reform; but there were not any reforms of the same historical importance as in most other orders, the policy having been to keep all such movements strictly within the organization of the order. In 1425 Martin V. relaxed for some houses the law of corporate poverty, allowing them to hold property, and to have fixed sources of income; and fifty years later Sixtus IV. extended this mitigation to the entire order, which thereby ceased to be mendicant. This change caused no troubles, as among the Franciscans, for it was felt that it did not touch St Dominic’s fundamental idea.

The Friars Preachers came to England and were established at Oxford in 1221, and by the end of the century fifty friaries were founded all over England, usually in the towns, and several in Ireland and Scotland. In London they were first on the site of Lincoln’s Inn, but in 1275 they migrated to that now occupied by Printing-house Square, and their name survives in Blackfriars Bridge. The only nunnery was at Dartford. At the Dissolution there were fifty-seven friaries (see lists in F. A. Gasquet’s English Monastic Life, Catholic Dictionary and C. F. Palmer’s Life of Cardinal Howard, where historical notes are added). In Mary’s reign some of the scattered friars were brought together and established in Smithfield, and the remnant of the nuns were restored to Dartford. In 1559 these houses were suppressed and the nuns and two friars expatriated, and for a hundred years there was no English Dominican community. But throughout the reigns of Elizabeth and the early Stuarts there were usually some Dominicans, either Englishmen professed in foreign monasteries or foreigners, labouring on the English mission or attached to the foreign embassies. In 1658 Friar Thomas Howard (afterwards Cardinal) succeeded in establishing at Bornhem near Antwerp a house for the English friars. From that time there has always been an organized body of English Dominicans, again and again reduced almost to extinction, but ever surviving; it now has half a dozen thriving friaries. The Irish province also survived the days of persecution and possesses a dozen friaries. In 1840 Lacordaire restored the French province. In 1900 there were 4350 Dominicans, including lay brothers, and 300 friaries, scattered all over the world. Missionary work still holds a prominent place in Dominican life; there are missions in Annam, Tongking and China, and in Mesopotamia, Mosul and Kurdistan. They have also a remarkable school for Biblical studies and research at Jerusalem, and the theological faculty in the Roman Catholic university at Fribourg in Switzerland is in their hands. There have been four Dominican popes: Innocent V. († 1276), Benedict XI. († 1304), Pius V. († 1572), Benedict XIII. († 1730).

The friars form the “First Order”; the nuns, or Dominicanesses, the “Second Order.” The latter may claim to have chronological precedence over the friars, for the first nunnery was established by St Dominic in 1206 at Prouille in the diocese of Toulouse, as a refuge for women converted from the Albigensian heresy. The second convent was at San Sisto in Rome, also founded by Dominic himself. From that time the institute spread widely. The rule resembled that of the friars, except that the nuns were to be strictly enclosed and purely contemplative; in course of time, however, they undertook educational work. In 1909 there were nearly 100 nunneries of the Second Order, with some 1500 nuns. They have schools and orphanages in South Africa, especially in the Transvaal.

A considerable number of other convents for women follow the Rule of the “Third Order.” This rule was not written until the 15th century, and it is controverted whether, and in what sense, it can be held that the “Third Order” really goes back to St Dominic, or whether it grew up in imitation of the Franciscan Tertiaries. Besides the conventual Tertiaries, there are confraternities of lay men and women who strive to carry out this rule while living their family life in the world (see Tertiaries). St Catharine of Siena was a Dominican Tertiary.

See the authorities cited in the article Dominic, Saint; also Helyot, Hist. des ordres religieux (1714), iii. cc. 24-29, and Max Heimbucher, Orden u. Kongregationen (1896), §§ 86-91; and C. F. Palmer, Life of Cardinal Howard (1867), which gives a special account of the English Dominican province.

(E. C. B.)

DOMINIS, MARCO ANTONIO DE (1560-1624), Italian theologian and natural philosopher, was born of a noble Venetian family in 1560 in the island of Arbe, off the coast of Dalmatia. He was educated by the Jesuits in their colleges at Loreto and Padua, and is supposed by some to have joined their order; the more usual opinion, however, is that he was dissuaded from doing so by Cardinal Aldobrandini. For some time he was employed as a teacher at Verona, as professor of mathematics at Padua, and professor of rhetoric and philosophy at Brescia. In 1596 he was appointed to the bishopric of Segnia (Zengg) in Dalmatia, and two years later was raised to the archbishopric of Spalato and primacy of Dalmatia and Croatia. His endeavours to reform the Church soon brought him into conflict with his suffragans; and the interference of the papal court with his rights as metropolitan, an attitude intensified by the quarrel between the papacy and Venice, made his position intolerable. This, at any rate, is the account given in his own apology—the Consilium profectionis—in which he also states that it was these troubles that led him to those researches into ecclesiastical law, church history and dogmatic theology, which, while confirming him in his love for the ideal of “the true Catholic Church,” revealed to him how far the 404 papal system was from approximating to it. After a visit to Rome, when he in vain attempted to gain the ear of Pope Paul V., he resigned his see in September 1616, wrote at Venice his Consilium profectionis, and then went by way of Switzerland, Heidelberg and Rotterdam to England, where he arrived in December. He was welcomed by the king and the Anglican clergy with great respect, was received into the Church of England in St Paul’s cathedral, and was appointed master of the Savoy (1618) and dean of Windsor (1619); he subsequently presented himself to the living of West Ilsley, Berkshire. Contemporary writers give no pleasant account of him, describing him as fat, irascible, pretentious and very avaricious; but his ability was undoubted, and in the theological controversies of the time he soon took a foremost place. His published attacks on the papacy succeeded each other in rapid succession: the Papatus Romanus, issued anonymously (London, 1617; Frankfort, 1618), the Scogli del naufragio Christiano, written in Switzerland (London, (?) 1618), of which English, French and German translations also appeared, and a Sermon preached in Italian, &c., before the king. But his principal work was the De republica ecclesiastica, of which the first part—after revision by Anglican theologians—was published under royal patronage in London (1617), in which he set forth with a great display of erudition his theory of the church. In the main it is an elaborate treatise on the historic organization of the church, its principal note being its insistence on the divine prerogatives of the Catholic episcopate as against the encroachments of the papal monarchy. In 1619 Dominis published in London, with a dedication to James I., Paolo Sarpi’s Historia del Concilio Tridentino, the MS. of which he had brought with him from Venice. It is characteristic of the man that he refused to hand over to Sarpi a penny of the money present given to him by the king as a reward for this work.

Three years later the ex-archbishop was back again in Rome, doing penance for his heresies in St Peter’s with a cord round his neck. The reasons for this sudden revolution in his opinions, which caused grave scandal in England, have been much debated; it is probably no libel on his memory, however, to say that they were connected with the hopes raised by the elevation of his kinsman, Alessandro Ludovisi, to the papal throne as Gregory XV. (1621). It is said that he was enticed back to Rome by the promise of pardon and rich preferment. If so, he was doomed to bitter disappointment. He had barely time to publish at Rome (1623) his Sui reditus ex Angliae consilium, an abject repudiation of his anti-papal works as written “non ex cordis sinceritate, non ex bona conscientia, non ex fide,” when Gregory died (July 1623). During the interregnum that followed, the proceedings of the Inquisition against the archbishop were revived, and they continued under Urban VIII. Before they were concluded, however, Dominis died in prison, on the 8th of September 1624. Even this did not end his trial, and on the 20th of December judgment was pronounced over his corpse in the church of Santa Maria sopra Minerva. By order of the Inquisition his body was taken from the coffin, dragged through the streets of Rome, and publicly burnt in the Campo di Fiore. By a strange irony of fate the publication of his Reditus consilium was subsequently forbidden in Venice because of its uncompromising advocacy of the supremacy of the pope over the temporal powers. As a theologian and an ecclesiastic Dominis was thoroughly discredited; as a man of science he was more happy. He was the first to put forward a true theory of the rainbow, in his De radiis visus et lucis in vitris perspectivis et iride (Venice, 1611).

See the article by Canon G. G. Perry in the Dict. Nat. Biog., and that by Benrath in Herzog-Hauck, Realencyklopädie (ed. 1898), iv. p. 781, where a full bibliography is given. Also H. Newland, Life and Contemporaneous Church History of Antonio de Dominis (Oxford, 1859).


DOMINOES, a game unknown until the 18th century, and probably invented in Italy, played with twenty-eight oblong pieces, or dominoes, known also as cards or stones, having ivory faces backed with ebony; from this ebony backing, as resembling the cloak (usually black) called a domino (see Mask), the name is said to be derived. Cardboard dominoes to be held in the hand are also in use. The face of each card is divided into two squares by a black line, and in each square half the value of the card is indicated by its being either a blank or marked with one or more black pips, generally up to six, but some sets run as high as double-nine. There are various ways of playing dominoes described below.

The Block and Draw Games.—The dominoes are shuffled face downwards on the table. The lead is usually decided by drawing for the highest card, but it is sometimes held that any doublet takes precedence. The cards are then reshuffled, and each player draws at random the number of cards required for the particular form of the game, usually seven. The cards left behind are called the stock. To play a card is known technically as to pose. The leader poses first, generally playing his highest domino, since at the end the player loses according to the number of pips in the cards he has left in his hand. By some rules, a player after playing a double may play another card which matches it: e.g. if he plays double-six he may play another card which has a six at one end. The second player has to match the leader’s pose by putting one of his cards in juxtaposition at one end, i.e. if the leader plays four-five, the second player has to play a card which contains either a four or a five, the five being applied to the five, or the four to the four. Doublets are placed à cheval (crosswise). If a player cannot match, he says “go,” and his opponent plays, unless the Draw game—the usual game—is being played, in which case the player who cannot match draws from the stock (two cards must always be left in the stock) till he takes a card that matches. If a player succeeds in posing all his cards, he calls “Domino!” and wins the hand, scoring as many points as there are pips on the cards still held by his opponent. If neither player can match, that player wins who has the fewest pips left in his hand, and he scores as many points as are left in the two hands combined (sometimes only the excess held by his opponent); but when a player has called “Go!” his adversary must match if he can, in which case the other player may be able to match in turn. A game is generally 100 points.

All Fives (or Muggins).—Each player takes five cards. If the leader poses either double-five, six-four, five-blank, or three-two, he scores the number of pips that are on the card. If in the course of play a player can play such a card as makes the sum of the end pips, 5, 10, 15 or 20, he scores that number; e.g. if to two-four he can play double-four (à cheval) he scores 10; if to six-one he plays six-four he scores 5. He must pose if he can match; if he cannot, he draws till he can. Scores are called and taken immediately. At the point of domino, the winner scores in points the multiple of five which is nearest to the number of pips in his adversary’s hand: e.g. he scores 25 if his adversary has 27 pips, 30 if he has 28. If neither hand can match, the lowest number of pips wins, and the score is taken as before, without addition or subtraction, according to the adversary’s pips.

All Threes is played in the same manner as Muggins, save that three or some multiple of three are aimed at.

Threes-and-Fives is similar, but only one point is scored for each five or three made at the two ends, though they can be scored in combination. Thus A plays six-five; B six-one; B scores 2 points for 5-1 (two threes). A plays one-five; B double five; B now scores 8 more, 5 for five threes and 3 for three fives.

Domino-Whist is played by four players. Partners are drawn for as at Whist, the player drawing the highest card leading. Each player takes seven cards. There are no tricks, trumps or honours. The cards are played as in ordinary dominoes, a hand being finished when one of the players plays his last card, or when both ends are blocked. Pips are then counted, and the holder or holders of the highest number score to their debit the aggregate number of points. The side that is first debited with 100 points loses the game. Strength in a suit is indicated by the lead; i.e. a lead of double-blank or double-six implies strength in blanks or sixes respectively.

Matador (from the Spanish word meaning “killer,” i.e. of the bull in a bull-fight). This is a favourite and perhaps the most scientific form of the game. It is played on a different principle from the preceding variations, the object being not to match the end number, but to pose such a number, as, added to the end, will make seven; e.g. to a five a two must be played, to a three a four, &c. Seven dominoes are drawn and the highest double begins. When a player cannot make a seven on either end he must draw from the stock until he secures a card that will enable him to make seven, two cards remaining in the stock. As Matador is played with dominoes no higher than six, a blank means the blocking of that end. In this case no further play can take place at that end excepting by posing a matador, which may be played at any time. There are four matadors, the 6-1, 5-2, 4-3 and double-blank. It is often better to draw one or more fresh cards than to play one’s last matador, as it may save the game at a critical juncture. In posing a double counts as a single number only, but in scoring the full number of pips is counted. When the game has been definitely blocked the player whose pips aggregate the lower number scores the number of the combined hands (sometimes only the excess in his opponent’s hand), the game being usually 100. Matador can be played by three persons, in which case the two having the lowest scores usually combine against the threatening winner; and also by four, either each for himself or two on a side.

405

Other varieties of the game not often played are the Bergen game, Sevastopol and Domino Loo.

See Card and Table Games by Hoffmann (London, G. Routledge & Sons).


DOMINUS (from an Indo-European root dam-, cf. Gr. δαμᾶν, to subdue, and Eng. “tame”), the Latin word for master or owner. As a title of sovereignty the term under the republic at Rome had all the associations of the Greek τύραννος; refused during the early principate, it finally became an official title of the Roman emperors under Diocletian. Dominus, the French equivalent being sieur, was the Latin title of the feudal (superior and mesne) lords, and also an ecclesiastical and academical title. The ecclesiastical title was rendered in English “sir,” which was a common prefix before the Reformation for parsons, as in “Sir Hugh Evans” in Shakespeare’s Merry Wives of Windsor. The academical use was for a bachelor of arts, and so is still used at Cambridge and other universities. The shortened form “dom” is used as a prefix of honour for ecclesiastics of the Roman Church, and especially for members of the Benedictine and other religious orders. The same form is also a title of honour in Portugal, as formerly in Brazil, used by members of the blood royal and others on whom it has been conferred by the sovereign. The Spanish form “don” is also a title, formerly applicable only to the nobility, and now one of courtesy and respect applied to any member of the better classes. The feminine form “donna” is similarly applied to a lady. The English colloquial use of “don” for a fellow or tutor of a college at a university is derived either from an application of the Spanish title to one having authority or position, or from the academical use of dominus. The earliest use of the word in this sense appears, according to the New English Dictionary, in South’s Sermons (1660). An English corruption “dan” was in early use as a title of respect, equivalent to “master.” The particular literary application to poets is due to Spenser’s use of “Dan Chaucer, well of English undefyled” (Faëry Queen, IV. ii. 32).


DOMITIAN (Titus Flavius Domitianus), Roman emperor a.d. 81-96, the second son of Titus Flavius Vespasianus and Flavia Domitilla, twelfth of the Caesars, and third of the Flavian dynasty, was born at Rome on the 24th of October a.d. 51. When Vespasian was proclaimed emperor at Alexandria, Domitian escaped with difficulty from the temple of the Capitol, which had been set on fire by the Vitellians, and remained in hiding till his father’s party proved victorious. After the fall of Vitellius he was saluted as Caesar, or prince imperial, by the troops, obtained the city praetorship, and was entrusted with the administration of Italy till his father’s return from the East. But although in his father’s lifetime he several times filled the office of consul, and after his death was nominally the partner in the empire with his brother Titus, he never took any part in public business, but lived in great retirement, devoting himself to a life of pleasure and of literary pursuits till he succeeded to the throne. The death of Titus, if not hastened by foul means, was at least eagerly welcomed by his brother. Domitian’s succession (on the 13th of September 81) was unquestioned, and it would seem that he had intended, so far as his weak volition and mean abilities would allow, to govern well. Like Augustus, he attempted a reformation of morals and religion. As chief pontiff he inquired rigorously into the character of the vestal virgins, three of whom were buried alive; he enforced the laws against adultery, mutilation, and the grosser forms of immorality, and forbade the public acting of mimes. He erected many temples and public buildings (amongst them the Odeum, a kind of theatre for musical performances) and restored the temple of the Capitol. He passed many sumptuary laws, and issued an edict forbidding the over-cultivation of vines to the neglect of corn-growing. Finally, he took a personal share in the administration of justice at Rome, checked the activity of the informers (delatores), and exercised a jealous supervision over the governors of provinces. Such public virtues at first counterbalanced his private vices in the eyes of the people. Domitian was the first emperor who arrogated divine honours in his lifetime, and caused himself to be styled Our Lord and God in public documents. Doubtless in the poems of writers like Martial this deification was nothing but fulsome flattery, but in the case of the provincials it was a sincere tribute to the impersonation of the Roman Empire, as the administrator of good government and the peacemaker of the world. Even when Rome and Italy smarted beneath his proscriptions and extortions, the provinces were undisturbed.

Though he took the title of imperator more than twenty times, and enjoyed at least one triumph, Domitian’s military achievements were insignificant. He defeated the Chatti, annexed the district of the Taunus, and established the Limes as a line of defence; but he suffered defeats at the hands of the Quadi, Sarmatae and Marcomanni; in Dacia he received a severe check, and was obliged to purchase peace (90) from Decebalus by the payment of a large sum of money and by guaranteeing a yearly tribute—the first instance in Roman history. His jealousy was provoked by the successes of Agricola in Britain, who was recalled to Rome (85) in the midst of his conquests, condemned to retirement, and perhaps removed by poison. The revolt of Antonius Saturninus, the commander of the Roman forces in Upper Germany (88 or 89), marks the turning-point in his reign (on the date see H. Schiller, Geschichte der römischen Kaiserzeit, i. pt. 2, p. 524, note 2). It was speedily crushed; but from that moment Domitian’s character changed. He got rid of all whom he disliked on the charge of having taken part in the conspiracy, and no man of eminence was safe against him. He was in constant fear of assassination and distrusted all around him. During the last three years of his life his behaviour was that of a madman. He sentenced to death his own cousin and nephew by marriage, Flavius Clemens, whose wife he banished for her supposed leaning towards Judaism (Christianity). A conspiracy among his own freedmen—set on foot, it is said, by his wife Domitia Longina, who knew her own life to be threatened—cut short his career. He was stabbed in his bedroom by a freedman of Clemens named Stephanus on the 18th of September 96.

Authorities. Ancient.—Tacitus, Histories, iii. iv.; Suetonius, Domitian; Dio Cassius lxvi., lxvii.; Tacitus, Agricola, 18-22. Modern accounts by A. Imhof, T. Flavius Domitianus (Halle, 1857), which, while not claiming any special originality, is based on a conscientious study of authorities; A. Halberstadt, De imperatoris Domitiani moribus et rebus (Amsterdam, 1877), an attempt to rehabilitate Domitian; S. Gsell, Essai sur le règne de l’empereur Domitien (1894), very complete in every respect; H. Schiller (as above), pp. 520-538; C. Merivale, Hist. of the Romans under the Empire, ch. 61, 62. For Domitian’s attitude towards Christianity see V. Schultze in Herzog-Hauck’s Realencyklopadie fur protestantische Theologie, iv. (1898); Sir W. M. Ramsay, The Church in the Roman Empire (1903); E. G. Hardy, Christianity and the Roman Government (1894); J. B. Bury, Appendix 8 to vol. ii. of his edition of Gibbon.


DOMRÉMY-LA-PUCELLE, a village of eastern France, in the department of Vosges, on the left bank of the Meuse, 7 m. N. of Neufchâteau by road. Pop. (1906) 233. Domrémy was the birthplace of Joan of Arc, and the cottage in which she was born still stands. Above the door are the arms of France and of Joan of Arc and an inscription of 1481 reading “Vive labeur; vive le roi Louys.” There are several monuments to the heroine, and a modern basilica has been erected in her honour on a neighbouring hill, where she is said to have heard the voices in obedience to which she took up the sword. The story of the heroine is annually celebrated by a play in which the villagers take part.


DON (anc. Tanais), a river of European Russia, called Tuna or Duna by the Tatars, rising in Lake Ivan (580 ft. above sea-level) in the government of Tula, where it has communication with the Volga by means of the Yepifan Canal, which links it with the Upa, a tributary of the Oka, which itself enters the Volga. The Don, after curving east through the government of Ryazan, flows generally south through the governments of Tambov, Orel, Voronezh and the Don Cossacks territory, describing in the last-named a sweeping loop to the east, in the course of which it approaches within 48 m. of the Volga in 49° N. In the middle of the Don Cossacks territory it turns definitely south-west, and finally enters the north-east extremity of the Sea of Azov, forming a delta 130 sq. m. in extent. Its total length is 1325 m., and its drainage area is calculated at 166,000 sq. m. The average fall 406 of the river is about 5¼ in. to the mile. In its upper course, which may be regarded as extending to the confluence of the Voronezh in 51° 40′, the Don flows for the most part through a low-lying, fertile country, though in the government of Ryazan its banks are rocky and steep, and in some places even precipitous. In the middle division, or from the mouth of the Voronezh to the point where it makes its nearest approach to the Volga, the stream cuts its way for the most part through Cretaceous rocks, which in many places rise on either side in steep and elevated banks, and at intervals encroach on the river-bed. A short distance below the town of Rostov it breaks up into several channels, of which the largest and most southern retains the name of the river. Before it receives the Voronezh the Don has a breadth of 500 to 700, or even in a few places 1000 ft., while its depth varies from 4 to 20 ft.; by the time it reaches its most eastern point the depth has increased to 8-50 ft., and the ordinary breadth to 700-1000 ft., with an occasional maximum of 1400 ft.; in the lowest division the depth is frequently 70 ft., and the breadth in many places 1870 ft. Generally speaking, the right bank is high and the left flat and low. Shallow reaches are not uncommon, and there are at least seven considerable shoals in the south-western part of the course; partly owing to this cause, and partly to the scarcity of ship-timber in the Voronezh government, the Don, although navigable as far up as Voronezh, does not attain any great importance as a means of communication till it reaches Kachalinskaya in the vicinity of the Volga. From that point, or rather from Kalach, where the railway (built in 1862) from the Volga has its western terminus, the traffic is very extensive. Of the tributaries of the river, the Voronezh, the Khoper, the Medvyeditsa and the Donets are navigable—the Donets having a course of 680 m., and during high water affording access to the government of Kharkov. The Manych, another large affluent on the left, marks the ancient line of water connexion between the Sea of Azov and the Caspian Sea. The lower section of the Don is subject to two annual floods, of which the earlier, known as the “cold water,” is caused by the melting of the snow in the country of the Don Cossacks, and the later, or the “warm water,” is due to the same process taking place in the region drained by the upper parts of the stream. About the beginning of June the river begins to subside with great rapidity; in August the water is very low and navigation almost ceases; but occasionally after the September rains the traffic with small craft is again practicable. Since the middle of the 18th century there have been five floods of extraordinary magnitude,—namely, in 1748, 1786, 1805, 1820 and 1845. The river is usually closed by ice from November or December to March or April, and at rare intervals it freezes in October. At Aksai, in the delta, it remains open on the average for 250 days in the year, at the mouth of the Medvyeditsa for 239, and at Novo-Cherkask, on another arm of the delta, for 246. This river supports a considerable fishing population, who despatch salt fish and caviare all over Russia. Salmon and herrings are taken in large numbers.

(P. A. K.; J. T. Be.)

DON, a river in the south of Aberdeenshire, Scotland, rising in peat-moss to the east of Glen Avon on the borders of Banffshire, at a height of nearly 2000 ft. above the sea. It follows a generally easterly course, roughly parallel with that of the Dee, and a few miles to the south of it, falling into the North Sea close to Old Aberdeen, after a run of 82 m. At the mouth the two rivers are only 213 m. apart. Like its greater neighbour, the Don is an excellent salmon stream. On the left its chief affluents are the Ernan, Nochty, Bucket and Urie; on the right, the Conrie, Carvie, Deskry and Strow. The principal places of interest on its banks are Strathdon, Towie, Kildrummy, Alford, Keig, Monymusk, Inverurie, Kintore and Dyce.


DONAGHADEE, a market town of Co. Down, Ireland, in the north parliamentary division, near the south of Belfast Lough, on the Irish Channel, 25 m. E. by N. of Belfast by a branch of the Belfast and Co. Down railway. Pop. (1901) 2073. It is the nearest port in Ireland to Great Britain, being 21½ m. S.W. of Portpatrick in Wigtownshire. Telegraph and telephone cables join these ports, but a regular passenger route does not exist owing to the unsuitability of Portpatrick. Donaghadee harbour admits vessels up to 200 tons. On the north-east side of the town there is a rath or encampment 70 ft. high, in which a powder magazine is erected. The parish church dates from 1626. There are two holy wells in the town. The town is frequented as a seaside watering-place in the summer months.


DONALDSON, SIR JAMES (1831-  ), Scottish classical scholar, educational and theological writer, was born at Aberdeen on the 26th of April 1831. He was educated at Aberdeen University and New College, London. In 1854 he was appointed rector of the Stirling high school, in 1866 rector of that of Edinburgh, in 1881 professor of humanity in the university of Aberdeen, and in 1890 principal of the university of St Andrews, by the Universities (Scotland) Act. His chief works are: Modern Greek Grammar (1853); Lyra Graeca (1854), specimens of Greek lyric poetry from Callinus to Soutsos; A Critical History of Christian Literature and Doctrine from the Death of the Apostles to the Nicene Council (i.-iii., 1864-1866; new ed. of i. as The Apostolical Fathers, 1874), a book unique of its kind in England at the time of its appearance and one which adds materially to the knowledge of Christian antiquities as deduced from the apostolic fathers; Lectures on the History of Education in Prussia and England (1874); The Westminster Confession of Faith and the Thirty-Nine Articles of the Church of England (1905); Woman, her position and influence in ancient Greece and Rome (1907). He was knighted in 1907.


DONALDSON, JOHN WILLIAM (1811-1861), English philologist and biblical critic, was born in London on the 7th of June 1811. He was educated at University College, London, and Trinity College, Cambridge, of which society he subsequently became fellow. In 1841 he was elected headmaster of King Edward’s school, Bury St Edmunds. In 1855 he resigned his post and returned to Cambridge, where his time was divided between literary work and private tuition. He died on the 10th of February 1861. He is remembered as a pioneer of philology in England, and as a great scholar in his day, though much of his work is now obsolete. The New Cratylus (1839), the book on which his fame mainly rests, was an attempt to apply to the Greek language the principles of comparative philology. It was founded mainly on the comparative grammar of Bopp, but a large part of it was original, Bopp’s grammar not being completed till ten years after the first edition of the Cratylus. In the Varronianus (1844) the same method was applied to Latin, Umbrian and Oscan. His Jashar (1854), written in Latin as an appeal to the learned world, and especially to German theologians, was an attempt to reconstitute the lost biblical book of Jashar from the remains of old songs and historical records, which, according to the author, are incorporated in the existing text of the Old Testament. His bold views on the nature of inspiration, and his free handling of the sacred text, aroused the anger of the theologians. Of his numerous other works the most important are The Theatre of the Greeks; The History of the Literature of Ancient Greece (a translation and completion of C. O. Müller’s unfinished work); editions of the Odes of Pindar and the Antigone of Sophocles; a Hebrew, a Greek and a Latin Grammar.


DONATELLO (diminutive of Donato) (c. 1386-1466), Italian sculptor, was the son of Niccolò di Betto Bardi, a member of the Florentine Woolcombers’ Gild, and was born in Florence probably in 1386. The date is conjectural, since the scanty contemporary records of Donatello’s life are contradictory, the earliest documentary reference to the master bearing the date 1406, when a payment is made to him as an independent sculptor. That Donatello was educated in the house of the Martelli family, as stated by Vasari, and that he owed to them his introduction to his future friend and patron, Cosimo de’ Medici, is very doubtful, in view of the fact that his father had espoused the cause of the Albizzi against the Medici, and was in consequence banished from Florence, where his property was confiscated. It is, however, certain that Donatello received his first training, according to the custom of the period, in a goldsmith’s workshop, and that he worked for a short time in Ghiberti’s studio. He was too young to enter the competition for the baptistery gates in 1402, from which Ghiberti issued victorious against Brunelleschi, Jacopo 407 della Quercia, Niccolò d’Arezzo and other rivals. But when Brunelleschi in his disappointment left Florence and went to Rome to study the remains of classic art he was accompanied by young Donatello. Whilst pursuing their studies and excavations on classic soil, which made them talked about amongst the Romans of the day as “treasure seekers,” the two young men made a living by working at the goldsmiths’ shops. This Roman sojourn was decisive for the entire development of Italian art in the 15th century, for it was during this period that Brunelleschi undertook his measurements of the Pantheon dome and of other Roman buildings, which enabled him to construct the noble cupola of S. Maria del Fiore in Florence, while Donatello acquired his knowledge of classic forms and ornamentation. The two masters, each in his own sphere, were to become the leading spirits in the art movement of the 15th century. Brunelleschi’s buildings and Donatello’s monuments are the supreme expression of the spirit of the early Renaissance in architecture and sculpture and exercised a potent influence upon the painters of that age.

Donatello probably did not return to Florence before 1405, since the earliest works in that city that can be traced to his chisel are two small statues of “prophets” for the north door of the cathedral, for which he received payment in November 1406 and in the beginning of 1408. In the latter year he was entrusted with the important commissions for the marble “David,” now at the Bargello, and for the colossal seated figure of “St John the Evangelist,” which until 1588 occupied a niche of the old cathedral façade, and is now placed in a dark chapel of the Duomo. We find him next employed at Or San Michele, where between 1340 and 1406 only four of the fourteen niches had been filled. As the result of a reminder sent by the Signory to the gilds who had undertaken to furnish the statues, the services of Ciuffagni, Nanni di Banco, Ghiberti and Donatello were enlisted, and Donatello completed between 1412 and 1415 the “St Peter,” the “St George” (the original, now in the Bargello, has been replaced by a copy) and the “St Mark.” He probably also assisted Nanni di Banco in his group of four saints. To this early period—in spite of Dr Bode’s contention, who places it about twenty years later—belongs the wooden crucifix in S. Croce, the most striking instance of Donatello’s realism in rendering the human form and his first attempt at carving the nude. It is said that this crucifix was executed in rivalry with Brunelleschi’s noble work at S. Maria Novella, and that Donatello, at the sight of his friend’s work, exclaimed, “It has been left to you to shape a real Christ, whilst I have made a peasant.” In this early group of statues, from the prophets for the cathedral door to the “St George,” can be followed the gradual advance from Gothic stiffness of attitude and draping to a forceful rendering of the human form and of movement, which is a distinct approach to the classic ideal; from the massiveness of the heavily draped figure to easy poise and muscular litheness. All these figures were carved in marble and are admirably conceived in relation to their architectural setting. In fact, so strong is this tendency that the “St Mark,” when inspected at the master’s workshop, was disapproved of by the heads of the Gild of Linen-weavers, but aroused public enthusiasm when placed in situ, and at a later date received Michelangelo’s unstinted admiration.

Between the completion of the niches for Or San Michele and his second journey to Rome in 1433, Donatello was chiefly occupied with statuary work for the campanile and the cathedral, though from this period dates the bronze figure of the Baptist for the christening font of Orvieto Cathedral, which was never delivered and is now among the treasures of the Berlin museum. This, and the “St Louis of Toulouse,” which originally occupied a niche at Or San Michele and is now badly placed at S. Croce, were the first works in bronze which owed their origin to the partnership of Donatello with Michelozzo, who undertook the casting of the models supplied by his senior. The marble statues for the campanile, which are either proved to be Donatello’s by documentary evidence or can be recognized as his work from their style, are the “Abraham,” wrought by the master in conjunction with Giovanni di Bartolo (il Rosso); the “St John the Baptist”; the so-called “Zuccone” (Jonah?); “Jeremiah”; “Habakuk” (?); the unknown “prophet” who is supposed to bear the features of the humanist Poggio Bracciolini; and possibly he may have had a share in the completion of the “Joshua” commenced by Ciuffagni in 1415. All these statues, and the “St John” at the Bargello, mark a bold departure from the statuesque balance of the “St Mark” and “St George” to an almost instantaneous impression of life. The fall of the draperies is no longer arranged in harmonious lines, but is treated in an accidental, massive, bold manner. At the same time the heads are no longer, as it were, impersonal, but almost cruelly realistic character portraits of actual people, just as the arms and legs and necks are faithfully copied from life with all their angularities and deviations from the lines of beauty. During this period Donatello executed some work for the baptismal font at S. Giovanni in Siena, which Jacopo della Quercia and his assistants had begun in 1416. Though the Florentine’s share in it is confined to a relief which may have been designed, or even begun, by Jacopo, and a few statuettes, it is of considerable importance in Donatello’s life-work, as it includes his first attempt at relief sculpture—except the marble relief on the socle of the “St George”—his first female figures,—“Faith” and “Hope,” and his first putti. The relief, “Herod’s Feast,” shows already that power of dramatic narration and the skill of expressing the depth of space by varying the treatment from plastic roundness to the finest stiacciato, which was to find its mature expression in the panels of the altar of S. Antonio in Padua and of the pulpit of S. Lorenzo in Florence. The casting of the pieces for the Siena font was probably done by Michelozzo, who is also credited with an important share in the next two monumental works, in the designing of which Donatello had to face a new problem—the tomb of John XXIII. in the baptistery (begun about 1425), and that of Cardinal Brancacci at S. Angelo a Nilo in Naples (executed in Pisa, 1427). The noble recumbent figure of the defunct on the former, the relief on the sarcophagus, and the whole architectural design, are unquestionably due to Donatello; the figure of the pope is the most beautiful tomb figure of the 15th century, and served as the model on which Rossellino, Desiderio, and other sculptors of the following period based their treatment of similar problems. Donatello’s share in the Naples monument is probably confined to the characteristic low relief of the “Ascension.” The baptistery tomb shows how completely Donatello had mastered the forms of Renaissance architecture, even before his second visit to Rome. An earlier proof of his knowledge of classic art is his niche for the “St Louis” at Or S. Michele, now occupied by Verrocchio’s “Christ and St Thomas.” Similar in treatment to the “Ascension” relief is the “Charge to St Peter” at South Kensington, which is almost impressionistic in its suggestion of distance and intervening atmosphere expressed by the extreme slightness of the relief. Another important work of this period, and not, as Vasari maintains, of Donatello’s youth, is the “Annunciation” relief, with its wealth of delicately wrought Renaissance motifs in the architectural setting.

When Cosimo, the greatest art patron of his time, was exiled from Florence in 1433, Michelozzo accompanied him to Venice, whilst Donatello for the second time went to Rome to drink once more at the source of classic art. The two works which still testify to his presence in this city, the “Tomb of Giovanni Crivelli” at S. Maria in Aracoeli, and the “Ciborium” at St Peter’s, bear the stamp of classic influence. Donatello’s return to Florence in the following year almost coincides with Cosimo’s. Almost immediately, in May 1434, he signed a contract for the marble pulpit on the façade of Prato cathedral, the last work executed in collaboration with Michelozzo, a veritable bacchanalian dance of half-nude putti, pagan in spirit, passionate in its wonderful rhythmic movement—the forerunner of the “singing tribune” for Florence cathedral, at which he worked intermittently from 1433 to 1440, and which is now restored to its original complete form at the museum of the Opera del Duomo. But Donatello’s greatest achievement of his “classic period” is the bronze “David” at the Bargello, the first nude statue of the Renaissance, the first figure conceived in the round, independent of any architectural surroundings—graceful, well-proportioned, 408 superbly balanced, suggestive of Greek art in the simplification of form, and yet realistic, without any striving after ideal proportions. The same tendencies are to be noted in the bronze putto at the Bargello.

In 1443 Donatello was invited to Padua to undertake the decoration of the high altar of S. Antonio, but in the period preceding his departure he not only assisted Brunelleschi in the decoration of the sacristy of S. Lorenzo, towards which the bronze doors are his chief contribution, but found time to chisel, or model in wax or terra-cotta, for Cosimo and other private patrons, most of the portrait busts and small reliefs, which are now distributed over the museums of the world. His first work in Padua was the bronze crucifix for the high altar, a work immeasurably superior to the early wooden crucifix at S. Croce, both as regards nobility of expression and subtlety of form. In the very year when Donatello arrived in Padua the famous Condottiere Erasmo de’ Narni, called Gattamelata, had died, and when it was decided to honour his memory with an equestrian statue, it was only natural that this master should be chosen to undertake a task from the difficulties of which all others may well have shrunk—had shrunk, indeed, since classic times. This commission, and the reliefs and figures for the high altar, kept Donatello in Padua for ten years, though during that time he visited Venice (where he carved the wooden “St John” at the Frari) and probably Mantua, Ferrara and Modena. At least, he was in communication with of Borso d’Este of Modena about a project for an equestrian statue, and had to give expert opinion about two equestrian statues at Ferrara. In his workshop in Padua he gathered around him quite a small army of assistants, stone-carvers, metal-workers, painters, gilders and bronze-casters. The Gattamelata was finished and set up in 1453—a work powerful and majestic in its very repose; there is no striving for dramatic effect, no exaggerated muscular action, but the whole thing is dominated by the strong, energetic head, which is modelled with the searching realism of the Zuccone and the Poggio heads. The high altar, for which Donatello executed twenty-two reliefs, seven statues and the crucifix, was completed in 1450, but had subsequently to undergo many changes, in the course of which the original disposition of the sculptures was entirely lost sight of, the present arrangement being due to Camillo Boito (1895). The chief features of the altar are the wonderfully animated and dramatic bronze reliefs, four in number, of the “Miracles of St Anthony.”

With the exception of another visit to Siena in 1457, of which the bronze “St John” in the cathedral is a reminder, Donatello spent the remaining years of his life in Florence. Closely akin to the rugged “St John” at Siena, and therefore probably contemporaneous, is the repulsively ugly, emaciated “Magdalen” at the baptistery in Florence. The dramatic intensity of the “Judith” group in the Loggia de’ Lanzi, which was originally placed in the court of the Medici Palace, marks it as belonging to the post-Paduan period of the master’s life. His last work of importance was the bronze reliefs for the pulpit of S. Lorenzo, commissioned about 1460, and finished after Donatello’s death by his pupil Bertoldo. The reliefs of the “Flagellation” and “Crucifixion” at the Victoria and Albert Museum are typical examples of the master’s style at this closing period of his life. He died on the 13th of December 1466.

As happened subsequently to Velazquez and Frans Hals, Donatello, whose supreme mastery had been acknowledged by Michelangelo, Raphael and the other giants of the late Renaissance, almost sank into oblivion during the 18th and early 19th centuries, and only in comparatively recent times has he been restored to the eminent position which is his due in the history of art. The full power of his genius was only revealed to the world when, at the quincentenary celebration of his birth, the greater part of his life-work was brought together in Florence. The large hall at the Bargello has ever since been devoted to the display of his works, the numerous original bronzes and marbles and terra-cottas being supplemented by casts of works at other places, such as the colossal Gattamelata monument.

Authorities.—Before the date of the Florence exhibition in 1886 the only books on the subject of Donatello—apart from references in general histories of art—were Pastor’s Donatello (Giessen, 1882) and Semper’s Donatello, seine Zeit und seine Schule (Vienna, 1875). Since then the great Florentine sculptor has received attention from many of the leading art writers, though England has only contributed a not very complete record of his life and work by Hope Rea, Donatello (London, 1900), and an excellent critical study by Lord Balcarres, Donatello (London, 1903), besides a translation of A. G. Meyer’s fully illustrated and exhaustive monograph in the Knackfuss series (London, 1904). Other notable books on the subject are:—Eugène Müntz, Donatello (Paris, 1885), and in the series of Les Artistes célèbres (Paris, 1890); Schmarzow, Donatello (Breslau, 1886); Cavalucci, Vita ed opere del Donatello (Milan, 1886); Tschudi, Donatello e la critica moderna (Turin, 1887); Reymond, Donatello (Florence, 1899); and Bode, Florentiner Bildhauer der Renaissance (Donatello als Architekt und Dekorator, Die Madonnenreliefs Donatellos) (Berlin, 1902).

(P. G. K.)

DONATI, GIOVANNI BATTISTA (1826-1873), Italian astronomer, was born at Pisa on the 16th of December 1826. He entered the observatory of Florence as a student in 1852, became assistant to G. B. Amici in 1854, and was appointed in 1864 to succeed him as director. A new observatory at Arcetri near Florence, built under his supervision, was completed in 1872. During the ten years 1854-1864 Donati discovered six comets, one of which, first seen on the 2nd of June 1858, bears his name (see Comet). He observed the total solar eclipse of the 18th of July 1860, at Torreblanca in Spain, and in the same year began experiments in stellar spectroscopy. In 1862 he published a memoir, Intorno alle strie degli spettri stellari, which indicated the feasibility of a physical classification of the stars; and on the 5th of August 1864 discovered the gaseous composition of comets by submitting to prismatic analysis the light of one then visible. An investigation of the great aurora of the 4th of February 1872 led him to refer such phenomena to a distinct branch of science, designated by him “cosmical meteorology”; but he was not destined to prosecute the subject. Attending the International Meteorological Congress of August 1873 at Vienna, he fell ill of cholera, and died a few hours after his arrival at Arcetri, on the 20th of September 1873.

See Vierteljahrsschrift der astr. Gesellschaft (Leipzig), ix. 4; Monthly Notices Roy. Astr. Society, xxxiv. 153; Memorie degli spettroscopisti italiani, ii. 125 (G. Cacciatore); Nature, viii. 556; &c.

(A. M. C.)

DONATIO MORTIS CAUSA (grant in case of death), in law, a gift of personal property made in contemplation of death and intended either expressly or impliedly to take complete effect only if the donor dies of the illness affecting him at the time of the gift. The conception as well as the name is borrowed from Roman law, and the definition given by Justinian (Inst. ii. 7. 1) applies equally to a donatio mortis causa in Roman and English law. A distinction, however, has arisen between the English and civil codes; by English law delivery either actual or (when from the nature of the thing actual delivery is impossible) constructive is essential, and this delivery must pass not only the possession but the dominion of the thing given; by the civil law, in some cases at least, delivery of possession was not essential (see the judgment of Lord Chancellor Hardwicke in Ward v. Turner, 1751, 2 Ves. sen. 431, where the whole question is exhaustively discussed). A donatio mortis causa stands halfway between a gift inter vivos and a legacy, and has some of the characteristics of each form of disposition. It resembles a legacy in that (1) it is revocable during the donor’s life, (2) it is subject to legacy and estate duty, and (3) it is liable to satisfy debts of the testator in default of other assets. On the other hand, it resembles a gift inter vivos in that it takes effect from delivery; therefore the consent of the executor is not necessary. Anything may be the subject of a donatio mortis causa, the absolute property in which can be made to pass by delivery after the donor’s death either in law or equity; this will cover bankers’ deposit notes, bills of exchange, and notes and cheques of a third person, but not promissory notes and cheques of the donor in favour of the donee, for the donor’s signature is merely an authority for his banker to pay, which is revoked by his death.


DONATION OF CONSTANTINE (Donatio Constantini), the supposed grant by the emperor Constantine, in gratitude for his conversion by Pope Silvester, to that pope and his successors 409 for ever, not only of spiritual supremacy over the other great patriarchates and over all matters of faith and worship, but also of temporal dominion over Rome, Italy and “the provinces, places and civitates of the western regions.” The famous document, known as the Constitutum Constantini and compounded of various elements (notably the apocryphal Vita S. Silvestri), was forged at Rome some time between the middle and end of the 8th century, was included in the 9th century in the collection known as the False Decretals, two centuries later was incorporated in the Decretum by a pupil of Gratian, and in Gibbon’s day was still “enrolled among the decrees of the canon law,” though already rejected “by the tacit or modest censure of the advocates of the Roman church.” It is now universally admitted to be a gross forgery.1 In spite, however, of Gibbon’s characteristic scepticism on this point, it is certain that the Constitutum was regarded as genuine both by the friends and the enemies of the papal pretensions throughout the middle ages.2 Though no use of it was made by the popes during the 9th and 10th centuries, it was quoted as authoritative by eminent ecclesiastics of the Frankish empire (e.g. by Ado of Vienne and Hincmar of Reims), and it was employed by two Frankish popes, Gregory V. and Silvester II., in urging certain territorial claims. But not till 1050 was it made the basis of the larger papal claims, when another Frankish pope, Leo IX., used it in his controversy with the Byzantines. From this time forward it was increasingly used by popes and canonists in support of the papal pretensions, and from the 12th century onwards became a powerful weapon of the spiritual against the temporal powers. It is, however, as Cardinal Hergenröther points out, possible to exaggerate its importance in this respect; a charter purporting to be a grant by an emperor to a pope of spiritual as well as temporal jurisdiction was at best a double-edged weapon; and the popes generally preferred to base their claim to universal sovereignty on their direct commission as vicars of God. By the partisans of the Empire, on the other hand, the Donation was looked upon as the fons et origo malorum, and Constantine was regarded as having, in his new-born zeal, betrayed his imperial trust. The expression of this opinion is not uncommon in medieval literature (e.g. Walther von der Vogelweide, Pfeiffer’s edition, 1880, Nos. 85 and 164), the most famous instance being in the Inferno of Dante (xix. 115):

“Ahi, Costantin, di questo mal fu matre

Non la tua conversion, ma quella dote

Che da te prese il primo ricco patre!”

The genuineness of the Constitutum was first critically assailed by Laurentius Valla in 1440, whose De falso credita et ementita Constantini donatione declamatio opened a controversy that lasted until, at the close of the 18th century, the defence was silenced. In modern times the controversy as to the genuineness of the document has been succeeded by a debate scarcely less lively as to its date, its authorship and place of origin. The efforts of Roman Catholic scholars have been directed (since Baronius ascribed the forgery to the Greeks) to proving that the fraud was not committed at Rome. Thus Cardinal Hergenröther holds that it was written by a Frank in the 9th century, in order to prove that the Greeks had been rightfully expelled from Italy and that Charlemagne was legitimate emperor. This view, with variations, was maintained by the writer of an article in the Civiltà cattolica in 1864 (Serie v. vol. x. pp. 303, &c.) and supported by Grauert, who maintains that the document was concocted at the abbey of St Denis, after 840. The evidence now available, however, confirms those who ascribe an earlier date to the forgery and place it at Rome. The view held by Gibbon and Döllinger among others,3 that the Constitutum is referred to in the letter of Pope Adrian I. to Charlemagne (778), is now indeed largely rejected; there is nothing in the letter to make such an assumption safe, and the same must be said of Friedrich’s attempt to find such reference in the letter addressed in 785 by the same pope to Constantine VI., emperor of the East, and his mother Irene. Still less safe is it to ascribe the authorship of the forgery to any particular pope on the ground of its style; for papal letters were drawn up in the papal chancery and the style employed there was apt to persist through several pontificates. Friedrich’s theory that the Constitutum is a composite document, part written in the 7th century, part added by Paul I. when a deacon under Stephen II., though supported by a wealth of learning, has been torn to tatters by more than one critic (G. Krüger, L. Loening).

On one point, however, a fair amount of agreement seems now to have been reached, a result due to the labour in collating documents of Scheffer-Boichorst, namely, that the style of the Constitutum is generally that of the papal chancery in the latter half of the 8th century. This being granted, there is room for plentiful speculation as to where and why it was concocted. We may still hold the opinion of Döllinger that it was intended to impress the barbarian Pippin and justify in his eyes the Frank intervention in favour of the pope in Italy; or we may share the view of Loening (rejected by Brunner, Rechtsgeschichte) that the forgery was a pious fraud on the part of a cleric of the Curia, committed under Adrian I.,4 with the idea of giving a legal basis to territorial dominion which that pope had succeeded in establishing in Italy. The donations of Pippin and Charlemagne established him as sovereign de facto; the donation of Constantine was to proclaim him as sovereign de jure. It is significant in this connexion that it was under Adrian (c. 774) that the papal chancery ceased to date by the regnal years of the Eastern emperor and substituted that of the pontificate. Döllinger’s view is supported and carried a step further by H. Böhmer, who by an ingenious argument endeavours to prove that the Constitutum was forged in 753, probably by the notary Christophorus, and was carried with him by Pope Stephen II. to the court of Pippin, in 754, with an eye to the acquisition of the Exarchate. In support of this argument it is to be noted that the forged document first appears at the abbey of St Denis, where Stephen spent the winter months of 754. E. Mayer, on the other hand, denies that the Constitutum can have been forged before the news of the iconoclastic decrees of the council of Constantinople of 754 had reached Rome. He lays stress on the relation of the supposed confession of faith of Constantine, embodied in the forgery, to that issued by the emperor Constantine V., pointing out the efforts made by the Byzantines between 756 and the synod of Gentilly in 767 to detach Pippin from the cause of Rome and the holy images. The forgery thus had a double object: as a weapon against Byzantine heresy and as a defence of the papal patrimony. As the result of an exhaustive analysis of the text and of the political and religious events of the time, Mayer comes to the conclusion that the document was forged about 775, i.e. at the time when Charlemagne was beginning to reverse the policy by which in 774 he had confirmed the possession of the duchies of Spoleto and Benevento to the pope.

Bibliography.—See Döllinger, Papstfabeln des Mittelalters (Munich, 1863; Eng. trans. A. Plummer, 1871); “Janus,” Der Pabst und das Konzil (Munich, 1869; Eng. trans. 1869); Hergenröther, Catholic Church and Christian State (Freiburg im Breisgau, 1872; Eng. trans. 2 vols. 1876); W. Martens, Die römische Frage unter Pippin u. Karl d. Grossen (Stuttgart, 1881), with text; H. Grauert, “Die Konstantinische Schenkung” in Hist. Jahrb. der Gorres-Gesellsch. iii. (1882), iv. (1883); Langen, “Entstehung u. Tendenz der Konst. Schenkungsurkunde” in Sybel’s Hist. Zeitschr. l. (1883); L. Weiland, “Die Konst. Schenkung” in Zeitschr. f. Kirchenrecht, xxii. (1887-1888), maintains that the Constitutum was forged at Rome between 813 and 875, in connexion with the papal claim to crown the emperors; H. Brunner and K. Zeumer, Die Konstantinische Schenkungsurkunde (Berlin, 1888; Festgaben für R. v. Gneist), with text; Friedrich, Die Konst. Schenkung (Nördlingen, 1889), with text; W. Martens, Die falsche Generalkonzession Konstantins des Grossen (Munich, 1889); P. Scheffer-Boichorst, “Neue 410 Forschungen über die Konst. Schenkung,” i. ii. Mitteilungen des Instituts für österr. Geschichtsforschung, x. (1889), xi. (1890); G. Krüger, “Die Frage der Entstehungszeit der Konst. Schenkung,” in Theologische Literaturzeitung, xiv. (1889); J. Hodgkin, Italy and her Invaders, vol. vii. p. 135 (Oxford, 1899); article “Konstantinische Schenkung,” G. H. Böhmer, in Herzog-Hauck, Realencykl. (1902); E. Mayer, “Die Schenkungen Konstantins und Pipins” in Deutsche Zeitschr. für Kirchenrecht (Tübingen, 1904). Laurentius Valla’s treatise was issued in a new edition, with French translation and historical introduction, by A. Bonneau, La Donation de Constantin (Lisieux, 1879).

(W. A. P.)

1 Dr Hodgkin’s suggestion (Italy and her Invaders, vii. p. 153) that the Constitutum may have been originally a mere pious romance, recognized as such by its author and his contemporaries, and laid up in the papal archives until its origin was forgotten, is wholly inconsistent with the unquestioned results of the critical analysis of the text.

2 Leo of Vercelli, the emperor Otto III.’s chancellor, protested that the Constitutum was a forgery, but without effect. The attacks upon it by the heretical followers of Arnold of Brescia (1152) convinced neither the partisans of the pope nor those of the emperor.

3 So Langen (1883) and E. Mayer (1904).

4 This is also W. Mayer’s view in his later work. In his Die römische Frage (1881) he had placed the forgery in 805 or 806.


DONATISTS, a powerful sect which arose in the Christian church of northern Africa at the beginning of the 4th century.1 In its doctrine it sprang from the same roots, and in its history it had in many things the same character, as the earlier Novatians. The predisposing causes of the Donatist schism were the belief, early introduced into the African church, that the validity of all sacerdotal acts depended upon the personal character of the agent, and the question, arising out of that belief, as to the eligibility for sacerdotal office of the traditores, or those who had delivered up their copies of the Scriptures under the compulsion of the Diocletian persecution; the exciting cause was the election of a successor to Mensurius, bishop of Carthage, who died in 311. Mensurius had held moderate views as to the treatment of the traditores, and accordingly a strong fanatical party had formed itself in Carthage in opposition to him, headed by a wealthy and influential widow named Lucilla, and countenanced by Secundus of Tigisis, episcopus primae sedis in Numidia. There were thus two parties, each anxious to secure the succession to the vacant see. The friends of the late bishop fixed their choice on Caecilian, the archdeacon, and secured his election and his consecration by Felix, the bishop of Aptunga, before the other party were ready for action. It had been customary for the Numidian bishops to be present at the election and consecration of the bishop of Carthage, who as metropolitan of proconsular Africa occupied a position of primacy towards all the African provinces. Caecilian’s party, however, had not waited for them, knowing them to be in sympathy with their opponents. Soon after Caecilian’s consecration, Secundus sent a commission to Carthage, which appointed an interventor temporarily to administer the bishopric which they regarded as vacant. Then Secundus himself with seventy of the Numidian bishops arrived at Carthage. A synod of Africa was formed, before which Caecilian was summoned; his consecration was declared invalid, on the ground that Felix had been a traditor; and finally, having refused to obey the summons to appear, he was excommunicated, and the lector Majorinus, a dependant of Lucilla’s, consecrated in his stead. This synod forbade the African churches to hold communion with Caecilian, the schism became overt, and in a very short time there were rival bishops and rival churches throughout the whole province.

It was soon clear, by the exclusion of the “Pars Majorini” from certain privileges conferred on the African church, that the sympathies of Constantine were with the other party (Eusebius, Hist. eccl. x. 6, 7). To investigate the dispute an imperial commission was issued to five Gallic bishops, under the presidency of Melchiades, bishop of Rome. The number of referees was afterwards increased to twenty, and the case was tried at Rome in 313.2 Ten bishops appeared on each side, the leading representative of the Donatists being Donatus of Casae Nigrae. The decision was entirely in favour of Caecilian, and Donatus was found guilty of various ecclesiastical offences. An appeal was taken and allowed; but the decision of the synod of Arles in 314 not only confirmed the position of Caecilian, but greatly strengthened it by passing a canon that ordination was not invalid because performed by a traditor, if otherwise regular. Felix had previously been declared innocent after an examination of records and witnesses at Carthage. A further appeal to the emperor in person was heard at Milan in 316, when all points were finally decided in favour of Caecilian, probably on the advice of Hosius, bishop of Cordova. Henceforward the power of the state was directed to the suppression of the defeated party. Persistent Donatists were no longer merely heretics; they were rebels and incurred the confiscation of their church property and the forfeiture of their civil rights.

The attempt to destroy the sect by force had the result of intensifying its fanaticism. Majorinus, the Donatist bishop of Carthage, died in 315, and was succeeded by Donatus, surnamed Magnus, a man of great force of character, under whose influence the schism gained fresh strength from the opposition it encountered. Force was met with force; the Circumcelliones, bands of fugitive slaves and vagrant (circum cellas) peasants, attached themselves to the Donatists, and their violence reached such a height as to threaten civil war. In 321 Constantine, seeing probably that he had been wrong in abandoning his usual policy of toleration, sought to retrace his steps by granting the Donatists liberty to act according to their consciences, and declaring that the points in dispute between them and the orthodox should be left to the judgment of God. This wise policy, to which he consistently adhered to the close of his reign, was not followed by his son and successor Constans, who, after repeated attempts to win over the sect by bribes, resorted to persecution. The renewed excesses of the Circumcelliones, among whom were ranged fugitive slaves, debtors and political malcontents of all kinds, had given to the Donatist schism a revolutionary aspect; and its forcible suppression may therefore have seemed to Constans even more necessary for the preservation of the empire than for the vindication of orthodoxy. The power which they had been the first to invoke having thus declared so emphatically and persistently against them, the Donatists revived the old world-alien Christianity of the days of persecution, and repeated Tertullian’s question, “What has the emperor to do with the church?” (Quid est imperatori cum ecclesia?) Such an attitude aggravated the lawlessness of the Circumcellion adherents of the sect, and their outrages were in turn made the justification for the most rigorous measures against the whole Donatist party indiscriminately. Many of their bishops fell victims to the persecution, and Donatus (Magnus) and several others were banished from their sees.

With the accession of Julian (361) an entire change took place in the treatment of the Donatists. Their churches were restored and their bishops reinstated (Parmenianus succeeding the deceased Donatus at Carthage), with the natural result of greatly increasing both the numbers and the enthusiasm of the party. A return to the earlier policy of repression was made under Valentinian I. and Gratian, by whom the Donatist churches were again closed, and all their assemblies forbidden. It was not, however, until the commencement of the 5th century that the sect began to decline, owing largely to the rise among them of a group of moderate and scholarly men like the grammarian Tychonius, who vainly strove to overcome the more fanatical section. Against the house thus divided against itself both state and church directed not unsuccessful assaults. In 405 an edict was issued by the emperor Honorius commanding the Donatists, under the severest penalties, to return to the Catholic church. On the other hand, Augustine, bishop of Hippo, after several years’ negotiation, arranged a great conference between the Donatists and the orthodox, which was held under the authority of the emperor at Carthage in 411. There were present 286 Catholics and 279 Donatist bishops. Before entering on the proceedings the Catholics pledged themselves, if defeated, to give up their sees, while in the other event they promised to recognize the Donatists as bishops on their simply declaring their adherence to the Catholic church. The latter proposal, though it was received with scorn at the time, had perhaps ultimately as much influence as the logic of Augustine in breaking the strength of the schism. The discussion, which lasted for three days, Augustine 411 and Aurelius of Carthage being the chief speakers on the one side, and Primian and Petilian on the other, turned exclusively upon the two questions that had given rise to the schism—first, the question of fact, whether Felix of Aptunga who consecrated Caecilian had been a traditor; and secondly, the question of doctrine, whether a church by tolerance of unworthy members within its pale lost the essential attributes of purity and catholicity. The Donatist position, like that of the Novatians, was that the mark of the true church is to guard the essential predicate of holiness by excluding all who have committed mortal sin; the Catholic standpoint was that such holiness is not destroyed by the presence of unworthy members in the church but rests upon the divine foundation of the church and upon the gift of the Holy Spirit and the communication of grace through the priesthood. In the words of Optatus of Milevi, sanctitas de sacramentis colligitur, non de superbia personarum pondera. And the much wider diffusion of the orthodox church was also taken as practical confirmation that it alone possessed what was regarded as the equally essential predicate of catholicity.

The decision of Marcellinus, the imperial commissioner, was in favour of the Catholic party on both questions, and it was at once confirmed on an appeal to the emperor. The severest penal measures were enforced against the schismatics; in 414 they were denied all civil rights, in 415 the holding of assemblies was forbidden on pain of death. But they lived on, suffering with their orthodox brethren in the Vandal invasions of the 5th century, and like them finally disappearing before the Saracen onslaught two centuries later.

Authorities.—1. Contemporary sources: Optatus Milevitanus De Schismate Donatistarum adversus Parmenianum, written c. 368 (Dupin’s ed., Paris, 1700), and several of the works of Augustine. 2. Modern: C. W. F. Walch, Entwurf einer vollständigen Historie der Ketzereien (Leipzig, 1768); Hauck-Herzog, Realencyk. für prot. Theol., art. “Donatismus” by N. Bonwetsch, who cites the literature very fully; W. Möller, History of the Christian Church (vol. i. pp. 331 ff., 445 ff.); D. Völter, Der Ursprung des Donatismus (Freiburg, 1883).


1 There were three prominent men named Donatus connected with the movement—Donatus of Casae Nigrae; Donatus surnamed Magnus, who succeeded Majorinus as the Donatist bishop of Carthage; and Donatus of Bagoi, a leader of the circumcelliones, who was captured and executed c. 350. The name of the sect was derived from the second of these. The Donatists themselves repudiated the designation, which was applied to them by their opponents as a reproach. They called themselves “Pars Majorini” or “Pars Donati.”

2 The Donatist movement affords a valuable illustration of the new importance which the changed position of the church under Constantine gave to the synodal system of ecclesiastical legislation.


DONATUS, AELIUS, Roman grammarian and teacher of rhetoric, flourished in the middle of the 4th century a.d. The only fact known regarding his life is that he was the tutor of St Jerome. He was the author of a number of professional works, of which there are still extant:—Ars grammatica; the larger portion of his commentary on Terence (a compilation from other commentaries), but probably not in its original form; and a few fragments of his notes on Virgil, preserved and severely criticized by Servius, together with the preface and introduction, and life of Virgil. The first of these works, and especially the section on the eight parts of speech, though possessing little claim to originality, and in fact evidently based on the same authorities which were used by the grammarians Charisius and Diomedes, attained such popularity as a school-book that in the middle ages the writer’s name, like the French Calepin, became a common metonymy (in the form donet) for a rudimentary treatise of any sort. On the introduction of printing editions of the little book were multiplied to an enormous extent. It is extant in the form of an Ars Minor, which only treats of the parts of speech, and an Ars Major, which deals with grammar in general at greater length.

Aelius Donatus is to be distinguished from Tiberius Claudius Donatus, the author of a commentary (Interpretationes) on the Aeneid (of far less value than that of Servius), who lived about fifty years later.

The best text of the Ars and the commentaries upon it by Servius and others is in H. Keil, Grammatici Latini, iv.; of the commentary on Terence there is an edition by P. Wessner (1902, Teubner series), with bibliography and full account of MSS. See generally E. A. Gräfenhan, Geschichte der klassischen Philologie im Altertum, iv. (1850); P. Rosenstock, De Donato, Terenti ... explicatore (1886); H. T. Karsten, De comm. Don. ad Terenti fabulas origine et compositione (Leiden, 1907). For the commentary of Tiberius Donatus see O. Ribbeck, Prolegomena to Virgil, Gräfenhan (as above), and V. Burkas, De Tiberii Claudii Donati in Aeneidem commentario (1889). The text will be found in G. Fabricius’s edition of Virgil (1561), ed. by H. George, i. (1905 foll.).


DONAUWÖRTH, a town of Germany in the kingdom of Bavaria, on the left bank of the Danube, at the confluence of the Wörnitz, 25 m. N. of Augsburg by rail and at the junction of lines to Ulm and Ingolstadt. Pop. 5000. It is an ancient town and has several medieval buildings of interest. Notable among its seven churches (six Roman Catholic) are the Kloster-Kirche (monasterial), a beautiful Gothic edifice with the sarcophagus of Maria of Brabant, and that of the former Benedictine abbey, Heilig-Kreuz, with a lofty tower. Remarkable among secular buildings are the Gothic town hall, and the so-called Tanz-haus, which now includes both a theatre and a school. The industries embrace machinery, brewing and saw-milling; the place is of some importance as a river port, and the centre of a considerable agricultural trade.

Donauwörth grew up in the course of the 11th and 12th centuries under the protection of the castle of Mangoldstein, became in the 13th a seat of the duke of Upper Bavaria, who, however, soon withdrew to Munich to escape from the manes of his wife Maria of Brabant, whom he had there beheaded on an unfounded suspicion of infidelity. The town received the freedom of the Empire in 1308, and maintained its position in spite of the encroachments of Bavaria till 1607, when the interference of the Protestant inhabitants with the abbot of the Heilig-Kreuz called forth an imperial law authorizing the duke of Bavaria to inflict chastisement for the offence. In the Thirty Years’ War it was stormed by Gustavus Adolphus (1632), and captured by King Ferdinand (1634). In the vicinity, on the Schellenberg, the Bavarians and French were defeated by Marlborough and Prince Louis of Baden on the 2nd of July 1704. The imperial freedom restored to the town by Joseph I. in 1705 was again lost by reincorporation with Bavaria in 1714. In the neighbourhood the Austrians under Mack were, on the 6th of October 1805, decisively defeated by the French under Soult.

See Königsdörfer, Geschichte des Klosters zum Heiligen Kreuz in Donauwörth (1819-20).


DON BENÍTO, a town of western Spain, in the province of Badajoz; near the left bank of the river Guadiana, on the Madrid-Badajoz-Lisbon railway. Pop. (1900) 16,565. Don Beníto is a thriving and comparatively modern town; for it dates only from the 15th century, when it was founded by refugees from Don Llorente, who deserted their own town owing to the danger of floods from the Guadiana. Besides manufactures of brandy, flour, oil, soap, linen and cloth, it has an active trade in wheat, wine and fruit, especially melons.


DONCASTER, a market-town and municipal borough in the Doncaster parliamentary division of the West Riding of Yorkshire, England, 156 m. N. by W. from London. Pop. (1901) 28,932. It lies in a flat plain on the river Don, with slight hills rising westward. It is an important station on the Great Northern railway, whose principal locomotive and carriage works are here, and it is also served by the North Eastern, Great Eastern, Great Central, Lancashire & Yorkshire, and Midland railways. The Don affords intercommunication with Goole and the Humber. The parish church of St George, occupying the site of an older structure of the same name, destroyed by fire in 1853, was finished in 1858 under the direction of Sir G. G. Scott. It is a fine cruciform structure of Decorated character, with a central tower 170 ft. high, and contains a particularly fine organ. St James’s church was erected, under the same architect and Lord Grimthorpe, by the Great Northern railway company. Other important buildings are the town hall, mansion house, free library and art school, corn exchange and markets. The grammar school was founded in 1553 and reorganized in 1862. Doncaster race-meetings are widely famous. The racecourse lies 1 m. S.E. of the town. The old course is 1 m. 7 fur. 70 yds. in length, and the Sandall course of 1 m. was added in 1892. The grand stand was erected in 1777, but there are several additional stands. Races have long been held at Doncaster, and there was a stand on the course before the year 1615. The St Leger takes its name from Lieut.-General St Leger, who originated the race in 1776; but it was not so named till 1778. The meetings are held in the second week of September. A system of electric tramways connects the town with its principal suburbs. The agricultural trade is extensive, and there are iron, brass and agricultural machine works. Doncaster lies on the outskirts of a populous district extending 412 up the valley of the Don. Two miles S.W. is the urban district of Balby-with-Hexthorpe (pop. 6781); and 7 m. S. is that of Tickhill, where there are remains of a Norman castle. Wheatley (3579) lies 2 m. N.E. The borough of Doncaster is under a mayor, six aldermen and eighteen councillors. Area, 1695 acres.

History.—There was a Roman station here, and numerous remains of the Roman period have been found. In the reign of Edward the Confessor, Doncaster, as a berewic of the manor of Hexthorp, belonged to Earl Tostig; but before 1086 it had been granted to Robert, earl of Mortain, whose successor William was attainted for treason in the time of Henry I. The overlordship then fell to the crown, and the families of Frossard, Mauley and Salvin successively held the manor as underlords. Doncaster was evidently a borough held of the crown for a fee farm rent before 1194, when Richard I. granted and confirmed to the burgesses their soke and town to hold by the ancient rent and by twenty-five marks yearly. The town was incorporated in 1467 by Edward IV., who granted a gild merchant and appointed that the town should be governed by a mayor and two serjeants-at-mace elected every year by the burgesses. Henry VII., while confirming this charter in 1505, granted further that the burgesses should hold their town and soke with all the manors in the soke on payment of a fee farm. He also by another charter in 1508 confirmed letters patent granted by Peter de Mauley in 1341, by which the latter renounced to the inhabitants of Doncaster all the manorial claims which he had upon them, with the “pernicious customs” which his ancestors claimed from bakers, brewers, butchers, fishers and wind-fallen trees. In 1623 Ralph Salvin tried to regain the manor of Doncaster from the mayor and burgesses, who, fearing that the case would go against them, agreed to pay about £3000, in return for which he gave up his claim to all the manors in the soke. Charles II. in 1664 gave the town a new charter, granting that it should be governed by a mayor, twelve aldermen and twenty-four capital burgesses, but since this was not enrolled and was therefore of no effect the burgesses obtained another charter from James II. in 1684 by which the town was governed until the Municipal Corporation Act. In 1200 a fair at Doncaster on the vigil and day of St James the Apostle was confirmed to Robert de Turnham, who held the manor in right of his wife, with the addition of an extra day, for which he had to give the king two palfreys worth 100 s. each. By the charter of 1194 the burgesses received licence to hold a fair on the vigil, feast and morrow of the Annunciation, and this with the fair on St James’s day was confirmed to them by Henry VII. in 1505. The fairs and markets are still held under these charters.

See Victoria County History, Yorkshire; Edward Miller, The History and Antiquities of Doncaster (1828-1831); Calendar to the Records of the Borough of Doncaster, published by the Corporation.


DON COSSACKS, TERRITORY OF THE (Russ. Donskaya Oblast), a government of S.E. Russia, bounded W. by the governments of Voronezh, Kharkov and Ekaterinoslav, S.W. by the Sea of Azov, S. by the governments of Kuban and Stavropol, and E. by those of Astrakhan and Saratov. Area, 63,532 sq. m. Pop. 1,010,135 in 1867, 2,585,920 in 1897 and 3,125,400 (estimate) in 1906. It belongs almost entirely to the region of the South Russian steppes, but in the N., W. and S.W. presents more the aspects of elevated plains gapped with ravine-like river-courses, while in the S.E., towards the Manych depression, it passes over into the arid Aral-Caspian steppes (e.g. Zadonsk Steppe), dotted over with salt lakes. Geologically the region is made up of Carboniferous limestones, clay slates and sandstones, containing anthracite and coal; of Cretaceous marls, chalk, sandstone and greensands—chalk cliffs, in fact, accompany the Don for 200 m.; and of Miocene limestones and clays. The surface, especially W. of the Don, is the fertile black earth, intermingled here and there, especially in the Zadonsk Steppe, with clay impregnated with salt. The government is drained by the Don and its tributaries, of which the Donets, Chir and Mius enter from the right and the Khoper and Medvyeditsa from the left. The Don is navigable throughout the government, and at Kalach is connected by a railway, 45 m. long, with Tsaritsyn on the Volga, routes by which an enormous amount of heavy merchandise is transported. The climate is continental and dry, the average temperatures being—year 43° Fahr., January 13°, July 72° at Uryupina (in 50° 48´ N.; alt. 92 ft.); and year 48°, January 21°, July 73° at Taganrog. The annual rainfall at the same two places is 13.4 and 17.4 in. respectively. Forests cover only 2% of the area.

Nearly one-half of the population are Cossacks, the other ethnological groups being (1897) 27,234 Armenians, 2255 Greeks, 1267 Albanians, 16,000 Jews and some 30,000 Kalmuck Tatars, who are Lamaists in religion. Nearly all the rest of the people, except the Jews and about 3000 Mahommedans, belong to the Orthodox Eastern Church. The Cossacks own nearly 30,000,000 acres of land. The government is well provided with schools, especially on the Cossack territory. Agriculture is the principal occupation, but the crops vary very greatly from year to year, owing to deficiency of rain. Vines are cultivated on a large scale, and tobacco is grown in the south. Cattle-breeding is important, and there are fine breeds of horses and large flocks of sheep. Productive fisheries are carried on at the mouth of the Don. Nearly 13,000 persons are engaged in coal-mining; the coalfields form part of the vast Donets coal basin (10,420 sq. m., with a total output of nearly 13,000,000 tons annually). Some iron ore, gypsum, salt and limestone are also produced. The principal branches of manufacturing industry are flour-milling, potteries, ironworks and tobacco factories. The exports consist chiefly of cereals, cattle, horses, sheep, wine, fish and hides. The government is under the administration of the ministry of war, and is divided into nine districts—Donets (chief town, Kamenskaya with 23,576 inhabitants in 1897), First Don district (Konstantinovskaya, 8800), Second Don district (Nizhne-Chirskaya, 15,196), Rostov (Rostov-on-Don, 119,889), Salsky (Velikoknyazheskaya), Taganrog (Taganrog, 58,928 in 1900), Ust-medvyeditsa (Ust-medvyeditsa, 16,000), Khoper (Uryupina, 9600), Cherkasky (Novo-cherkassk, 52,005). The capital of the government is Novo-cherkassk. Many of the Cossack stanitsas (villages) are very populous.

(P. A. K.; J. T. Be.)

DONEGAL, a county in the extreme north-west of Ireland, in the province of Ulster, bounded N. and W. by the Atlantic Ocean, E. by Lough Foyle and the counties Londonderry and Tyrone, and S. by Donegal Bay and the counties Fermanagh and Leitrim. The area is 1,197,153 acres, or about 1871 sq. m., the county being the largest in Ireland after Cork and Mayo. This portion of the country possesses little natural wealth; its physical characteristics are against easy communications, and although its northern coast affords one or two good natural harbours, there is no commercial inducement to take advantage of them. The fine scenery and other natural attractions of Donegal thus remained practically unknown until late in the 19th century, but an effort was then made by Lord George Hill to introduce wealth from without into the county, and to develop its resources in this, almost the only possible direction. The county possesses a large extent of sea-coast indented by numerous inlets. Ballyshannon harbour, the most southern of these, is small, and has a bar at its mouth, as has Donegal harbour farther north. Killybegs harbour is well sheltered, and capable of receiving large vessels. These, with Bruckles or M’Swiney’s Bay, and Teelin harbour, suitable for small vessels, are arms of the fine inlet of Donegal Bay. The western shore is beautified by the indentations of Loughros Beg, Gweebarra, Trawenagh and Inishfree Bays. On the north is Sheephaven, within which is Dunfanaghy Bay, where the largest ships may lie in safety, as they may also in Mulroy Bay and Lough Swilly farther east. Lough Foyle, which divides Donegal from Londonderry, is a noble sheet of water, but is shallow and in part dry at ebb tide, contracted at its entrance, and encumbered with shoals. A few miles west of Malin Head, the most northerly point of the mainland of Ireland, the varied and extensive Lough Swilly runs far into the interior. From these two loughs much land has been reclaimed. Numerous islands and rocks stud the coast. The largest island is North Aran, about 15 m. in circumference, with a lofty hill in its centre, and a gradual declivity down to the sea. On the northern coast are Tory Island, and, farther east, Inishtrahull, the ultima Thule of Ireland. The inhabitants of these islands obtain a precarious 413 livelihood by fishing, kelp-burning and rude husbandry, but are often reduced to extreme destitution.

Mountains and irregular groups of highlands occupy the whole interior of the county, and a considerable portion is bog and moorland. Errigal mountain in the north-west attains an elevation of 2466 ft. and commands from its summit a fine view over a considerable portion of the country. In its vicinity, the Derryveagh mountains reach 2240 ft. in Slieve Snaght; Muckish is 2197 ft.; in the south Bluestack reaches 2219 ft.; and in the Innishowen peninsula between Loughs Swilly and Foyle, another Slieve Snaght is 2019 ft. in elevation. At the western extremity of the north coast of Donegal Bay stands Slieve League, whose western flank consists of a mighty cliff, descending almost sheer to the Atlantic, exhibiting beautiful variegated colouring, and reaching an extreme height of 1972 ft. From these details it will appear that the scenery of the highlands and the sea-coast often attain a character of savage and romantic grandeur; whereas the eastern and southern portions are generally less elevated and more fertile, but still possess considerable beauty. A considerable portion of the surface, however, is occupied by bogs, and entirely destitute of timber.

With the exception of the tidal river Foyle, which forms the boundary between this county and Tyrone and Londonderry, the rivers, though numerous, are of small size. The branches of the Foyle which rise in Donegal are the Derg, issuing from Lough Derg, and the Finn, rising in the beautiful little lake of the same name in the highlands, and passing through some of the best cultivated land in the county. The Foyle, augmented by their contributions, and by those of several other branches from the counties Tyrone and Londonderry, proceeds northward, discharging its waters into the southern extremity of Lough Foyle, at the city of Londonderry. It is navigable for vessels of large burden to this place, and thence by lighters of fifty tons as far as Lifford. Boats of fourteen tons can proceed up the Finn river as far as Castlefinn. The fine river Erne flows from Lough Erne through the southern extremity of the county into the southern extremity of Donegal Bay. Its navigation is prevented by a fall of 12 ft., generally called the Salmon Leap, in the neighbourhood of Ballyshannon, and by rapids between Ballyshannon and Belleek, on the confines of Co. Fermanagh. The Gweebarra, the Owenea, and the Eask are the only other streams of any note. Lakes are very numerous in Donegal. The most remarkable, and also the largest, is Lough Derg, comprising within its waters several islets, on one of which, Station Island, is the cave named St Patrick’s Purgatory, a celebrated place of resort for pilgrims and devotees. The circumference of the lake is about 9 m., and the extent of the island to which the pilgrims are ferried over is less than 1 acre. The landscape round Lough Derg is desolate and sombre in the extreme, barren moors and heathy hills surrounding it on all sides. Salmon, sea-trout and brown trout afford sport in most of the rivers and loughs, and Glenties for the Owenea river, and Gweedore for the Clady, in the west; Killybegs for the Eanymore and Eask, in the south; and Rathmelton and Rosapenna for the Owencarrow and Leannan, in the north, may be mentioned as centres. Ballyshannon and Bundoran, in the extreme south, are centres for the Erne and other waters outside the county.

Geology.—The dominant feature in the geology of this county is the north-east and south-west strike forced upon the older rocks during earth-movements that set in at the close of Silurian times. The granite that forms characteristically the core of the folds is probably of the same age as that of Leinster, or may possibly represent older igneous masses, brought into a general parallelism during the main epoch of stress. The oldest recognizable series of rocks is the Dalradian, and its quartzites form the white summits of Muckish, Errigal and Aghla. The intruding granite, which predominates in the north-west, has frequently united with the metamorphic series to form composite gneiss. In the southern mass near Pettigo, once regarded as Archaean and fundamental, residual “eyes” of the hornblendic rocks that are associated with the Dalradian series remain floating, as it were, in the gneiss. North of this, the country is wilder, consisting largely of mica-schist, through which a grand mass of unfoliated granite rises at Barnesmore. The course of the Gweebarra, or Glen Beagh, of the Glendowan mountains, and the Aghla ridge, have all been determined by the general strike imparted to the country. At Donegal Bay the Lower Carboniferous sandstone and limestone come in as a synclinal, and the limestone extends to Bundoran. Small Carboniferous outliers on the summits of the great cliff of Slieve League show the former extension of these strata. Bog iron-ore is raised as a gas-purifier; and talc-schist has been worked for steatite at Crohy Head. In most parts of the west the patches of glacial drift form the only agricultural land. The fine-grained sandstone of Mount Charles near Donegal is a well-known building stone, and the granites of the north-west have attracted much attention.

Industries.—The modes of agriculture present little that is peculiar to the county, and the spade still supplies the place of the plough where the rocky nature of the surface prevents the application of the latter implement. The soil of the greater portion of the county, i.e. the granite, quartz and mica slate districts, is thin and cold, while that on the carboniferous limestone is warm and friable. Owing to the boggy nature of the soil, agriculture has not made much progress, although in certain districts (Gweedore, for instance) much land has been brought under cultivation through the enterprise of the proprietors. Roughly speaking, however, about 45% of the land is waste, 35% pasture and 15% tillage. Wheat and barley are quite an inconsiderable crop, and in this as well as in other respects Donegal is much behind the rest of Ulster in the extent of its crops. It bears, however, a more favourable comparison as regards its live stock, as cattle, sheep and poultry are extensively kept.

In Donegal, as in other counties of Ulster, the linen manufacture affords employment to a number of inhabitants, especially at Raphoe, while the manufacture of excellent homespun, woollen stockings and worked muslin is carried on pretty extensively. The trade in these manufactures and in the domestic produce of the county finds its principal outlets through the port of Londonderry and the inland town of Strabane, Co. Tyrone. The deep-sea fisheries are important, and are centred at Killybegs, Gweedore and Rathmullen. The salmon fishery is also prosecuted to a considerable extent, the principal seats of the trade being at Ballyshannon and Letterkenny.

The railway system includes the County Donegal railway from Londonderry south-west to Donegal town and Killybegs, with branches to Glenties, a village near the west coast, and to Ballyshannon; and the Londonderry and Lough Swilly, serving Letterkenny, and continuing to Burtonport with a branch north to Buncrana, a watering-place on Lough Swilly, and Cardonagh in the Innishowen peninsula. From Letterkenny the line continues to Dunfanaghy on the north coast, thence to Gweedore and Burtonport.

Population and Administration.—The population (185,635 in 1891; 173,722 in 1901) decreases less seriously than in most Irish counties, though the proportion of emigrants is large. About 78% of the population is Roman Catholic, and almost the whole is rural. The native Erse naturally dies out slowly in this remote county, and the Donegal dialect is said to be the purest in the Irish language. The towns are small in extent and importance. Lifford (pop. 446), the county town, is practically a suburb of Strabane, in the neighbouring Co. Tyrone. Ballyshannon (2359) on the river Erne, Letterkenny (2370) at the head of Lough Swilly, and Donegal (1214) at the head of the bay of that name, are the other principal towns. The principal watering-places are Moville on Lough Foyle, Buncrana and Rathmelton on Lough Swilly; while, following the coast from north to south, Rosapenna, Dunfanaghy, Gweedore, Dungloe and Ardara, with Bundoran in the extreme south, are seaside villages frequently visited. Resorts deserving mention for the attractive scenery for which they are centres, are—Ardara, on the Owenea river, where the cliffs of the neighbouring coast are particularly fine; Carrick, Malin Head, the beautiful land-locked bay of Mulroy, Narin on Boylagh Bay, Portsalon on Lough Swilly, and Stranorlar, a small market town near the fine mountain pass of Barnesmore.

Donegal contains seven baronies and fifty parishes. Assizes are held at Lifford, and quarter sessions at Ballyshannon, Buncrana, Donegal, Cardonagh, Glenties, Letterkenny and Lifford. The county is in the Protestant dioceses of Clogher and Derry, 414 and the Roman Catholic dioceses of Raphoe, Clogher and Derry. The county returned twelve members to the Irish parliament; after the Union it returned two; but it is now divided into north, east, south and west divisions, each returning one member.

History and Antiquities.—The greater part of Donegal was anciently called Tyrconnell (q.v.) or the country of Conall; and it was sometimes called O’Donnell’s country, after the head chieftains of the district. This district was formed into the county of Donegal in the reign of Queen Elizabeth, in 1585, by the lord-deputy Sir John Perrott. The most noteworthy architectural remains of antiquity in the county are to be found at the head of Lough Swilly, where, situated on the summit of a hill 802 ft. high, some remarkable remains exist of a fortress or palace of the northern Irish kings. These are known as the Grianan of Aileach, and evidently date from a period prior to the 12th century. On Tory Island there are one of the best specimens of a round tower and some other interesting remains. Numerous ruins of ancient castles along the coast prove that much attention was formerly paid to the defence of the country from invasion. The principal are—Kilbarron Castle, an ancient stronghold of the O’Clerys, near Ballyshannon; Donegal Castle, built by the O’Donnells, anciently their chief residence, and now a fine ruin standing close to the water’s edge; Burt Castle, built in the reign of Henry VIII. on the shores of Lough Swilly by Sir Cahir O’Dogherty, to whom is also attributed the erection of Green Castle, one of the strongholds of the clan on Lough Foyle. Near the Castle of Doe, or M’Swiney’s Castle, at Horn Head, is a natural perforation in the roof of a cave, called M’Swiney’s Gun, formed by the workings of the ocean into the overhanging cliff. When the wind blows due north, and the tide is at half flood, the gun is seen to spout up jets of water to a height of 100 ft., attended with explosions heard occasionally in favourable weather at an immense distance. Gulmore Fort, on the coast of Lough Swilly, supposed to have been erected by the O’Doghertys, having come into the possession of the crown, was granted in 1609 to the corporation of London. It was afterwards enlarged or rebuilt, and acted a prominent part in the celebrated siege of Derry. Traces of religious houses, some existing only in traditionary or documental records, are also numerous. The ruins of that of Donegal, founded in 1474, afford proofs of its ancient grandeur. At Raphoe, 5 m. N.W. of Lifford, is the cathedral of a former diocese united to that of Derry in 1835.


DONEGAL, a small seaport and market town of Co. Donegal, Ireland (not, as its name would suggest, the county town, which is Lifford), in the south parliamentary division, at the head of Donegal Bay, and the mouth of the river Eask, on the Donegal railway. Pop. (1901) 1214. Its trade in agricultural produce is hampered by the unsatisfactory condition of its harbour, the approach to which is beset with shoals. Here are the ruins of a fine Jacobean castle, occupying the site of a fortress of the O’Donnells of Tyrconnell, but built by Sir Basil Brooke in 1610. There are also considerable remains of a Franciscan monastery, founded in 1474 by one of the O’Donnells, and here were compiled the famous “Annals of the Four Masters,” a record of Irish history completed in 1636 by one Michael O’Clery and his coadjutors. There is a chalybeate well near the town, and 7½ m. S., at Ballintra, a small stream forms a series of limestone caverns known as the Pullins. Donegal received a charter from James I., and returned two members to the Irish parliament. The name is said to signify the “fortress of the foreigners,” and to allude to a settlement by the Northmen.


DONELSON, FORT, an entrenched camp at Dover, Tennessee, U.S.A., erected by the Confederates in the Civil War to guard the lower Cumberland river, and taken by the Federals on the 16th of February 1862. It consisted of two continuous lines of entrenchments on the land side, and water batteries commanding the river. After the capture (Feb. 6) of Fort Henry on the lower Tennessee the Union army (three divisions) under Brigadier-General U. S. Grant marched overland to invest Donelson, and the gunboat flotilla (Commodore A. H. Foote) descended the Tennessee and ascended the Cumberland to meet him. Albert Sidney Johnston, the Confederate commander in Kentucky, had thrown a large garrison under General Floyd into Donelson, and Grant was at first outnumbered; though continually reinforced, the latter had at no time more than three men to the Confederates’ two. The troops of both sides were untrained but eager.

On the 12th and 13th of February 1862 the Union divisions, skirmishing heavily, took up their positions investing the fort, and on the 14th Foote’s gunboats attacked the water batteries. The latter received a severe repulse, Foote himself being amongst the wounded, and soon afterwards the Confederates determined to cut their way through Grant’s lines. On the 15th General Pillow attacked the Federal division of McClernand and drove it off the Nashville road; having done this, however, he halted, and even retired. Grant ordered General C. F. Smith’s division to assault a part of the lines which had been denuded of its defenders in order to reinforce Pillow. Smith personally led his young volunteers in the charge and carried all before him. The Confederates returning from the sortie were quite unable to shake his hold on the captured works, and, Grant having reinforced McClernand with Lew Wallace’s division, these two generals reoccupied the lost position on the Nashville road. On the 16th, the two senior Confederate generals Floyd and Pillow having escaped by steamer, the infantry left in the fort under General S. B. Buckner surrendered unconditionally. The Confederate cavalry under Colonel Forrest made its escape by road. The prisoners numbered about 15,000 out of an original total of 18,000.


DONGA, a Bantu word for a ravine, narrow watercourse or gully formed by the action of water. Adopted by the European residents of South Africa from the Kaffirs, the use of the word has been extended by English writers to ravines or watercourses of the nature indicated in various other parts of the world. It is almost equivalent to the Arabic khor, which, however, also means the dry bed of a stream, or a stream flowing through a ravine. The Indian word nullah (properly a watercourse) has also the same significance. The three words are often used interchangeably by English writers.


DONGOLA, a mudiria (province) of the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan. It lies wholly within the region known as Nubia and extends along both banks of the Nile from about 18° N. to 20° N. The rainfall is very slight, and the area of fertility is mainly confined to the lands watered by the Nile. Beyond stretches eastward the Nubian desert, westward the Libyan desert. The Wadi el Kab (Gab), west of and parallel to the Nile, contains, however, a good deal of arable land. This wadi, which is some 63 m. long, obtains water by percolation from the Nile. Farther west is the extensive plateau of Jebel Abiad, and beyond, some 250 m. due west of Debba, is Bir Natron, or Bir Sultan, a valley whence natron is obtained. In this desert region is found the addax, the rarest of Sudan antelopes. The chief grain crops are durra and barley, and date palms are extensively cultivated. The province is also noted for a breed of strong, hardy horses. The largest town is Dongola, but the administrative headquarters of the mudiria are at New Merawi (Merowe, Meroe), on the left bank of the Nile, below the 4th cataract. Other towns, also on the Nile, are Debba and Korti, whence start caravan routes to Kordofan and Omdurman. At Jebel Barkal, in the neighbourhood of Merawi, and elsewhere in the mudiria, are ancient ruins (see Sudan: Anglo-Egyptian). Old Merawi, on the right bank of the Nile, and Sanam Abu Dom, on the left bank, indicate the site of the Ethiopian city of Napata. From Kareima, on the right or northern bank of the Nile, 6 m. above New Merawi, a railway (opened in March 1906) runs to Abu Hamed, whence there is railway connexion with the Red Sea, Khartum and Egypt. From Kareima downstream the Nile is navigable to Kerma, just above the 3rd cataract. Between 1896 and 1904 a railway ran between Kerma and Wadi Halfa. In the last-named year this railway was closed. It had been built for purely military purposes and was unremunerative as a commerical undertaking.

The Dongolese (Dongolawi, Danaglas, Danagalehs) are Nubas in type and language, but have a large admixture of Arab, Turk and other blood. They are great agriculturists and keen 415 traders, and were notorious slave-dealers. South of Old Dongola the inhabitants are not Nubians but Shagia (q.v.), and the Nubian tongue is replaced by Arabic. Of the nomad desert tribes the chief are the Hawawir and Kabbabish.

The country now forming the mudiria was once part of the ancient empire of Ethiopia (q.v.), Napata being one of its capital cities. From about the beginning of the Christian era the chief tribes in the region immediately south of Egypt were the Blemmyes and the Nobatae. The last named became converted to Christianity about the middle of the 6th century, through the instrumentality, it is stated, of the empress Theodora. A chieftain of the Nobatae, named Silko, between the middle and the close of that century, conquered the Blemmyes, founded a new state, apparently on the ruins of that of the southern Meroe (Bakarawiya), made Christianity the official religion of the country, and fixed his capital at (Old) Dongola. This state, now generally referred to as the Christian kingdom of Dongola, lasted for eight or nine hundred years. Though late in reaching Nubia, Christianity, after the wars of Silko, spread rapidly, and when the Arab conquerors of Egypt sought to subdue Nubia also they met with stout resistance. Dongola, however, was captured by the Moslems in 652, and the country laid under tribute (bakt)—400 men having to be sent yearly to Egypt. This tribute was paid when it could be enforced; at periods the Nubians gained the upper hand, as in 737 when Cyriacus, their then king, marched into Egypt with a large army to redress the grievances of the Copts. There is a record of an embassy sent by a king Zacharias in the 9th century to Bagdad concerning the tribute, while by the close of the 10th century the Nubians seem to have regained almost complete independence. They did not, however, possess any part of the Red Sea coast, which was held by the Egyptians, who, during the 9th and 10th centuries, worked the emerald and gold mines between the Nile and the Red Sea. The kingdom, according to the Armenian historian Abu Salih, was in a very flourishing condition in the 12th century. It then extended from Assuan southward to the 4th cataract, and contained several large cities. Gold and copper mines were worked. The liturgy used was in Greek. In 1173 Shams addaula, a brother of Saladin, attacked the Nubians, captured the city of Ibrim (Primis), and among other deeds destroyed 700 pigs found therein. The Egyptians then retired, and for about 100 years the country was at peace. In 1275 the Mameluke sultan Bibars aided a rebel prince to oust his uncle from the throne of Nubia; the sultans Kalaun and Nasir also sent expeditions to Dongola, which was several times captured. Though willing to pay tribute to the Moslems, the Nubians clung tenaciously to Christianity, and, despite the raids to which the country was subjected, it appears during the 12th and 13th centuries to have been fairly prosperous. No serious attempt was made by the Egyptians to penetrate south of Napata, nor is it certain how far south of that place the authority of the Dongola kingdom (sometimes known as Mukarra) extended. It was neighboured on the south by another Christian state, Aloa (Alwa), with its capital Soba on the Blue Nile.

Cut off more and more from free intercourse with the Copts in Egypt, the Nubian Christians at length began to embrace Jewish and Mahommedan doctrines; the decay of the state was hastened by dissensions between Mukarra and Aloa. Nevertheless, the Nubians were strong enough to invade upper Egypt during the reign of Nawaya Krestos (1342-1372), because the governor of Cairo had thrown the patriarch of Alexandria into prison. The date usually assigned for the overthrow of the Christian kingdom is 1351. Only the northern part of the country (as far as the 3rd cataract) came under the rule of Egypt. Nevertheless, according to Leo Africanus, at the close of the 15th century Christianity and native states still survived in Nubia, and in the 16th century the Nubians sent messengers to Abyssinia to Father Alvarez, begging him to appoint priests to administer the sacraments to them—a request with which he was not able to comply. Thereafter the Nubian Church is without records. The Moslems may have extinguished it in blood, for the region between Dongola and Shendi appears to have been depopulated. Between Assuan and Hannek the Turks introduced in the 16th century numbers of Bosnians, whose descendants ruled the district, paying but a nominal allegiance to the Porte. At Ibrim, Mahass, and elsewhere along the banks and in the islands of the Nile, they built castles, now in ruins. South of Hannek the kings of Sennar became overlords of the country. As the power of the Sennari declined, the nomad Shagia (or Shaikiyeh) attained pre-eminence in the Dongola district.

About 1812 Mamelukes fleeing from Mehemet Ali, the pasha of Egypt, made themselves masters of part of the country, destroying the old capital and building a new one lower down the Nile. In 1820 both Mamelukes and Shagia were conquered by the Egyptians, and the Dongola province annexed to Egypt. In consequence of the rising of the Dervishes Egypt evacuated Dongola in 1886. The attempt to set up an independent government failed, and the Dervishes held the town until September 1896, when it was reoccupied by an Egyptian force.

See J. L. Burckhardt, Travels in Nubia (London, 1819); Naum Bey Shucair, The History and Geography of the Sudan (in Arabic, 3 vols., Cairo, 1903); E. A. Wallis Budge, The Egyptian Sudan (2 vols., London, 1907).


DONGOLA, a town of the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan, which gives its name to a mudiria. It is situated on the W. bank of the Nile, about 45 m. above the 3rd cataract, in 19° 10′ N., 30° 29′ E. Pop. about 10,000. It is 1082 m. S. of Cairo by river and 638 m. N. of Khartum by the same route. Its commerical outlet, however, is Port Sudan, on the Red Sea, 600 m. E.S.E. by steamer and railway. It is a thriving, well-built town; an important agricultural and trading centre. Lignite is found on the east bank of the Nile opposite the town. Founded c. 1812 by Mamelukes who fled to Nubia from the persecutions of Mehemet Ali, the town is called Dongola Makara (New Dongola) to distinguish it from Dongola Agusa (Old Dongola), which it supplanted. It is also called El Ordi (the barracks), a reminiscence of the buildings erected by the Egyptians after their occupation of the town in 1820. The Mahdi Mahommed Ahmed was a native of Dongola. In 1884-1885 the town was the base of the British troops in their advance on Khartum.

Dongola Agusa, 75 m. upstream from New Dongola, now a heap of ruins, was the capital of the Nubian state usually called the Christian kingdom of Dongola. An Arab historian of the 11th century describes it as a large city with many churches, fine houses and wide streets. It is said to have been finally destroyed by the Mamelukes. On a hill near the ruins is a mosque in which is an Arabic inscription stating that the building was opened “on the 20th Rabi el Aneh in the year 717 (June 1, 1317 a.d.) after the victory of Sefeddin Abdallah en Nasir over the Infidels.”


DONIZETTI, GAETANO (1798-1848), Italian musical composer, was born at Bergamo in 1798, the son of a government official of limited means. Originally destined for the bar, he showed at an early age a strong taste for art. At first, strangely enough, he mistook architecture for his vocation, and only after an unsuccessful trial in that direction did he discover his real talent. He entered the conservatoire of his native city, where he studied under Simon Mayr, the fertile operatic composer. His second master was Mattei, the head master of the celebrated music school of Bologna, where Donizetti resided for three years. After his return to Bergamo the young composer determined to devote himself to dramatic music, but his father insisted upon his giving lessons with a view to immediate gain. The disputes arising from this cause ultimately led to Donizetti’s enlisting in the army. But this desperate step proved beneficial against all expectation. The regiment was quartered at Venice, and here the young composer’s first dramatic attempt, an opera called Enrico comte di Borgogna, saw the light in 1818.

The success of this work, and of a second opera brought out in the following year, established Donizetti’s reputation. He obtained his discharge from the army, and henceforth his operas followed each other in rapid and uninterrupted succession at the rate of three or four a year. Although he had to contend successively with two such dangerous rivals as Rossini and Bellini, he succeeded in taking firm hold of the public, and the 416 brilliant reception accorded to his Anna Bolena at Milan carried his name beyond the limits of his own country. In 1835 Donizetti went for the first time to Paris, where, however, his Marino Faliero failed to hold its own against Bellini’s Puritani, then recently produced at the Théâtre Italien. The disappointed composer went to Naples, where the enormous success of his Lucia di Lammermoor consoled him for his failure in Paris. For Naples he wrote a number of works, none of which is worth notice. In 1840 the censorship refused to pass his Poliuto, an Italian version of Corneille’s Polyeucte, in consequence of which the disgusted composer once more left his country for Paris. Here he produced at the Opéra Comique his most popular opera, La Fille du régiment, but again with little success. It was not till after the work had made the round of the theatres of Germany and Italy that the Parisians reconsidered their unfavourable verdict. A serious opera, Les Martyrs, produced about the same time with the Daughter of the Regiment, was equally unsuccessful, and it was reserved to La Favorita, generally considered as Donizetti’s masterpiece, to break the evil spell. His next important work, Linda di Chamounix, was written for Vienna, where it was received most favourably in 1842, and the same success accompanied the production of Don Pasquale after Donizetti’s return to Paris in 1843. Soon after this event the first signs of a fatal disease, caused to a great extent by overwork, began to show themselves. The utter failure of Don Sebastian, a large opera produced soon after Don Pasquale, is said to have hastened the catastrophe. A paralytic stroke in 1844 deprived Donizetti of his reason; for four years he lingered on in a state of mental and physical prostration. A visit to his country was proposed as a last resource, but he reached his native place only to die there on the 1st of April 1848.

The sum total of his operas amounts to sixty-four. The large number of his works accounts for many of their chief defects. His rapidity of working made all revision impossible. It is said that he once wrote the instrumentation of a whole opera within thirty hours, a time hardly sufficient, one would think, to put the notes on paper. And yet it may be doubted whether more elaboration would have essentially improved his work; for the last act of the Favorita, infinitely superior to the preceding ones, is also said to have been the product of a single night.

There is a strange parallelism observable in the lives of Rossini, Bellini and Donizetti. They had no sooner established their reputations on the Italian stage than they left their own country for Paris, at that time the centre of the musical world. All three settled in France, and all three were anxious to adapt the style of their music to the taste and artistic traditions of their adopted country. The difference which exists between Rossini’s Tell and his Semiramide may, although in a less striking degree, be noticed between Donizetti’s Fille du régiment and one of his earlier Italian operas. But here the parallel ends. As regards artistic genius Donizetti can by no means be compared with his illustrious countrymen. He has little of Bellini’s melancholy sweetness, less of Rossini’s sparkle, and is all but devoid of spontaneous dramatic impulse. For these shortcomings he atones by a considerable though by no means extraordinary store of fluent melody, and by his rare skill in writing for the voice. The duet in the last act of the Favorita and the ensemble in Lucia following upon the signing of the contract, are masterpieces of concerted music in the Italian style. These advantages, together with considerable power of humorous delineation, as evinced in Don Pasquale and L’Elisir d’amore, must account for the unimpaired vitality of many of his works on the stage.


DONJON (from a Late Lat. accusative form domnionem, connected with domnus or dominus, a lord), the French term for the keep of a medieval castle, used now in distinction to “dungeon” (q.v.), the prison, which is only an anglicized spelling (see also Keep).


DON JUAN, a legendary character, whose story has found currency in various European countries. He was introduced into formal literature in the Spanish El Burlador de Sevilla y convidado de piedra, a play which was first printed at Barcelona in 1630, and is usually attributed to Tirso de Molina; but the story of a profligate inviting a dead man to supper, and finding his invitation accepted, was current before 1630, and is not peculiar to Spain. A Don Juan Tenorio is said to have frequented the court of Peter the Cruel, and at a later period another Don Juan Tenorio, a dissolute gallant, is reported as living at Seville; but there is no satisfactory evidence of their existence, and it is unlikely that the Don Juan legend is based on historical facts. It exists in Picardy as Le Souper de fantôme, and variants of it have been found at points so far apart as Iceland and the Azores; the available evidence goes to show that Don Juan is a universal type, that he is the subject of local myths in many countries, that he received his name in Spain, and that the Spanish version of his legend has absorbed certain elements from the French story of Robert the Devil. Some points of resemblance are observable between El Burlador de Sevilla and Dineros son calidad, a play of earlier date by Lope de Vega; but these resemblances are superficial, and the character of Don Juan, the incarnation of perverse sensuality and arrogant blasphemy, may be considered as the creation of Tirso de Molina, though the ascription to him of El Burlador de Sevilla has been disputed. The Spanish drama was apparently more popular in Italy than in Spain, and was frequently given in pantomime by the Italian actors, who accounted for its permanent vogue by saying that Tirso de Molina had sold his soul to the devil for fame. A company of these Italian mimes took the story into France in 1657, and it was dramatized by Dorimond in 1659 and by De Villiers in 1661; their attempts suggested Le Festin de pierre (1665) to Molière, who, apparently with the Spanish original before his eyes, substituted prose for verse, reduced the supernatural element, and interpolated comic effects completely out of keeping with the earlier conception. Later adaptations by Rosimond and Thomas Corneille were even less successful. The story was introduced into England by Sir Aston Cokain in his unreadable Tragedy of Ovid (1669), and was the theme of The Libertine (1676), a dull and obscene play by Shadwell. Goldoni’s D. Giovanni Tenorio osia Il Dissoluto, based upon the adaptations of Molière and Thomas Corneille, is one of his least interesting productions. Tirso de Molina’s play was recast, but not improved, by Antonio de Zamora early in the 18th century. A hundred years later the character of Don Juan was endowed with a new name in Espronceda’s Estudiante de Salamanca; Don Félix de Montemar is plainly modelled on Don Juan Tenorio, and rivals the original in licentiousness, impiety and grim humour. But the most curious resuscitation of the type in Spain is the protagonist in Zorrilla’s Don Juan Tenorio, which is usually played in all large cities during the first week in November, and has come to be regarded as an essentially national work. It is in fact little more than an adaptation of the elder Dumas’ Don Juan de Marana, which, in its turn, derives chiefly from Mérimée’s novel, Les Âmes du purgatoire. Less exotic are Zorrilla’s two poems on the same subject—El Desafío del diablo and El Testigo de bronce. Byron’s Don Juan presents a Regency lady-killer who resembles Ulloa’s murderer in nothing but his name.

The sustained popularity of the Don Juan legend is undoubtedly due in great measure to Mozart’s incomparable setting of Da Ponte’s mediocre libretto. In this pale version of El Burlador de Sevilla the French romantic school made acquaintance with Don Juan, and hence, no doubt, the works of Mérimée and Dumas already mentioned, Balzac’s Élexir d’une longue vie, and Alfred de Musset’s Une Matinée de Don Juan and Namouna. The legend has been treated subsequently by Flaubert and Barbey d’Aurevilly in France, by Landau and Heyse in Germany, and by Sacher-Masoch in Austria. It has always fascinated composers. Mozart’s Don Giovanni has annihilated the earlier operas of Le Tellier, Righini, Tritto, Gardi and Gazzaniga; but Gluck’s ballet-music still survives, and Henry Purcell’s setting—the oldest of all—has saved some of Shadwell’s insipid lyrics from oblivion.

Bibliography.—F. de Simone Brouwer, Don Giovanni nella poesia e nell’ arte musicale (Napoli, 1894); A. Farinelli, Don Giovanni: Note critiche (Torino, 1896); A. Farinelli, Cuatro palabras sobre Don Juan y la literatura donjuanesca del porvenir in the Homenaje á Menéndez y Pelayo (Madrid, 1899), vol. i. pp. 205-222.

(J. F.-K.)

417

DONKIN, SIR RUFANE SHAW (1773-1841), British soldier, came of a military family. His father, who died, a full general, in 1821, served with almost all British commanders from Wolfe to Gage. Rufane Donkin was the eldest child, and received his first commission at the age of five in his father’s regiment; he joined, at fourteen, with eight years’ seniority as a lieutenant. Becoming a captain in 1793, he was on active service in the West Indies in 1794, and (as major) in 1796. At the age of twenty-five he became lieutenant-colonel, and in 1798 led a light battalion with distinction in the Ostend expedition. He served with Cathcart in Denmark in 1807, and two years later was given a brigade in the army in Portugal, which he led at Oporto and Talavera. He was soon transferred, as quartermaster-general, to the Mediterranean command, in which he served from 1810 to 1813, taking part in the Catalonian expeditions. Sir John Murray’s failure at Tarragona did not involve Donkin, whose advice was proved to be uniformly ignored by the British commander. In July 1815 Major-General Donkin went out to India, and distinguished himself as a divisional commander in Hastings’ operations against the Mahrattas (1817-1818), receiving the K.C.B. as his reward. The death of his young wife seriously affected him, and he went to the Cape of Good Hope on sick leave. From 1820 to 1821 he administered the colony with success, and named the rising seaport of Algoa Bay Port Elizabeth in memory of his wife. In 1821 he became lieutenant-general and G.C.H. The rest of his life was spent in literary and political work. He was one of the original fellows of the Royal Geographical Society, and was a member of the Royal Society and of many other learned bodies. His theories as to the course of the river Niger, published under the title Dissertation on the Course and Probable Termination of the Niger (London, 1829), involved him in a good deal of controversy. From 1832 onwards he sat in the House of Commons, and in 1835 was made surveyor-general of the ordnance. He committed suicide at Southampton in 1841. He was then a general, and colonel of the 11th Foot.

See Jerdan, National Portraits, vol. iii.; Gentleman’s Magazine, xcii. i. 273.


DONNAY, CHARLES MAURICE (1859-  ), French dramatist, was born of middle-class parents in Paris in 1859. He made his serious début as a dramatist on the little stage of the Chat Noir with Phryné (1891), a series of Greek scenes. Lysistrata, a four-act comedy, was produced at the Grand Théâtre in 1892 with Mme Réjane in the title part. Later plays were Folle Entreprise (1894); Pension de famille (1894); Complices (1895), in collaboration with M. Groselande; Amants (1895), produced at the Renaissance theatre with Mme Jeanne Granier as Claudine Rozeray; La Douloureuse (1897); L’Affranchie (1898); Georgette Lemeunier (1898); Le Torrent (1899), at the Comédie Française; Éducation de prince (1900); La Clairière (1900), and Oiseaux de passage (1904), in collaboration with L. Descaves; La Bascule (1901); L’Autre danger, at the Comédie Française (1902); Le Retour de Jérusalem (1903); L’Escalade (1904); and Paraître (1906). With Amants he won a great success, and the play was hailed by Jules Lemaître as the Bérénice of contemporary French drama. Very advanced ideas on the relations between the sexes dominate the whole series of plays, and the witty dialogue is written with an apparent carelessness that approximates very closely to the language of every day.


DONNE, JOHN (1573-1631), English poet and divine of the reign of James I., was born in 1573 in the parish of St Nicholas Olave, in the city of London. His father was a wealthy merchant, who next year became warden of the Company of Ironmongers, but died early in 1576. Donne’s parents were Catholics, and his mother, Elizabeth Heywood, was directly descended from the sister of the great Sir Thomas More; she was the daughter of John Heywood the epigrammatist. As a child, Donne’s precocity was such that it was said of him that “this age hath brought forth another Pico della Mirandola.” He entered Hart Hall, Oxford, in October 1584, and left it in 1587, proceeding for a time to Cambridge, where he took his degree. At Oxford he began his friendship with Henry Wotton, and at Cambridge, probably, with Christopher Brooke. Donne was “removed to London” about 1590, and in 1592 he entered Lincoln’s Inn with the intention of studying the law.

When he came of age, he found himself in possession of a considerable fortune, and about the same time rejected the Catholic doctrine in favour of the Anglican communion. He began to produce Satires, which were not printed, but eagerly passed from hand to hand; the first three are known to belong to 1593, the fourth to 1594, while the other three are probably some years later. In 1596 Donne engaged himself for foreign service under the earl of Essex, and “waited upon his lordship” on board the “Repulse,” in the magnificent victory of the 11th of June. We possess several poems written by Donne during this expedition, and during the Islands Voyage of 1597, in which he accompanied Essex to the Azores. According to Walton, Donne spent some time in Italy and Spain, and intended to proceed to Palestine, “but at his being in the farthest parts of Italy, the disappointment of company, or of a safe convoy, or the uncertainty of returns of money into those remote parts, denied him that happiness.” There is some reason to suppose that he was on the continent at intervals between 1595 and the winter of 1597. His lyrical poetry was mainly the product of his exile, if we are to believe Ben Jonson, who told Drummond of Hawthornden that Donne “wrote all his best pieces ere he was 25 years old.” At his return to England he became private secretary in London to Sir Thomas Egerton, the lord keeper (afterwards Lord Brackley), in whose family he remained four years. In 1600 he found himself in love with his master’s niece, Anne More, whom he married secretly in December 1601. As soon as this act was discovered, Donne was dismissed, and then thrown into the Fleet prison (February 1602), from which he was soon released. His circumstances, however, were now very much straitened. His own fortune had all been spent and “troubles did still multiply upon him.” Mrs Donne’s cousin, Sir Francis Wooley, offered the young couple an asylum at his country house of Pyrford, where they resided until the end of 1604.

During the latter part of his residence in Sir Thomas Egerton’s house, Donne had composed the longest of his existing poems, The Progress of the Soul, not published until 1633. In the spring of 1605 we find the Donnes living at Camberwell, and a little later in a small house at Mitcham. He had by this time “acquired such a perfection” in civil and common law that he was able to take up professional work, and he now acted as a helper to Thomas Morton in his controversies with the Catholics. Donne is believed to have had a considerable share in writing the pamphlets against the papists which Morton issued between 1604 and 1607. In the latter year, Morton offered the poet certain preferment in the Church, if he would only consent to take holy orders. Donne, however, although he was at this time become deeply serious on religious matters, did not think himself fitted for the clerical life. In 1607 he started a correspondence with Mrs Magdalen Herbert of Montgomery Castle, the mother of George Herbert. Some of these pious epistles were printed by Izaak Walton. These exercises were not of a nature to add to his income, which was extremely small. His uncomfortable little house he speaks of as his “hospital” and his “prison;” his wife’s health was broken and he was bowed down by the number of his children, who often lacked even clothes and food. In the autumn of 1608, however, his father-in-law, Sir George More, became reconciled with them, and agreed to make them a generous allowance. Donne soon after formed part of the brilliant assemblage which Lucy, countess of Bradford, gathered around her at Twickenham; we possess several of the verse epistles he addressed to this lady. In 1609 Donne was engaged in composing his great controversial prose treatise, the Pseudo-Martyr, printed in 1610; this was an attempt to convince Roman Catholics in England that they might, without any inconsistency, take the oath of allegiance to James I. In 1611 Donne wrote a curious and bitter prose squib against the Jesuits, entitled Ignatius his Conclave. To the same period, but possibly somewhat earlier, belongs the apology for the principle of suicide, which was not published until 1644, long after Donne’s death. This work, the Biathanatos, is an attempt to show that “the scandalous disease 418 of headlong dying,” to which Donne himself in his unhappy moods had “often such a sickly inclination,” was not necessarily and essentially sinful.

In 1610 Donne formed the acquaintance of a wealthy gentleman, Sir Robert Drury of Hawsted, who offered him and his wife an apartment in his large house in Drury Lane. Drury lost his only daughter, and in 1611 Donne published an extravagant elegy on her, entitled An Anatomy of the World, to which he added in 1612 a Progress of the Soul on the same subject; he threatened to celebrate the “blessèd Maid,” Elizabeth Drury, in a fresh elegy on each anniversary of her death, but he happily refrained from the third occasion onwards. At the close of 1611 Sir Robert Drury determined to visit Paris (but not, as Walton supposed, on an embassy of any kind), and he took Donne with him. When he left London, his wife was expecting an eighth child. It seems almost certain that her fear to have him absent led him to compose one of his loveliest poems:

“Sweetest Love, I do not go

For weariness of thee.”

He is said to have had a vision, while he was at Amiens, of his wife, with her hair over her shoulders, bearing a dead child in her arms, on the very night that Mrs Donne, in London (or more probably in the Isle of Wight), was delivered of a still-born infant. He suffered, accordingly, a great anxiety, which was not removed until he reached Paris, where he received reassuring accounts of his wife’s health. The Drurys and Donne left Paris for Spa in May 1612, and travelled in the Low Countries and Germany until September, when they returned to London. In 1613 Donne contributed to the Lachrymae lachrymarum an obscure and frigid elegy on the death of the prince of Wales, and wrote his famous Marriage Song for St Valentine’s Day to celebrate the nuptials of the elector palatine with the princess Elizabeth. About this time Donne became intimate with Robert Ker, then Viscount Rochester and afterwards the infamous earl of Somerset, from whom he had hopes of preferment at court. Donne was now in weak health, and in a highly neurotic condition. He suggested to Rochester that if he should enter the church, a place there might be found for him. But he was more useful to the courtier in his legal capacity, and Rochester dissuaded him from the ministry. At the close of 1614, however, the king sent for Donne to Theobald’s, and “descended to a persuasion, almost to a solicitation of him, to enter into sacred orders,” but Donne asked for a few days to consider. Finally, early in 1614, King, bishop of London, “proceeded with all convenient speed to ordain him, first deacon, then priest.” He was, perhaps, a curate first at Paddington, and presently was appointed royal chaplain.

His earliest sermon before the king at Whitehall carried his audience “to heaven, in holy raptures.” In April, not without much bad grace, the university of Cambridge consented to make the new divine a D.D. In the spring of 1616, Donne was presented to the living of Keyston, in Hunts., and a little later he became rector of Sevenoaks; the latter preferment he held until his death. In October he was appointed reader in divinity to the benchers of Lincoln’s Inn. His anxieties about money now ceased, but in August 1617 his wife died, leaving seven young children in his charge. Perhaps in consequence of his bereavement, Donne seems to have passed through a spiritual crisis, which inspired him with a peculiar fervour of devotion. In 1618 he wrote two cycles of religious sonnets, La Corona and the Holy Sonnets, the latter not printed in complete form until by Mr Gosse in 1899. Of the very numerous sermons preached by Donne at Lincoln’s Inn, fourteen have come down to us. His health suffered from the austerity of his life, and it was probably in connexion with this fact that he allowed himself to be persuaded in May 1619 to accompany Lord Doncaster as his chaplain on an embassy to Germany. Having visited Heidelberg, Frankfort and other German cities, the embassy returned to England at the opening of 1620.

In November 1621, James I., knowing that London was “a dish” which Donne “loved well,” “carved” for him the deanery of St Paul’s. He resigned Keyston, and his preachership in Lincoln’s Inn (Feb., 1622). In October 1623 he suffered from a dangerous attack of illness, and during a long convalescence wrote his Devotions, a volume published in 1624. He was now appointed to the vicarage of St Dunstan’s in the West. In April 1625 Donne preached before the new king, Charles I., a sermon which was immediately printed, and he now published his Four Sermons upon Special Occasions, the earliest collection of his discourses. When the plague broke out he retired with his children to the house of Sir John Danvers in Chiswick, and for a time he disappeared so completely that a rumour arose that he was dead. Sir John had married Donne’s old friend, Mrs Magdalen Herbert, for whom Donne wrote two of the most ingenious of his lyrics, “The Primrose” and “The Autumnal.” The popularity of Donne as a preacher rose to its zenith when he returned to his pulpit, and it continued there until his death. Walton, who seems to have known him first in 1624, now became an intimate and adoring friend. In 1630 Donne’s health, always feeble, broke down completely, so that, although in August of that year he was to have been made a bishop, the entire breakdown of his health made it worse than useless to promote him. The greater part of that winter he spent at Abury Hatch, in Epping Forest, with his widowed daughter, Constance Alleyn, and was too ill to preach before the king at Christmas. It is believed that his disease was a malarial form of recurrent quinsy acting upon an extremely neurotic system. He came back to London, and was able to preach at Whitehall on the 12th of February 1631. This, his latest sermon, was published, soon after his demise, as Death’s Duel. He now stood for his statue to the sculptor, Nicholas Stone, standing before a fire in his study at the Deanery, with his winding-sheet wrapped and tied round him, his eyes shut, and his feet resting on a funeral urn. This lugubrious work of art was set up in white marble after his death in St Paul’s cathedral, where it may still be seen. Donne died on the 31st of March 1631, after he had lain “fifteen days earnestly expecting his hourly change.” His aged mother, who had lived in the Deanery, survived him, dying in 1632.

Donne’s poems were first collected in 1633, and afterwards in 1635, 1639, 1649, 1650, 1654 and 1669. Of his prose works, the Juvenilia appeared in 1633; the LXXX Sermons in 1640; Biathanatos in 1644; Fifty Sermons in 1649; Essays in Divinity, 1651; his Letters to Several Persons of Honour, 1651; Paradoxes, Problems and Essays, 1652; and Six and Twenty Sermons, 1661. Izaak Walton’s Life of Donne, an admirably written but not entirely correct biography, preceded the Sermons of 1640. The principal editor of his posthumous writings was his son, John Donne the younger (1604-1662), a man of eccentric and scandalous character, but of considerable talent.

The influence of Donne upon the literature of England was singularly wide and deep, although almost wholly malign. His originality and the fervour of his imaginative passion made him extremely attractive to the younger generation of poets, who saw that he had broken through the old tradition, and were ready to follow him implicitly into new fields. In the 18th century his reputation almost disappeared, to return, with many vicissitudes in the course of the 19th. It is, indeed, singularly difficult to pronounce a judicious opinion on the writings of Donne. They were excessively admired by his own and the next generation, praised by Dryden, paraphrased by Pope, and then entirely neglected for a whole century. The first impression of an unbiassed reader who dips into the poems of Donne is unfavourable. He is repulsed by the intolerably harsh and crabbed versification, by the recondite choice of theme and expression, and by the oddity of the thought. In time, however, he perceives that behind the fantastic garb of language there is an earnest and vigorous mind, an imagination that harbours fire within its cloudy folds, and an insight into the mysteries of spiritual life which is often startling. Donne excels in brief flashes of wit and beauty, and in sudden daring phrases that have the full perfume of poetry in them. Some of his lyrics and one or two of his elegies excepted, the Satires are his most important contribution to literature. They are probably the earliest poems of their kind in the language, and they are full of force and picturesqueness. Their obscure and knotty language only serves to give peculiar 419 brilliancy to the not uncommon passages of noble perspicacity. To the odd terminology of Donne’s poetic philosophy Dryden gave the name of “metaphysics,” and Johnson, borrowing the suggestion, invented the title of the “metaphysical school” to describe, not Donne only, but all the amorous and philosophical poets who succeeded him, and who employed a similarly fantastic language, and who affected odd figurative inversions.

Izaak Walton’s Life, first published in 1640, and entirely recast in 1659, has been constantly reprinted. The best edition of Donne’s Poems was edited by E. K. Chambers in 1896. His prose works have not been collected. In 1899 Edmund Gosse published in two volumes The Life and Letters of John Donne, for the first time revised and collected.

(E. G.)

DONNYBROOK, a part of Dublin, Ireland, in the south-east of the city. The former village of the name was famous for a fair held under licence from King John in 1204. It gained, however, such a scandalous notoriety for disorder that it was discontinued in 1855, the rights being purchased for £3000.


DONOSO CORTÉS, JUAN, Marquis de Valdegamas (1809-1853), Spanish author and diplomatist, was born at Valle de la Serena (Extremadura) on the 6th of May 1809, studied law at Seville, and entered politics as an advanced liberal under the influence of Quintana (q.v.). His views began to modify after the rising at La Granja, and this tendency towards conservatism, which became more marked on his appointment as private secretary to the Queen Regent, finds expression in his Lecciones de derecho politico (1837). Alarmed by the proceedings of the French revolutionary party in 1848-1849, Donoso Cortés issued his Ensayo sobre el catolicismo, el liberalismo, y el socialismo considerados en sus principios fundamentales (1851), denouncing reason as the enemy of truth and liberalism as leading to social ruin. He became ambassador at Paris, and died there on the 3rd of May 1853. The Ensayo has failed to arrest the movement against which it was directed, and is weakened by its extravagant paradoxes; but, with all its rhetorical excesses, it remains the finest specimen of impassioned prose published in Spain during the 19th century.

Donoso Cortés’ works were collected in five volumes at Madrid (1854-1855) under the editorship of Gavino Tejado.


DONOVAN, EDWARD (1768-1837), English naturalist, was the author of many popular works on natural history and botany. In 1792 appeared the first volume of his Natural History of British Insects, which extended to sixteen volumes, and was completed in 1813. He also published Natural Histories of British Birds, in 10 vols. 8vo (1799-1819), of British Fishes, in 5 vols. (1802-1808), of British Shells, in 5 vols. (1800-1804), a series of illustrated works on The Insects of India, China, New Holland, &c., in 3 vols. 4to (1798-1805), and Excursions in South Wales and Monmouthshire (1805). To these works must be added his periodical entitled The Naturalist’s Repository, a monthly publication, of which three volumes were completed (1823-1825), and an Essay on the Minute Parts of Plants in general. Donovan was author of the articles on natural history in Rees’s Cyclopaedia. In 1833 he published a Memorial respecting my Publications in Natural History, in which he complains that he had been nearly ruined by his publishers. He was a fellow of the Linnean Society, and died in London on the 1st of February 1837.


DOOM (Old Eng. dóm, a word common to Teut. languages for that which is set up or ordered, from “do,” in its original meaning of “place”; cf. Gr. θέμις, from stem of τίθημι), originally a law or enactment, the legal decision of a judge, and particularly an adverse sentence on a criminal. The word is thus applicable to the adverse decrees of fate, and particularly to the day of judgment. The verb “deem,” to deliver a judgment, and hence to give or hold an opinion, is a derivative, and appears also in various old Teutonic forms. It is seen in “deemster,” the name of the two judges of the Isle of Man.


DOON DE MAYENCE, a hero of romance, who gives his name to the third cycle of the Charlemagne romances, those dealing with the feudal revolts. There is no real unity in the geste of Doon de Mayence. The rebellious barons are connected by the trouvères with Doon by imaginary genealogical ties, and all are represented as in opposition to Charlemagne, though their adventures, in so far as they possess a historical basis, must generally be referred to earlier or later periods than the reign of the great emperor. The general insolence of their attitude to the sovereign suggests that Charlemagne is here only a name for his weaker successors. The tradition of a traitorous family of Mayence, which was developed in Italy into a series of stories of criminals, was however anterior to the Carolingian cycle, for an interpolator in the chronicle of Fredegarius states (iv. 87) that the army of Sigebert was betrayed from within its own ranks by men of Mayence in a battle fought with Radulf on the banks of the Unstrut in Thuringia. The chief heroes of the poems which make up the geste of Doon de Mayence are Ogier the Dane (q.v.), the four sons of Aymon (see Renaud), and Huon of Bordeaux (q.v.). It is probable that Doon himself was one of the last personages to be clearly defined, and that the chanson de geste relating his exploits was drawn up partly with the view of supplying a suitable ancestor for the other heroes. The latter half of the poem, the story of Doon’s wars in Saxony, is perhaps based on historical events, but the earlier half, which is really a separate romance dealing with his romantic childhood, is obviously pure fiction and dates from the 13th century. Doon had twelve sons: Gaufrey de Dane Marche (Ardennes?), the father of Ogier; Doon de Nanteuil, whose son Garnier married the beautiful Aye d’Avignon; Griffon d’Hauteville, father of the arch-traitor Ganelon; Aymon de Dordone or Dourdan, whose four sons were so relentlessly pursued by Charles; Beuves d’Aigremont, whose son was the enchanter Maugis; Sevin or Seguin, the father of Huon of Bordeaux; Girard de Roussillon, and others less known. The history of these personages is given in Doon de Mayence, Gaufrey, the romances relating to Ogier, Aye d’Avignon, the fragmentary Doon de Nanteuil, Gui de Nanteuil, Tristan de Nanteuil, Parise la Duchesse, Maugis d’Aigremont, Vivien l’amachour de Monbranc, Renaus de Montauban or Les Quatre Fils Aymon, and Huon de Bordeaux. Some of this material, which dates in its existing form from the 12th and 13th centuries, remains unpublished, but the chief poems are available in the series of Anciens Poètes de la France (1859, &c).

See Hist. litt. de la France, vols. xxii. and xxvi. (1852 and 1873), for analyses of these poems by Paulin Paris; also J. Barrois, Éléments carolingiens (Paris, 1846); W. Niederstadt, Alter und Heimat der altfr. Doon (Greifswald, 1889). The prose romance, La Fleur des batailles Doolin de Mayence, was printed by Antoine Vérard (Paris, 1501), by Alain Lotrian and Denis Janot (Paris, c. 1530), by N. Bonfons (Paris; no date), by J. Waesbergue (Rotterdam, 1604), &c.


DOOR (corresponding to the Gr. θύρα, Lat. fores or valvae; the English word, with other forms common in allied languages, comes from the same Indo-European stem as the Gr. θύρα and Lat. fores), in architecture, the slab, flap or leaf forming the enclosure of a doorway (q.v.), either in wood, metal or stone. The earliest records are those represented in the paintings of the Egyptian tombs, in which they are shown as single or double doors, each in a single piece of wood. In Egypt, where the climate is intensely dry, there would be no fear of their warping, but in other countries it would be necessary to frame them, which according to Vitruvius (iv. 6.) was done with stiles (scapi) and rails (impages): the spaces enclosed being filled with panels (tympana) let into grooves made in the stiles and rails. The stiles were the vertical boards, one of which, tenoned or hinged, is known as the hanging stile, the other as the middle or meeting stile. The horizontal cross pieces are the top rail, bottom rail, and middle or intermediate rails. The most ancient doors were in timber, those made for King Solomon’s temple being in olive wood (1 Kings vi. 31-35), which were carved and overlaid with gold. The doors dwelt upon in Homer would appear to have been cased in silver or brass. Besides olive wood, elm, cedar, oak and cyprus were used. All ancient doors were hung by pivots at the top and bottom of the hanging stile which worked in sockets in the lintel and cill, the latter being always in some hard stone such as basalt or granite. Those found at Nippur by Dr Hilprecht, dating from 2000 b.c.. were in dolorite. The tenons of 420 the gates at Balawat (see fig.) (895-825 b.c.) were sheathed with bronze (now in the British Museum). These doors or gates were hung in two leaves, each about 8 ft. 4 in. wide and 27 ft. high; they were encased with bronze bands or strips, 10 in. high, covered with repoussé decoration of figures, &c. The wood doors would seem to have been about 3 in. thick, but the hanging stile was over 14 in. in diameter. Other sheathings of various sizes in bronze have been found, which proves this to have been the universal method adopted to protect the wood pivots. In the Hauran in Syria, where timber is scarce, the doors were made in stone, and one measuring 5 ft. 4 in. by 2 ft. 7 in. is in the British Museum; the band on the meeting stile shows that it was one of the leaves of a double door. At Kuffeir near Bostra in Syria, Burckhardt found stone doors, 9 to 10 ft. high, being the entrance doors of the town. In Etruria many stone doors are referred to by Dennis.

Balawat Gates, sheath and socket.

From History of Art in Chaldaea and Assyria, by permission of Chapman & Hall Ltd.

The ancient Greek and Roman doors were either single doors (μονοθύραι, unifores), double doors (διθύραι, bifores or geminae) or folding doors (πτύχες, valvae); in the last case the leaves were hinged and folded back one over the other. At Pompeii, in the portico of Eumachia, is a painting of a door with three leaves, the two outer ones of which were presumably hung, the inner leaf folding on one or the other; hinges connecting the folding leaves of a door have been found in Pompeii. In the tomb of Theron at Agrigentum there is a single four-panel door carved in stone. In the Blundell collection is a bas-relief of a temple with double doors, each leaf with five panels. Among existing examples, the bronze doors in the church of SS. Cosmas and Damiano, in Rome, are important examples of Roman metal work of the best period; they are in two leaves, each with two panels, and are framed in bronze. Those of the Pantheon are similar in design, with narrow horizontal panels in addition, at the top, bottom and middle. Two other bronze doors of the Roman period are in the Lateran Basilica.

The doors of the church of the Nativity at Bethlehem (6th century) are covered with plates of bronze, cut out in patterns: those of Sta Sophia at Constantinople, of the 8th and 9th century, are wrought in bronze, and the west doors of the cathedral of Aix-la-Chapelle (9th century), of similar manufacture, were probably brought from Constantinople, as also some of those in St Mark’s, Venice.

Of the 11th and 12th centuries there are numerous examples of bronze doors, the earliest being one at Hildesheim, Germany (1015). Of others in South Italy and Sicily, the following are the finest: in Sant’ Andrea, Amalfi (1060); Salerno (1099); Canosa (1111); Troja, two doors (1119 and 1124); Ravello (1179), by Barisano of Trani, who also made doors for Trani cathedral; and in Monreale and Pisa cathedrals, by Bonano of Pisa. In all these cases the hanging stile had pivots at the top and bottom. The exact period when the hinge was substituted is not quite known, but the change apparently brought about another method of strengthening and decorating doors, viz. with wrought-iron bands of infinite varieties of design. As a rule three bands from which the ornamental work springs constitute the hinges, which have rings outside the hanging stiles fitting on to vertical tenons run into the masonry or wooden frame. There is an early example of the 12th century in Lincoln; in France the metal work of the doors of Notre Dame at Paris is perhaps the most beautiful in execution, but examples are endless throughout France and England.

Returning to Italy, the most celebrated doors are those of the Baptistery of Florence, which together with the door frames are all in bronze, the borders of the latter being perhaps the most remarkable: the modelling of the figures, birds and foliage of the south doorway, by Andrea Pisano (1330), and of the east doorway by Ghiberti (1425-1452), are of great beauty; in the north door (1402-1424) Ghiberti adopted the same scheme of design for the panelling and figure subjects in them as Andrea Pisano, but in the east door the rectangular panels are all filled with bas-reliefs, in which Scripture subjects are illustrated with innumerable figures, these being probably the gates of Paradise of which Michelangelo speaks.

The doors of the mosques in Cairo were of two kinds; those which, externally, were cased with sheets of bronze or iron, cut out in decorative patterns, and incised or inlaid, with bosses in relief; and those in wood, which were framed with interlaced designs of the square and diamond, this latter description of work being Coptic in its origin. The doors of the palace at Palermo, which were made by Saracenic workmen for the Normans, are fine examples and in good preservation. A somewhat similar decorative class of door to these latter is found in Verona, where the edges of the stiles and rails are bevelled and notched.

In the Renaissance period the Italian doors are quite simple, their architects trusting more to the doorways for effect; but in France and Germany the contrary is the case, the doors being elaborately carved, especially in the Louis XIV. and Louis XV. periods, and sometimes with architectural features such as columns and entablatures with pediment and niches, the doorway being in plain masonry. While in Italy the tendency was to give scale by increasing the number of panels, in France the contrary seems to have been the rule; and one of the great doors at Fontainebleau, which is in two leaves, is entirely carried out as if consisting of one great panel only.

The earliest Renaissance doors in France are those of the cathedral of St Sauveur at Aix (1503); in the lower panels there are figures 3 ft. high in Gothic niches, and in the upper panels a double range of niches with figures about 2 ft. high with canopies over them, all carved in cedar. The south door of Beauvais cathedral is in some respects the finest in France; the upper panels are carved in high relief with figure subjects and canopies over them. The doors of the church at Gisors (1575) are carved with figures in niches subdivided by classic pilasters superimposed. In St Maclou at Rouen are three magnificently carved doors; those by Jean Goujon have figures in niches on each side, and others in a group of great beauty in the centre. The other doors, probably about forty to fifty years later, are enriched with bas-reliefs, landscapes, figures and elaborate interlaced borders.

In England in the 17th century the door panels were raised with “bolection” or projecting mouldings, sometimes richly carved, round them; in the 18th century the mouldings worked on the stiles and rails were carved with the egg and tongue ornament.

(R. P. S.)

DOORWAY (corresponding to the Gr. πύλη, Lat. porta), in architecture, the entrance to a building, apartment or enclosure. The term is more generally applied to the framing of the opening in wood, stone or metal. The representations in painting, and existing examples, show that whilst the jambs of the doorway in Egyptian architecture were vertical, the outer side had almost the same batter as the walls of the temples. In the doorways of enclosures or screen walls there was no lintel, but a small projection inwards at the top, to hold the pivot of the door. In Greece the linings of the earliest doorways at Tiryns were in wood, and in order to lessen the bearing of the lintel the dressings or jambs (antepagmenta) sloped inwards, so that the width of the doorway opening was less at the top than at the bottom. In the entrance doorway of the tomb of Agamemnon at Mycenae, 18 ft. in height, the width is about 6 in. less at the top than at the bottom. The lintel of the Greek doorway projected on either side beyond the dressings, constituting what are known as the shoulders or knees (projecturae), a characteristic feature which has been retained down to our time. The next step was to work a projecting moulding round the dressings and lintel forming the architrave. Examples with shoulders in stone exist in the Beulé doorway of the Acropolis at Athens, in the tomb of Theron, and in a temple at Agrigentum in Sicily; also in the temples of Hercules at Cora, and of Vesta at Trivoli, and with a peculiar pendant in all the Etruscan tombs. The most beautiful example of a Greek doorway is that under the north portico of the Erechtheum (420 b.c.). There is a slight diminution in the width at the top of the opening, 421 and outside the ordinary architrave mouldings (which here and in all classic examples are derived from those of the architrave of an order) is a band with rosettes, which recall the early decorative features in Crete and Mycenae; the band being carried across the top of the lintel and surmounted by a cornice supported on each side by corbels (ancones).

In the Roman doorways, excepting those at Cora and Tivoli, there is, as a rule, no diminishing of the width, which is generally speaking half of the height. The dimensions of some of the Roman doorways are enormous; in the temple of the Sun at Palmyra the doorway is 15 ft. 6 in. wide and 33 ft. high; and in the temple of Jupiter at Baalbec, 20 ft. wide and 45 ft. high, the lintel is composed of three stones forming voussoirs the keystone measuring 7 ft. at the bottom, 8 ft. at the top, 10 ft. high and 7 ft. 6 in. deep.

All the doorways mentioned above have cornices, and in those at Palmyra and Baalbec richly carved friezes with side corbels. In the Pantheon there is a plain convex frieze, but the outer mouldings of the architrave and the bed-mould of the cornice are richly carved. In the Byzantine doorways at Sta Sophia, Constantinople, a bold convex moulding and a hollow take the place of the fasciae of the classic architrave.

So far we have only referred to square-headed doorways, but the side openings of the triumphal arches of Titus and Constantine are virtually doorways, and they have semicircular heads, the mouldings of which are the same as those of the square-headed examples. In Saxon doorways, which had semicircular heads, the outer mouldings projected more boldly than in classic examples, and were sometimes cut in a separate ring of stone like the hood mould of later date.

During the Romanesque period in all countries, the doorway becomes the chief characteristic feature, and consists of two or more orders, the term “order” in this case being applied to the concentric rings of voussoirs forming the door-head. In classic work the faces of these concentric rings were nearly always flush one with the other; in Romanesque work the upper one projected over the ring immediately below, and the employment of a different design in the carving of each ring produced a magnificent and imposing effect: in the Italian churches the decoration of the arch mould is frequently carried down the door jambs, and the same is found, but less often, in the English and French doorways; but as a rule each ring or order is carried by a nook shaft, those in England and France being plain, but in Italy and Sicily elaborately carved with spirals or other ornaments and sometimes inlaid with mosaic.

The deeply recessed Norman doorways in English work required a great thickness of wall, and this was sometimes obtained by an addition outside, as at Iffley, Adel, Kirkstall and other churches.

In France, during the Gothic period, the several orders were carved with figure sculpture, as also the door jambs; and the great recessing of these doorways brought them more into the categories of porches. In England much less importance was given to the Gothic doorways, and although they consisted of many orders, these were emphasized only by deep hollows and converse mouldings and always carried on angle or nook shafts. In the perpendicular period the pointed-arch doorway was often enclosed within a square head-moulding, the spandrel being enriched with foliage or quatrefoil tracery.

In the Mahommedan style the doorway itself is comparatively simple, except that the voussoirs of its lintel are joggled with a series of curves, and being of different coloured stones have a decorative effect. These doorways are placed in a rectangular recess roofed with the stalactite vault.

With the Renaissance architect, the doorway continued as the principal characteristic of the style; the actual door-frame was simply moulded, by enclosing it with pilasters or columns, isolated or semi-detached, raised on pedestals and carrying an entablature with pediment and other kind of super-doorway; and great importance was given to the feature. In the Italian cinquecento period, the panels of the side pilasters were enriched with the most elaborate carving, and this would seem to have been an ancient Roman method, to judge by portions of carved panels now in the museums of Rome. The doorways of Venice are remarkable in this respect. At Como the two side doorways of the cathedral, one of which is said to be by Bramante, are of great beauty, and the same rich decoration is found throughout Spain and France. In Germany and England the pattern book too often suggested designs of an extremely rococo character, and it was under the influence of Palladio, through Inigo Jones, that in England the architect returned to the simpler and purer Italian style.

(R. P. S.)

DOPPLERITE, a naturally occurring organic substance found in amorphous, elastic or jelly-like masses, of brownish-black colour, in peat beds in Styria and in Switzerland. It is tasteless, insoluble in alcohol and ether, and is described by Dana as an acid substance, or mixture of different acids, related to humic acid.


DORAN, JOHN (1807-1878), English author, was born in London of Irish parentage on the 11th of March 1807. He became tutor in several distinguished families, and while travelling on the continent contributed journalistic sketches to The Literary Chronicle, a paper which was afterwards incorporated with The Athenaeum. His play, Justice or the Venetian Jew, was produced at the Surrey theatre in 1824, and in 1830 he began to write translations from French, German, Latin and Italian authors for The Bath Journal. After some years of travel on the continent he became in 1841 literary editor of The Church and State Gazette, and in 1852 under the title of Filia dolorosa produced a memoir of Maria Thérèse Charlotte, duchesse d’Angoulême. Two years later he became a regular contributor to The Athenaeum, succeeding Hepworth Dixon as editor for a short time in 1869, until he became editor of Notes and Queries in 1870. His most elaborate work, Their Majesties’ Servants, a history of the English stage from Betterton to Kean, was published in 1860, and was supplemented by In and About Drury Lane, which was written for Temple Bar and was not published in book form till 1885, after Doran’s death. Among his other works may be mentioned Table Traits and Habits of Men (1854), The Queens of the House of Hanover (1855), Knights and their Days (1856), Monarchs retired from Business (1856), The History of Court Fools (1858), an edition of the Bentley Ballads (1858), The Last Journals of Horace Walpole (2 vols., 1859), The Princess of Wales (1860), and the Memoirs of Queen Adelaide (1861). These were followed by A Lady of the Last Century (1873), an account of Mrs Elizabeth Montagu and the blue-stockings; London in Jacobite Times (1877); and Memories of our Great Towns (1878). Doran died in London, on the 25th of January 1878.


DORAT, CLAUDE JOSEPH (1734-1780), French man of letters, was born in Paris on the 31st of December 1734. He belonged to a family whose members had for generations been lawyers, and he entered the corps of the king’s musketeers. He obtained a great vogue by his Réponse d’Abailard à Héloïse, and followed up this first success with a number of heroic epistles, Les Victimes de l’amour, ou lettres de quelques amants célèbres (1776). Dorat was possessed by an ambition quite out of proportion to his very mediocre ability. Besides light verse he wrote comedies, fables and, among other novels, Les Sacrifices de l’amour, ou lettres de la vicomtesse de Senanges et du chevalier de Versenay (1771). He tried to cover his failures as a dramatist by buying up a great number of seats, and his books were lavishly illustrated by good artists and expensively produced, to secure their success. He was maladroit enough to draw down on himself the hatred both of the philosophe party and of their arch-enemy Charles Palissot, and thus cut himself off from the possibility of academic honours. Le Tartufe littéraire (1777) attacked La Harpe and Palissot, and at the same time D’Alembert and Mlle de Lespinasse. Dorat died on the 29th of April 1780 in Paris.

See G. Desnoireterres, Le Chevalier Dorat et les poètes légers au XVIIIe siècle (1887). For the bibliographical value of his works, see Henry Cohen, Guide de l’amateur de livres à figures et à vignettes du XVIIIe siècle (editions of Ch. Mehl, 1876, and R. Portalis, 1887).


DORCHESTER, DUDLEY CARLETON, Viscount (1573-1632), English diplomatist, son of Antony Carleton of Baldwin 422 Brightwell, Oxfordshire, and of Jocosa, daughter of John Goodwin of Winchington, Buckinghamshire, was born on the 10th of March 1573, and educated at Westminster school and Christ Church, Oxford, where he graduated M.A. in 1600. He travelled abroad, and was returned to the parliament of 1604 as member for St Mawes. Through his connexion as secretary with the earl of Northumberland his name was associated with the Gunpowder Plot, but after a short confinement he succeeded in clearing himself of any share in the conspiracy. In 1610 he was knighted and was sent as ambassador to Venice, where he was the means of concluding the treaty of Asti. He returned in 1615, and next year was appointed ambassador to Holland. The policy of England on the continent depended mainly upon its relations with that state, and Carleton succeeded in improving these, in spite of his firm attitude on the subject of the massacre of Amboyna, the bitter commercial disputes between the two countries, and the fatal tendency of James I. to seek alliance with Spain. It was in his house at the Hague that the unfortunate Elector Frederick and the princess Elizabeth took refuge in 1621. Carleton returned to England in 1625 with the duke of Buckingham, and was made vice-chamberlain of the household and a privy councillor. Shortly afterwards he took part in an abortive mission to France in favour of the French Protestants and to inspire a league against the house of Austria. On his return in 1626 he found the attention of parliament, to which he had been elected for Hastings, completely occupied with the attack upon Buckingham. Carleton endeavoured to defend his patron, and supported the king’s violent exercise of his prerogative. It was perhaps fortunate that his further career in the Commons was cut short by his elevation in May to the peerage as Baron Carleton of Imbercourt. Shortly afterwards he was despatched on another mission to the Hague, on his return from which he was created Viscount Dorchester in July 1628. He was active in forwarding the conferences between Buckingham and Contarini for a peace with France on the eve of the duke’s intended departure for La Rochelle, which was prevented by the latter’s assassination. In December 1628 he was made principal secretary of state, and died on the 15th of February 1632, being buried in Westminster Abbey. He was twice married, and had children, but all died in infancy, and the title became extinct. Carleton was one of the ablest diplomatists of the time, and his talents would have secured greater triumphs had he not been persistently hampered by the mistaken and hesitating foreign policy of the court.

His voluminous correspondence, remarkable for its clear, easy and effective style, and for the writer’s grasp of the main points of policy, covers practically the whole history of foreign affairs during the period 1610-1628, and furnishes valuable material for the study of the Thirty Years’ War. His letters as ambassador at the Hague, January 1616 to December 1620, were first edited by Philip Yorke, afterwards second earl of Hardwicke, with a biographical and historical preface, in 1757; his correspondence from the Hague in 1627 by Sir Thomas Phillipps in 1841; other letters are printed in the Cabala, and in T. Birch’s Court and Times of James I. and Charles I., but by far the greater portion remains in MS. among the state papers.


DORCHESTER, GUY CARLETON, 1st Baron (1724-1808), British general and administrator, was born at Strabane, Co. Tyrone, Ireland, on the 3rd of September 1724. He served with distinction on the continent under the duke of Cumberland, and in 1759 in America as quartermaster-general, under his friend Wolfe. He was wounded at the capture of Quebec, and promoted to the rank of brigadier-general. In 1766 he was appointed governor-general of Canada, which position he held till 1778. His justice and kindliness greatly endeared him to the recently conquered French-Canadians, and did much to hold them neutral during the War of American Independence. He ordered the first codification of the civil law of the province, and was largely responsible for the passing of the Quebec Act. On the American invasion of Canada in 1775 he was compelled to abandon Montreal and narrowly escaped capture, but defended Quebec (q.v.) with skill and success. In October of the same year he destroyed the American flotilla on Lake Champlain. In 1777 he was superseded in his command of the military forces by Major-General John Burgoyne, and asked to be recalled. He returned, however, to America in May 1782 as commander-in-chief, remaining till November 1783. In 1786 he was again sent to Canada as governor-general and commander of the forces, with the title of Baron Dorchester. Many important reforms marked his rule; he administered the country with tact and moderation, and kept it loyal to the British crown amid the ferment caused by the French Revolution, and by the attempts of American emissaries to arouse discontent. In 1791 the province was divided into Upper and Lower Canada by the Constitutional Act. Of this division Carleton disapproved, as he did also of a provision tending to create in the new colony an hereditary aristocracy. In 1796 he insisted on retiring, and returned to England. He died on the 10th of November 1808. He married in 1772 a daughter of the 2nd earl of Effingham, and had nine children, being succeeded in the title by his grandson Arthur. On the death in 1897 of the 4th baron (another grandson) the title became extinct, but was revived in 1899 for his cousin and co-heiress Henrietta Anne as Baroness Dorchester.

J. C. Dent’s Canadian Portrait Gallery (Toronto, 1880) gives a sketch of Lord Dorchester’s Canadian career. His life by A. G. Bradley is included in the Makers of Canada series (Toronto). Most of his letters and state papers, which are indispensable for a knowledge of the period, are in the archives department at Ottawa, and are calendared in Brymner’s Reports on Canadian Archives (Ottawa, 1885, seq.).

(W. L. G.)

DORCHESTER, a market town and municipal borough and the county town of Dorsetshire, England, in the southern parliamentary division, 135 m. S.W. by W. from London by the London & South Western railway; served also by the Great Western railway. Pop. (1901) 9458. It stands on an eminence on the right bank of the river Frome, within a wide open tract of land, containing 3400 acres, held under the duchy of Cornwall, called Fordington Field. Several of the streets are planted with trees, and the town is nearly surrounded by fine avenues. St Peter’s church is a Perpendicular building with a fine tower. All Saints and Holy Trinity churches are modern, but Fordington church retains Norman and Transitional details. Of public buildings the principal are—the town-hall, with market-house, shire-hall, county prison and county hospital; there is also a county museum, containing many local objects of much interest. The grammar school (founded in 1569) is endowed with exhibitions to Oxford and Cambridge. There is a statue to William Barnes the Dorsetshire poet (1801-1886). The town is noted also for its ale. It is a place of considerable agricultural trade, and large sheep and lamb fairs are held annually. The borough is under a mayor, six aldermen and eighteen councillors. Area 1648 acres.

History.Durnovaria was here, a Romano-British country town of considerable size, probably successor to a British tribal centre of the Durotriges. The walls can be traced in part, and many mosaics, remains of houses, &c., have been found. The remains of an amphitheatre are seen at Maumbury Rings, near the town. Maiden Castle, 2 m. S.W. of the town, is a vast earthwork considered to have been a stronghold of the tribe of the Durotriges. There are other such remains in the vicinity. Little mention of Dorchester (Dornceaster, Dorcestre) occurs in Saxon annals, but a charter from Æthelstan to Milton Abbey in 939 is dated at villa regalis quae dicitur Doracestria, and at this period it possessed a mint. According to the Domesday Survey it was a royal borough, and at the time of Edward the Confessor contained 172 houses, of which 100 had been totally destroyed since the Conquest. Mention is made of a castle at Dorchester in records of the 12th and 13th centuries; and the Franciscan priory, founded some time before 1331, is thought to have been constructed out of its ruins. The latter was suppressed among the lesser monasteries in 1536. Edward II. granted the borough to the bailiffs and burgesses at a fee-farm rent of £20 for five years, and the grant was renewed in perpetuity by Edward III. Richard III. empowered the burgesses to elect a coroner and two constables, to be exempt from tolls, and to try minor pleas in the king’s court within the borough before a steward to be chosen by themselves. The first charter of incorporation, granted by James I. in 1610, established a governing council of two bailiffs and 423 fifteen capital burgesses. Charles I. in 1629 instituted a mayor, six aldermen and six capital burgesses, and also incorporated all the freemen of the borough, for the purposes of trade, under the government of a council consisting of a governor, assistants and twenty-four freemen, the governor and four assistants to be chosen out of the twenty-four by the freemen, and five other assistants to be chosen by the mayor out of the capital burgesses; the Council was empowered to hold four courts yearly and to make laws for the regulation of the markets and trade. Dorchester returned two members to parliament from 1295, until the Representation of the People Act of 1868 reduced the number to one; by the Redistribution Act of 1885 the representation was merged in the county. Edward III. granted to the burgesses the perquisites from three fairs lasting one day at the feasts of Holy Trinity, St John Baptist and St James, and markets on Wednesday, Friday and Saturday. Elizabeth granted an additional three days’ fair at Candlemas. The days of the fairs and markets have remained unchanged. The cloth industry which flourished during the 16th century never recovered from the depression following on the Civil War. The malting and brewing industries came into prominence in the 17th century, when there was also a considerable serge manufacture, which has since declined.

See Victoria County History, Dorsetshire; John Hutchins, The History and Antiquities of the Town and Borough of Dorchester (3rd edition, corrected, augmented and improved by W. Shipp and J. W. Hodson, Blandford, 1865).


DORCHESTER, a large village in the south parliamentary division of Oxfordshire, England, 9 m. S.S.E. of Oxford by road, on the river Thame, 1 m. from its junction with the Thames. This is a site of much historical interest. There was a Roman station near the present village, facing, across the Thames, the double isolated mound known as Wittenham Hills (historically Sinodun), on one summit of which are strong early earthworks. In Dorchester itself the chief point of interest is the abbey church of St Peter and St Paul. This consists of a nave of great length, primarily of the transitional Norman period; a choir with arcades of the finest Decorated work; north choir aisle of the close of the 13th century, south choir aisle (c. 1300) and south nave aisle (c. 1320). The tower (western) is an erection of the late 17th century. The eastern bay of the choir is considered to have been added as a Lady chapel, and the north window is a magnificent example of a “Jesse window,” in which the tracery represents the genealogical tree of Jesse, the complete execution of the design being carried on in the glass. The sedilia and piscina are very fine. The Decorated windows on the south side of the church form a beautiful series, and there are monuments and brasses of great interest.

Dorchester (Dorcinia, Dornacestre, Dorchecestre) was conquered by the West Saxons about 560. It occupied a commanding position at the junction of the Thames and the Thame, and in 635 was made the seat of a bishopric which at its foundation was the largest in England, comprising the whole of Wessex and Mercia. The witenagemot of Wessex was held at Dorchester three times in the 9th century, and in 958 Æthelstan held a council here. In the 11th century, however, the town is described as small and ill-peopled and remarkable only for the majesty of its churches, and in about 1086 William I. and Bishop Remigius removed the bishop’s stool to Lincoln, as a city more worthy of the distinction. According to the Domesday Survey Dorchester was held by the bishop of Lincoln; it was assessed at 100 hides and comprised two mills. In 1140 Alexander bishop of Lincoln founded an abbey of Black Canons at Dorchester, but the town declined in importance after the removal of the cathedral, and is described by 16th-century writers as a mere agricultural village and destitute of trade.

See Victoria County History, Oxfordshire; Henry Addington, Some Account of the Abbey Church of St Peter and St Paul at Dorchester, Oxfordshire, reissue with additional notes (Oxford, 1860).


DORCHESTER, a residential and manufacturing district of Boston, Massachusetts, U.S.A., a separate town until 1870, between the Neponset river on the S. and South Boston and Boston proper on the N. It is served by three lines of the New York, New Haven & Hartford railway. A ridge, with an average height of about 100 ft. above the sea, extends through the district from N. to S. and commands delightful views of Boston Bay to the E. and of the Blue Hills to the S. There are many large private estates, with beautiful lawns, and Franklin Field and Franklin Park, one of the largest parks of the Boston park system, are in Dorchester. The Shawmut school for girls is in the district. Among the landmarks are the Barnard Capen house, built in the fourth decade of the 17th century and now probably the second oldest house in New England; and the James Blake house (1648), now the home of the Dorchester Historical Society, which has a library and a museum. Opposite the Blake house formerly stood the house in which Edward Everett was born. Not far away is the old Dorchester burying ground, which dates from 1634; it has many curious epitaphs, and contains the graves of Barnard Capen, who died in 1638 (probably the oldest marked grave in the United States); of William Stoughton (1631-1701), chief justice of the court which tried the Salem “witches” in 1692, lieutenant-governor of the colony from 1692, acting governor in 1694-1699 and 1700-1701, and founder of the original Stoughton Hall, Harvard; and of Richard Mather, pastor of the First Parish church here from 1636 until his death. In Dorchester Maria Susana Cummins (1827-1866) wrote The Lamplighter (1854), one of the most popular novels of its time, and William T. Adams (“Oliver Optic”) and Charles Follen Adams (“Yawcob Strauss”) did much of their writing; it was long the home of Mrs Lucy Stone (Blackwell). Among the manufactures are cocoa, chocolate, &c. (of the long-established Walter Baker & Co.), paper, crushing and grinding machinery (Sturtevant Mill Co.), chemicals, horseshoe nails, valves, organs and pianos, lumber, automobiles and shoe machinery.

Dorchester was founded by about 140 colonists from Dorsetshire, England, with whom the movement for planting the colony in Massachusetts Bay was begun under the leadership of Rev. John White. They organized as a church while at Plymouth, England, in March 1630, then embarked in the ship “Mary and John,” arrived in Boston Bay two weeks before Governor Winthrop with the rest of the fleet, and in June selected Savin Hill (E. of what is now Dorchester Avenue and between Crescent Avenue and Dorchester Bay) as the site for their settlement. At the time the place was known as Mattapanock, but they named it Dorchester. Town affairs were at first managed by the church, but in October 1633 a town government was organized, and the example was followed by the neighbouring settlements; this seems to have been the beginning of the town-meeting form of government in America. Up to this time Dorchester was the largest town in the colony, but dissatisfaction arose with the location (Boston had a better one chiefly on account of the deeper water in its harbour), and in 1635-1637 many of the original settlers removed to the valley of the Connecticut where they planted Windsor. New settlers, however, arrived at Dorchester and in 1639 that town established a school supported by a public tax; this was the first free school in America supported by direct taxation or assessment on the inhabitants of a town.1 In October 1695, a few of the inhabitants of Dorchester organized a church and in December removed to South Carolina where they planted another Dorchester (on the N. bank of the Ashley river, about 26 m. from Charleston); by 1752 they had become dissatisfied with their location, which was unhealthy, and they gradually removed to Georgia, where they settled at Medway 424 (half way between the Ogeechee and Altamaha rivers), their settlement soon developing into St John’s Parish (see Georgia: History). It was the fortification of Dorchester Heights, under orders from General Washington, on the night of the 4th and 5th of March 1776, that forced the British to evacuate Boston. At one time Dorchester extended from Boston nearly to the Rhode Island line; but its territory was gradually reduced by the creation of new townships and additions to old ones. Dorchester Neck was annexed to Boston in 1804, Thompson’s Island in 1834, and the remaining portions in 1855 and 1870.

See W. D. Orcutt, Good Old Dorchester (Cambridge, 1893).


1 In 1635 the general court of the colony of Massachusetts Bay had granted to Dorchester Thompson’s Island, situated near the coast of the township. By the township of Dorchester this island was apportioned among the freemen of the township. On the 20th of May 1639 it was ordered that the proprietors of land in this island should collectively pay a “rent of twenty pounds a year forever,” this rent “to be paid to such a school-master as shall undertake to teach English, Latin, and other tongues, and also writing,” it being “left to the discretion of the elders and the seven men for the time being whether maids shall be taught with the boys or not.” In 1642 the proprietors of the island conveyed it to the township “for and toward the maintenance of a free school in Dorchester aforesaid for the instructing and teaching of children and youth in good literature and learning.”


DORDOGNE, a river of central and south-western France, rising at a height of 5640 ft. on the Puy-de-Sancy, a mountain of the department of Puy-de-Dôme, and flowing to the Garonne with which it unites at Bec d’Ambès to form the Gironde estuary. It has a length of 295 m. and the area of its basin is 9214 sq. m. Descending rapidly from its source, sometimes over cascades, the river soon enters deep gorges through which it flows as far as Beaulieu (department of Corrèze) where it debouches into a wide and fertile valley and is shortly after joined by the Cère. Entering the department of Lot, it abandons a south-westerly for a westerly course and flowing in a sinuous channel traverses the department of Dordogne, where it receives the waters of the Vézère. Below the town of Bergerac it enters the department of Gironde, where at Libourne it is joined by the Isle and widens out, attaining at its union with the Garonne 45 m. from the sea a width of nearly 3300 yds. A few miles above this point the river is spanned by the magnificent bridges of Cubzac-les-Ponts, which carry a road and railway. Below its confluence with the Vézère, over the last 112 m. of its course, the river carries considerable navigation. The influence of the highest tides is felt at Pessac, a distance of 100 m. from the ocean.


DORDOGNE, an inland department of south-western France, formed in 1790 from nearly the whole of Périgord, a part of Agenais, and small portions of Limousin and of Angoumois. Area 3560 sq. m. Pop. (1906) 447,052. It is bounded N. by Haute-Vienne, W. by Charente, Charente-Inférieure and Gironde, S. by Lot-et-Garonne, and E. by Lot and Corrèze. Situated on the western slopes of the Massif Central, Dordogne consists in the north-east and centre of sterile plateaus sloping towards the west, where they end in a region of pine forests known as the Double. The greatest altitudes are found in the highlands of the north, where many points exceed 1300 ft. in height. The department is intersected by many fertile and beautiful river valleys, which converge from its northern and eastern borders towards the south-west. The Dordogne is the principal river of the department and its chief affluent is the Isle, which crosses the centre of the department and flows into the Dordogne at Libourne, in the neighbouring department of Gironde. The Dronne and the Auvézère, both tributaries of the Isle, are the other main rivers. The climate is generally agreeable and healthy, but rather humid, especially in the north-east. Agriculture flourishes in the south and south-west of the department, especially in the valleys of the Dordogne and Isle, the rest of its surface being covered to a great extent by woods and heath. Pasture and forage amply suffice for the raising of large flocks and herds. The vine, cultivated mainly in the neighbourhood of Bergerac, and tobacco are important sources of profit. Wheat and maize are the chief cereals and potatoes are largely grown. The truffles of Périgord are famous for their abundance and quality. The plum and cider-apple yield good crops. In the forests the prevailing trees are the oak and chestnut. The fruit of the latter is much used both as food by the people and for fattening hogs, which are reared in large numbers. The walnut is extensively grown for its oil. The department has mines of lignite, and produces freestone, lime, cement, mill-stone, peat, potter’s clay and fireclay. The leather industry and the preparation of preserved foods are important, and there are flour-mills, brick and tile works, earthenware manufactories, printing works, chemical works and a few iron foundries. Exports consist of truffles, wine, chestnuts and other fruit, live stock, poultry, and minerals of various kinds. Dordogne is served by the Orléans railway; the Dordogne, the Isle and the Vézère furnish nearly 200 m. of navigable waterway. It is divided into the arrondissements of Périgueux, Bergerac, Nontron, Ribérac and Sarlat, with 47 cantons and 587 communes, and belongs to the ecclesiastical province of Bordeaux, to the académie (educational division) of Bordeaux and to the region of the XII. army corps, which has its headquarters at Limoges. Its court of appeal is at Bordeaux.

Périgueux, the capital, Bergerac, Sarlat and Brantôme are the principal towns (see separate articles). There are several other places of interest. Bourdeilles has two finely preserved châteaux, one of the 14th century, with an imposing keep, the other in the Renaissance style of the 16th century. Both buildings are contained within the same fortified enceinte. The celebrated château of Biron, founded in the 11th century, preserves examples of many subsequent architectural styles, among them a beautiful chapel of late Gothic and early Renaissance workmanship. The château of Jumilhac-le-Grand belongs to the 15th century. Dordogne possesses several medieval bastides, the most perfect of which is Monpazier. At Cadouin there are the remains of a Cistercian abbey. Its church is a fine cruciform building in the Romanesque style, while the cloister is an excellent example of Flamboyant architecture. St Jean-de-Côle has an interesting Romanesque church and a château of the 15th, 16th and 18th centuries. In the rocks of the valley of the lower Vézère there are prehistoric caves of great archaeological importance, in which have been found tools, and carvings on bone, flint and ivory. Troglodytic dwellings are to be found in many other places in Dordogne (see Cave).


DORDRECHT (abbreviated Dordt, or Dort), a town and river-port of Holland, in the province of South Holland, on the south side of the Merwede, and a junction station 12½ m. by rail S.E. of Rotterdam. Steam ferries connect it with Papendrecht and Zwyndrecht on the opposite shore, and it has excellent communication by water in every direction. Pop. (1900) 38,386. Dordrecht presents a picturesque appearance with its busy quays and numerous canals and windmills, its quaint streets and curiously gabled houses. The Groote Kerk, of Our Lady, whose massive tower forms a conspicuous object in the views of the town, dates from the 14th century and contains some finely carved stalls (1540) by Jan Terween Aertsz, a remarkable pulpit (1759), many old monuments and a set of gold communion plate. In the town museum is an interesting collection of paintings, chiefly by modern artists, but including also pictures by some of the older masters, among whom Ferdinand Bol, the two Cuyps, Nicolas Maes, Godefried Schalcken, and in later times Ary Scheffer, were all natives of Dordrecht. The celebrated 17th-century statesman John de Witt was also a native of the town. Close to the museum is one of the old city gates, rebuilt in 1618, and now containing a collection of antiquities belonging to the Oud-Dordrecht Society. The South African Museum (1902) contains memorials of the Boer War of 1899-1902. The harbour of Dordrecht still has a large trade, but much has been diverted to Rotterdam. Large quantities of wood are imported from Germany, Scandinavia and America. There are numerous saw-mills, shipbuilding yards, engineering works, distilleries, sugar refineries, tobacco factories, linen bleacheries and stained glass, salt and white lead works.

Dordrecht was founded by Count Dirk III. of Holland in 1018, becoming a town about 1200. One of the first towns in the Netherlands to embrace the reformed religion and to throw off the yoke of Spain, it was in 1572 the meeting-place of the deputies who asserted the independence of the United Provinces. In 1618 and 1619 it was the seat of the synod of Dort (q.v.).


DORÉ, LOUIS AUGUSTE GUSTAVE (1832-1883), French artist, the son of a civil engineer, was born at Strassburg on the 6th of January 1832. In 1848 he came to Paris and secured a three years’ engagement on the Journal pour rire. His facility as a draughtsman was extraordinary, and among the books he illustrated in rapid succession were Balzac’s Contes drolatiques (1855), Dante’s Inferno (1861), Don Quixote (1863), The Bible (1866), Paradise Lost (1866), and the works of Rabelais (1873). He painted also many large and ambitious compositions of a 425 religious or historical character, and made some success as a sculptor, his statue of Alexandre Dumas in Paris being perhaps his best-known work in this line. He died on the 25th of January 1883.


DORIA, ANDREA (1466-1560), Genoese condottiere and admiral, was born at Oneglia of an ancient Genoese family. Being left an orphan at an early age, he became a soldier of fortune, and served first in the papal guard and then under various Italian princes. In 1503 we find him fighting in Corsica in the service of Genoa, at that time under French vassalage, and he took part in the rising of Genoa against the French, whom he compelled to evacuate the city. From that time forth it was as a naval captain that he became famous. For several years he scoured the Mediterranean in command of the Genoese fleet, waging war on the Turks and the Barbary pirates. In the meanwhile Genoa had been recaptured by the French, and in 1522 by the Imperialists. But Doria now veered round to the French or popular faction and entered the service of King Francis I., who made him captain-general; in 1524 he relieved Marseilles, which was besieged by the Imperialists, and helped to place his native city once more under French domination. But he was dissatisfied with his treatment at the hands of Francis, who was mean about payment, and he resented the king’s behaviour in connexion with Savona, which he delayed to hand back to the Genoese as he had promised; consequently on the expiry of Doria’s contract we find him in the service of the emperor Charles V. (1528). He ordered his nephew Filippino, who was then blockading Naples in concert with a French army, to withdraw, and sailed for Genoa, where, with the help of some leading citizens, he expelled the French once more and re-established the republic under imperial protection. He reformed the constitution in an aristocratic sense, most of the nobility being Imperialists, and put an end to the factions which divided the city. He refused the lordship of Genoa and even the dogeship, but accepted the position of perpetual censor, and exercised predominant influence in the councils of the republic until his death. He was given two palaces, many privileges, and the title of Liberator et Pater Patriae. As imperial admiral he commanded several expeditions against the Turks, capturing Corona and Patras, and co-operating with the emperor himself in the capture of Tunis (1535). Charles found him an invaluable ally in the wars with Francis, and through him extended his domination over the whole of Italy. Doria’s defeat by the Turks at Preveza in 1538 was said to be not involuntary, and designed to spite the Venetians whom he detested. He accompanied Charles on the ill-fated Algerian expedition of 1541, of which he disapproved, and by his ability just saved the whole force from complete disaster. For the next five years he continued to serve the emperor in various wars, in which he was generally successful and always active, although now over seventy years old; there was hardly an important event in Europe in which he had not some share. After the peace of Crépy between Francis and Charles in 1544 he hoped to end his days in quiet. But his great wealth and power, as well as the arrogance of his nephew and heir Giannettino Doria, made him many enemies, and in 1547 the Fiesco conspiracy to upset the power of his house took place. Giannettino was murdered, but the conspirators were defeated, and Andrea showed great vindictiveness in punishing them. Many of their fiefs he seized for himself, and he was implicated in the murder of Pier Luigi Farnese, duke of Parma (see Farnese), who had helped Fiesco. Other conspiracies followed, of which the most important was that of Giulio Cibò (1548), but all failed. Although Doria was ambitious and harsh, he was a good patriot and successfully opposed the emperor Charles’s repeated attempts to have a citadel built in Genoa and garrisoned by Spaniards; neither blandishments nor threats could win him over to the scheme. Nor did age lessen his energy, for in 1550, when eighty-four years old, he again put to sea to punish the raids of his old enemies the Barbary pirates, but with no great success. War between France and the Empire having broken out once more, the French seized Corsica, then administered by the Genoese Bank of St George; Doria was again summoned, and he spent two years (1553-1555) in the island fighting the French with varying fortune. He returned to Genoa for good in 1555, and being very old and infirm he gave over the command of the galleys to his great-nephew Giovanni Andrea Doria, who conducted an expedition against Tripoli, but proved even more unsuccessful than his uncle had been at Algiers, barely escaping with his life. Andrea Doria died on the 25th of November 1560, leaving his estates to Giovanni Andrea. The family of Doria-Pamphilii-Landi (q.v.) is descended from him and bears his title of prince of Melfi. Doria was a man of indomitable energy and a great admiral. If he appears unscrupulous and even treacherous he did but conform to the standards of 16th-century Italy.

Bibliography.—E. Petit’s André Doria (Paris, 1887) is an accurate and documented biography, indicating all the chief works on the subject, but the author is perhaps unduly harsh in his judgment of the admiral; F. D. Guerrazzi’s Vita di Andrea Doria (3rd ed., Milan, 1874); among the earlier works L. Cappelloni’s Vita di Andrea Doria (Italian edition, Genoa, 1863) and V. Sigonius’s Vita Andreae Doriae (1576) may be mentioned; see also “Documenti ispano-genovesi dell’Archivio di Simancas” in the Atti della Società ligure di Storia patria, vol. viii.; the Archivio storico italiano (serie iii. tome iv. parte i., 1866) contains a bibliography, but a great deal has been published since that date.

(L. V.*)

DORIANS, a name applied by the Greeks to one of the principal groups of Hellenic peoples, in contradistinction to Ionians and Aeolians. In Hellenic times a small district known as Doris in north Greece, between Mount Parnassus and Mount Oeta, counted as “Dorian” in a special sense. Practically all Peloponnese, except Achaea and Elis, was “Dorian,” together with Megara, Aegina, Crete, Melos, Thera, the Sporades Islands and the S.W. coast of Asia Minor, where Rhodes, Cos, Cnidus and (formerly) Halicarnassus formed a “Dorian” confederacy. “Dorian” colonies, from Corinth, Megara, and the Dorian islands, occupied the southern coasts of Sicily from Syracuse to Selinus. Dorian states usually had in common the “Doric” dialect, a peculiar calendar and cycle of festivals of which the Hyacinthia and Carneia were the chief, and certain political and social institutions, such as the threefold “Dorian tribes.” The worships of Apollo and Heracles, though not confined to Dorians, were widely regarded as in some sense “Dorian” in character.

But those common characters are not to be pressed too far. The northern Doris, for example, spoke Aeolic, while Elis, Phocis, and many non-Dorian districts of north-west Greece spoke dialects akin to Doric. Many Dorian states had additional “non-Dorian tribes”; Sparta, which claimed to be of pure and typical Dorian origin, maintained institutions and a mode of life which were without parallel in Peloponnese, in the Parnassian and in the Asiatic Doris, and were partially reflected in Crete only.

Most non-Dorian Greeks, in fact, seem to have accepted much as Dorian which was in fact only Spartan: this was particularly the case in the political, ethical and aesthetic controversies of the 5th and 4th centuries b.c. Much, however, which was common (in art, for example) to Olympia, Argolis and Aegina, and might thus have been regarded as Dorian, was conspicuously absent from the culture of Sparta.

Traditional History.—In the diagrammatic family tree of the Greek people, as it appears in the Hesiodic catalogue (6th century) and in Hellanicus (5th century), the “sons of Hellen” are Dorus, Xuthus (father of Ion and Achaeus) and Aeolus. Dorus’ share of the inheritance of Hellen lay in central Greece, north of the Corinthian Gulf, between Xuthus in north Peloponnese and Aeolus in Thessaly. His descendants, either under Dorus or under a later king Aegimius, occupied Histiaeotis, a district of northern Thessaly, and afterwards conquered from the Dryopes the head-waters of the Boeotian Cephissus between Mount Parnassus and Mount Oeta. This became “Doris” par excellence. Services rendered to Aegimius by Heracles led (1) to the adoption of Hyllus, son of Heracles, by Aegimius, side by side with his own sons Dymas and Pamphylus, and to a threefold grouping of the Dorian clans, as Hylleis, Dymanes and Pamphyli; (2) to the association of the people of Aegimius in the repeated attempts of Hyllus and his family to recover their lost inheritance in 426 Peloponnese (see Heraclidae). The last of these attempts resulted in the “Dorian conquest” of the “Achaeans” and “Ionians” of Peloponnese, and in the assignment of Argolis, Laconia and Messenia to the Heracleid leaders, Temenus, Aristodemus and Cresphontes respectively; of Elis to their Aetolian allies; and of the north coast to the remnants of the conquered Achaeans. The conquest of Corinth and Megara was placed a generation later: Arcadia alone claimed to have escaped invasion. This conquest was dated relatively by Thucydides (i. 12) at eighty years after the Trojan War and twenty years after the conquest of Thessaly and Boeotia by the similar “invaders from Arne”; absolutely by Hellanicus and his school (5th century) at 1149 b.c.; by Isocrates and Ephorus (4th century b.c.) at about 1070 b.c.; and by Sosibius, Eratosthenes (3rd century), and later writers generally, at the generations from 1125 to 1100 b.c.

The invasion was commonly believed to have proceeded by way of Aetolia and Elis, and the name Naupactus was interpreted as an allusion to the needful “shipbuilding” on the Corinthian Gulf. One legend made Dorus himself originally an Aetolian prince; the participation of Oxylus, and the Aetolian claim to Elis, appear first in Ephorus (4th century). The conquest of Laconia at least is represented in 5th-century tradition as immediate and complete, though one legend admits the previous death of the Heracleid leader Aristodemus, and another describes a protracted struggle in the case of Corinth. Pausanias, however (following Sosibius), interprets a long series of conflicts in Arcadia as stages in a gradual advance southward, ending with the conquest of Amyclae by King Teleclus (c. 800 b.c.) and of Helos by King Alcamenes (c. 770 b.c.).

Of the invasion of Argolis a quite different version was already current in the 4th century. This represents the Argive Dorians as having come by sea (apparently from the Maliac Gulf, the nearest seashore to Parnassian Doris), accompanied by survivors of the Dryopes (former inhabitants of that Doris), whose traces in south Euboea (Styra and Carystus), in Cythnus, and at Eion (Halieis), Hermione and Asine in Argolis, were held to indicate their probable route.

The Homeric Dorians of Crete were also interpreted by Andron and others (3rd century) as an advance-guard of this sea-borne migration, and as having separated from the other Dorians while still in Histiaeotis. The 5th-century tradition that the Heracleid kings of Macedon were Temenid exiles from Argos may belong to the same cycle.

The fate of the Dorian invaders was represented as differing locally. In Messenia (according to a legend dramatized by Euripides in the 5th century, and renovated for political ends in the 4th century) the descendants of Cresphontes quarrelled among themselves and were exterminated by the natives. In Laconia Aristodemus (or his twin sons) effected a rigid military occupation which eventually embraced the whole district, and permitted (a) the colonization of Melos, Thera and parts of Crete (before 800 b.c.), (b) the reconquest and annexation of Messenia (about 750 b.c.), (c) a settlement of half-breed Spartans at Tarentum in south Italy, 700 b.c. In Argos and other cities of Argolis the descendants of the Achaean chiefs were taken into political partnership, but a tradition of race-feud lasted till historic times. Corinth, Sicyon and Megara, with similar political compromises, mark the limits of Dorian conquest; a Dorian invasion of Attica (c. 1066 b.c.) was checked by the self-sacrifice of King Codrus: “Either Athens must perish or her king.” Aegina was reckoned a colony of Epidaurus. Rhodes, and some Cretan towns, traced descent from Argos; Cnidus from Argos and Sparta; the rest of Asiatic Doris from Epidaurus or Troezen in Argolis. The colonies of Corinth, Sicyon and Megara, and the Sicilian offshoots of the Asiatic Dorians, belong to historic times (8th-6th centuries).

Criticism of the Traditional History.—The following are the problems:—(1) Was there a Dorian invasion as described in the legends; and, if not, how did the tradition arise? (2) Who were the Dorian invaders, and in what relation did they stand to the rest of the population of Greece? (3) How far do the Dorian states, or their characteristics, represent the descendants, or the culture, of the original invaders?

The Homeric poems (12th-10th centuries) know of Dorians only in Crete, with the obscure epithet τριχάϊκες, and no hint of their origin. All those parts of Peloponnese and the islands which in historic times were “Dorian” are ruled by recently established dynasties of “Achaean” chiefs; the home of the Asiatic Dorians is simply “Caria”; and the geographical “catalogue” in Iliad ii. ignores the northern Doris altogether.

The almost total absence from Homer not only of “Dorians” but of “Ionians” and even of “Hellenes” leads to the conclusion that the diagrammatic genealogy of the “sons of Hellen” is of post-Homeric date; and that it originated as an attempt to classify the Doric, Ionic and Aeolic groups of Hellenic settlements on the west coast of Asia Minor, for here alone do the three names correspond to territorial, linguistic and political divisions. The addition of an “Achaean” group, and the inclusion of this and the Ionic group under a single generic name, would naturally follow the recognition of the real kinship of the “Achaean” colonies of Magna Graecia with those of Ionia. But the attempt to interpret, in terms of this Asiatic diagram, the actual distribution of dialects and peoples in European Greece, led to difficulties. Here, in the 8th-6th centuries, all the Dorian states were in the hands of exclusive aristocracies, which presented a marked contrast to the subject populations. Since the kinship of the latter with the members of adjacent non-Dorian states was admitted, two different explanations seem to have been made, (1) on behalf of the non-Dorian populations, either that the Dorians were no true sons of Hellen, but were of some other northerly ancestry; or that they were merely Achaean exiles; and in either case that their historic predominance resulted from an act of violence, ill-disguised by their association with the ancient claims of the Peloponnesian Heraclidae; (2) on behalf of the Dorian aristocracies, that they were in some special sense “sons of Hellen,” if not the only genuine Hellenes; the rest of the European Greeks, and in particular the anti-Dorian Athenians (with their marked likeness to Ionians), being regarded as Hellenized barbarians of “Pelasgian” origin (see Pelasgians). This process of Hellenization, or at least its final stage, was further regarded as intimately connected with a movement of peoples which had brought the “Dorians” from the northern highlands into those parts of Greece which they occupied in historic times.

So long as the Homeric poems were believed to represent Hellenic (and mainly Ionian) beliefs of the 9th century or later, the historical value of the traditions of a Dorian invasion was repeatedly questioned; most recently and thoroughly by J. Beloch (Gr. Geschichte, i., Strassburg, 1893), as being simply an attempt to reconcile the political geography of Homer (i.e. of 8th-century Ionians describing 12th-century events) with that of historic Greece, by explaining discrepancies (due to Homeric ignorance) as the result of “migrations” in the interval. Such legends often arise to connect towns bearing identical or similar names (such as are common in Greece) and to justify political events or ambitions by legendary precedents; and this certainly happened during the successive political rivalries of Dorian Sparta with non-Dorian Athens and Thebes. But in proportion as an earlier date has become more probable for Homer, the hypothesis of Ionic origin has become less tenable, and the belief better founded (1) that the poems represent accurately a well-defined phase of culture in prehistoric Greece, and (2) that this “Homeric” or “Achaean” phase was closed by some such general catastrophe as is presumed by the legends.

The legend of a Dorian invasion appears first in Tyrtaeus, a 7th-century poet, in the service of Sparta, who brings the Spartan Heracleids to Peloponnese from Erineon in the northern Doris; and the lost Epic of Aegimius, of about the same date, seems to have presupposed the same story. In the 5th century Pindar ascribes to Aegimius the institutions of the Peloponnesian Dorians, and describes them as the “Dorian folk of Hyllus and Aegimius,” and as “originating from Pindus” (Pyth. v. 75: cf. Fr. 4). Herodotus, also in the 5th century, describes them as the 427 typical (perhaps in contrast to Athenians as the only genuine) Hellenes, and traces their numerous wanderings from (1) an original home “in Deucalion’s time” in Phthiotis (the Homeric “Hellas”) in south Thessaly, to (2) Histiaeotis “below Ossa and Olympus” in north-east Thessaly (note that the historic Histiaeotis is “below Pindus” in north-west Thessaly): this was “in the days of Dorus,” i.e. it is at this stage that the Dorians are regarded as becoming specifically distinct from the generic “Hellene”: thence (3) to a residence “in Pindus,” where they passed as a “Macedonian people.” Hence (4) they moved south to the Parnassian Doris, which had been held by Dryopes: and hence finally (5) to Peloponnese. Elsewhere he assigns the expulsion of the Dryopes to Heracles in co-operation not with Dorians but with Malians. Here clearly two traditions are combined:—one, in which the Dorians originated from Hellas in south Thessaly, and so are “children of Hellen”; another, in which they were a “Macedonian people” intruded from the north, from Pindus, past Histiaeotis to Doris and beyond. It is a noteworthy coincidence that in Macedonia also the royal family claimed Heracleid descent; and that “Pindus” is the name both of the mountains above Histiaeotis and of a stream in Doris. It is noteworthy also that later writers (e.g. Andron in Strabo 475) derived the Cretan Dorians of Homer from those of Histiaeotis, and that other legends connected Cretan peoples and places with certain districts of Macedon.

Thucydides agrees in regarding the Parnassian Doris as the “mother-state” of the Dorians (i. 107) and dates the invasion (as above) eighty years after the Trojan War; this agrees approximately with the pedigree of the kings of Sparta, as given by Herodotus, and with that of Hecataeus of Miletus (considered as evidence for the foundation date of an Ionian refugee-colony). Thucydides also accepts the story of Heracleid leadership.

The legend of an organized apportionment of Peloponnese amongst the Heracleid leaders appears first in the 5th-century tragedians,—not earlier, that is, than the rise of the Peloponnesian League,—and was amplified in the 4th century; the Aetolians’ aid, and claim to Elis, appear first in Ephorus. The numerous details and variant legends preserved by later writers, particularly Strabo and Pausanias, may go back to early sources (e.g. Herodotus distinguished the “local” from the “poetic” versions of events in early Spartan history); but much seems to be referable to Ephorus and the 4th-century political and rhetorical historians:—e.g. the enlarged version of the Heracleid claims in Isocrates (Archidamus, 120) and the theory that the Dorians were mere disowned Achaeans (Plato, Laws, 3). Moreover, many independent considerations suggest that in its main outlines the Dorian invasion is historical.

The Doric Dialects.—These dialects have strongly marked features in common (future in -σεω -σιω -σῶ; 1st pers. plur. in -μες; κά for ἄν; -αε -αη = ῆ), but differ more among themselves than do the Ionic. Laconia with its colonies (including those in south Italy) form a clear group, in which and -ο lengthen to and as in Aeolic. Corinth (with its Sicilian colonies), the Argolid towns, and the Asiatic Doris, form another group, in which and -ο become -ει and -ου as in Ionic. Connected with the latter (e.g. by -ει and -ου) are the “northern” group:—Phocis, including Delphi, with Aetolia, Acarnania, Epirus and Phthiotis in south Thessaly. But these have also some forms in common with the “Aeolic” dialect of Boeotia and Thessaly, which in historic times was spoken also in Doris; Locris and Elis present similar northern “Achaean-Doric” dialects. Arcadia, on the other hand, in the heart of Peloponnese, retained till a late date a quite different dialect, akin to the ancient dialect of Cyprus, and more remotely to Aeolic. This distribution makes it clear (1) that the Doric dialects of Peloponnese represent a superstratum, more recent than the speech of Arcadia; (2) that Laconia and its colonies preserve features alike, and which are common to southern Doric and Aeolic; (3) that those parts of “Dorian” Greece in which tradition makes the pre-Dorian population “Ionic,” and in which the political structure shows that the conquered were less completely subjugated, exhibit the Ionic -ει and -ου; (4) that as we go north, similar though more barbaric dialects extend far up the western side of central-northern Greece, and survive also locally in the highlands of south Thessaly; (5) that east of the watershed Aeolic has prevailed over the area which has legends of a Boeotian and Thessalian migration, and replaces Doric in the northern Doris. All this points on the one hand to an intrusion of Doric dialect into an Arcadian-and-Ionic-speaking area; on the other hand to a subsequent expansion of Aeolic over the north-eastern edge of an area which once was Dorian. But this distribution does not by itself prove that Doric speech was the language of the Dorian invaders. Its area coincides also approximately with that of the previous Achaean conquests; and if the Dorians were as backward culturally as traditions and archaeology suggest, it is not improbable that they soon adopted the language of the conquered, as the Norman conquerors did in England. As evidence of an intrusion of northerly folk, however, the distribution of dialects remains important. See Greek Language.

The common calendar and cycle of festivals, observed by all Dorians (of which the Carneia was chief), and the distribution in Greece of the worships of Apollo and Heracles, which attained pre-eminence mainly in or near districts historically “Dorian,” suggest that these cults, or an important element in them, were introduced comparatively late, and represent the beliefs of a fresh ethnic superstratum. The steady dependence of Sparta on the Delphic oracle, for example, is best explained as an observance inherited from Parnassian ancestors.

The social and political structure of the Dorian states of Peloponnese presupposes likewise a conquest of an older highly civilized population by small bands of comparatively barbarous raiders. Sparta in particular remained, even after the reforms of Lycurgus, and on into historic times, simply the isolated camp of a compact army of occupation, of some 5000 families, bearing traces still of the fusion of several bands of invaders, and maintained as an exclusive political aristocracy of professional soldiers by the labour of a whole population of agricultural and industrial serfs. The serfs were rigidly debarred from intermixture or social advancement, and were watched by their masters with a suspicion fully justified by recurrent ineffectual revolts. The other states, such as Argos and Corinth, exhibited just such compromises between conquerors and conquered as the legends described, conceding to the older population, or to sections of it, political incorporation more or less incomplete. The Cretan cities, irrespective of origin, exhibit serfage, militant aristocracy, rigid martial discipline of all citizens, and other marked analogies with Sparta; but the Asiatic Dorians and the other Dorian colonies do not differ appreciably in their social and political history from their Ionian and Aeolic neighbours. Tarentum alone, partly from Spartan origin, partly through stress of local conditions, shows traces of militant asceticism for a while.

Archaeological evidence points clearly now to the conclusion that the splendid but overgrown civilization of the Mycenaean or “late Minoan” period of the Aegean Bronze Age collapsed rather suddenly before a rapid succession of assaults by comparatively barbarous invaders from the European mainland north of the Aegean; that these invaders passed partly by way of Thrace and the Hellespont into Asia Minor, partly by Macedon and Thessaly into peninsular Greece and the Aegean islands; that in east Peloponnese and Crete, at all events, a first shock (somewhat later than 1500 b.c.) led to the establishment of a cultural, social and political situation which in many respects resembles what is depicted in Homer as the “Achaean” age, with principal centres in Rhodes, Crete, Laconia, Argolis, Attica, Orchomenus and south-east Thessaly; and that this régime was itself shattered by a second shock or series of shocks somewhat earlier than 1000 b.c. These latter events correspond in character and date with the traditional irruption of the Dorians and their associates.

The nationality of these invaders is disputed. Survival of fair hair and complexion and light eyes among the upper classes in Thebes and some other localities shows that the blonde type of mankind which is characteristic of north-western Europe had already penetrated into Greek lands before classical times; but 428 the ascription of the same physical traits to the Achaeans of Homer forbids us to regard them as peculiar to that latest wave of pre-classical immigrants to which the Dorians belong; and there is no satisfactory evidence as to the coloration of the Spartans, who alone were reputed to be pure-blooded Dorians in historic times.

Language is no better guide, for it is not clear that the Dorian dialect is that of the most recent conquerors, and not rather that of the conquered Achaean inhabitants of southern Greece; in any case it presents no such affinities with any non-Hellenic speech as would serve to trace its origin. Even in northern and west-central Greece, all vestige of any former prevalence has been obliterated by the spread of “Aeolic” dialects akin to those of Thessaly and Boeotia; even the northern Doris, for example, spoke “Aeolic” in historic times.

The doubt already suggested as to language applies still more to such characteristics as Dorian music and other forms of art, and to Dorian customs generally. It is clear from the traditions about Lycurgus (q.v.), for example, that even the Spartans had been a long while in Laconia before their state was rescued from disorder by his reforms; and if there be truth in the legend that the new institutions were borrowed from Crete, we perhaps have here too a late echo of the legislative fame of the land of Minos. Certainly the Spartans adopted, together with the political traditions of the Heracleids, many old Laconian cults and observances such as those connected with the Tyndaridae.

Bibliography.—K. O. Muller, Die Dorier (ed. F. W. Schneidewin, Breslau, 1844); G. Gilbert, Studien zur altspartanischen Geschichte (Gottingen, 1872); H. Gelzer, “Die Wanderzuge der lakedamonischen Dorier,” in Rhein. Museum, xxxii. (1877), p. 259; G. Busolt, Die Lakedaimonier und ihre Bundesgenossen, i. (Leipzig, 1878); S. Beloch, “Die dorische Wanderung,” in Rhein. Mus. xlv. (1890). 555 ff.; H. Collitz, Sammlung der gr. Dialekt-Inschriften, iii. (Gottingen, 1899-1905); R. Meister, “Dorier und Achaer” in Abh. d. K. Sachs. Ges. Wiss. (Phil.-hist. Kl.), xxiv. 3 (Leipzig, 1904).

(J. L. M.)

DORIA-PAMPHILII-LANDI, a princely Roman family of Genoese extraction. The founder of the house was Ansaldo d’Oria, consul of Genoa in the 12th century, but the authentic pedigree is traced no further back than to Paolo d’Oria (1335). The most famous member of the family was Andrea Doria (q.v.), perpetual censor of Genoa in 1528 and admiral to the emperor Charles V., who was created prince of Melfi (1531) and marquis of Tursi (in the kingdom of Naples) in 1555. The marquisate of Civiez and the county of Cavallamonte were conferred on the family in 1576, the duchy of Tursi in 1594, the principality of Avella in 1607, the duchy of Avigliano in 1613. In 1760 the title of Reichsfurst or prince of the Holy Roman Empire was added and attached to the lordship of Torriglia and the marquisate of Borgo San Stefano, together with the qualification of Hochgeboren. That same year the Dorias inherited the fiefs and titles of the house of Pamphilii-Landi of Gubbio, patricians of Rome and princes of San Martino, Valmontano, Val di Toro, Bardi and Corupiano. The Doria-Pamphilii palace in Rome, a splendid edifice, was built in the 17th century, and contains a valuable collection of paintings. The Villa Doria-Pamphilii with its gardens is one of the loveliest round Rome. During the siege of 1849 it was Garibaldi’s headquarters.


DORION, SIR ANTOINE AIMÉ1 (1816-1891), Canadian lawyer and statesman, son of Pierre Dorion and Geneviève Bureau, was born in the parish of Sainte Anne de la Pérade on the 17th of January 1816. He was educated at Nicolet College, and in his twenty-second year went to Montreal to read law with M. Cherrier, an eminent lawyer for whom he retained a lasting friendship. On the 6th of January 1842 he was admitted to the bar of the province, became the partner of M. Cherrier, and in the course of a few years attained the highest rank in his profession. He married in 1848 Iphigénie, daughter of Dr Jean Baptiste Trestler, of Vaudreuil. Dorion descended from an old Liberal family which from early days had supported the reform party in Canada. His father, a merchant of Sainte Anne, was a member of the legislative assembly for the county of Champlain, from 1830 to 1838, and his grandfather, on the maternal side, represented the county of Saint Maurice in the same body from 1819 to 1830. At the time that Dorion commenced the study of law, Canada was entering upon a new phase of her political life. The rebellion of 1837 had resulted in the suspension of the constitution of 1791, and the union of the provinces, effected under the Imperial Act of 1840, was framed to compel the obedience of the refractory population. It was an unsatisfactory measure, providing a single legislature for two provinces, with an equal number of representatives from each province, irrespective of population. At the time the lower province was the larger, but it was foreseen that a tide of English emigration would eventually place the upper province in the stronger position. Indeed, at the date of the Union, there were many English residents in the lower province, so that in the aggregate the English had then the majority. From the first it was apparent that representation by population would become an issue, and for several years there was a constant struggle for the establishment of responsible government, which was only achieved after the contest of 1848, when the La Fontaine-Baldwin administration was maintained in power. The difficulty had been avoided during the first years of the Union by La Fontaine, who succeeded in uniting English and French Liberals, and by substituting principles for race carried out a policy based upon a broader conception of human interests. Although a decisive victory had been gained by La Fontaine and Baldwin in 1848, they did not press for an immediate overthrow of institutions which for years had been a cause of contention, and their influence gradually diminished until, on the 28th of October 1851, the administration was handed over to Hincks and Morin. Liberal principles had now become aggressive; the new leaders did not keep abreast of the spirit of the times, their majority decreased, and, on the 11th of September 1854, a government was formed by McNab and Morin.

The elections of 1854 had brought new blood into the ranks of the Liberal party, young men eager to carry out measures of reform, and Dorion was chosen as leader. Under the coalition brought about by McNab between the Tories of Upper Canada and the Liberals of the lower province old abuses were removed, and, after the abolition of seigneurial tenure and clergy reserves, it appeared that the political atmosphere was clear. In 1856 the question of representation by population was again prominent. Upper Canada had increased, and it contributed a larger share to the revenue, and demanded proportionate representation. La Fontaine had pointed out, at the time he was prime minister, that representation by population would subject the weaker province to the control of the stronger, and that as he would not impose the principle upon Upper Canada at the time he would not concede it, without constitutional restraint, if her position were reversed. Upper Canada now became aggressive and the question had to be settled. Macdonald, who became prime minister in 1856, and had formed a new government with Cartier in 1857, maintained that no amendment to the constitution was necessary; that existing conditions were satisfactory. Brown, on the opposite side of the House, declared that representation by population was imperative, with or without constitutional changes; and Dorion appears to have suggested the true remedy, when he gave notice of a motion in 1856:—

“That a committee be appointed to inquire into the means that should be adopted to form a new political and legislative organization of the heretofore provinces of Upper and Lower Canada, either by the establishment of their former territorial divisions or by a division of each province, so as to form a federation, having a federal government and a local legislature for each one of the new provinces, and to deliberate as to the course which should be adopted to regulate the affairs of united Canada, in a manner which would be equitable to the different sections of the province.”

Dorion was in advance of the time. He understood the true principle of federative union as applicable to Canada. But he did not pursue this idea, and in fact his following was never sufficiently strong to enable him to give effect to the sound measures he was so capable of formulating. This, perhaps, was his special weakness. On the 2nd of August 1858 he formed an administration with Brown, but was forced to resign after being in office three days. 429 When the question of confederation was discussed a few years later he opposed the scheme, believing there was nothing to justify the union at the time, although he admitted “that commercial intercourse may increase sufficiently to render confederation desirable.” In 1873 he accepted the portfolio of minister of justice in the Mackenzie government, and during the six months that he was in office passed the Electoral Law of 1874 and the Controverted Elections Act. Dorion sat as member of the assembly for the province of Canada for the city of Montreal from 1854 to 1861, for the county of Hochelaga from 1862 to 1867; as member of the House of Commons for the county of Hochelaga from 1867 to July 1872, and for the county of Napierville from September 1872 to June 1874, when he was appointed chief justice of the province. In 1878 he was created a knight bachelor. He died at Montreal on the 31st of May 1891. No more able or upright judge ever adorned the Canadian bench. He had a broad, clear mind, vast knowledge, and commanded respect from the loftiness of his character and the strength of his abilities. The keynote of his life was an unswerving devotion to duty.

See Dorion, a Sketch, by Fennings Taylor (Montreal, 1865); and “Sir Antoine Amié Dorion,” by Sir Wilfrid Laurier, in The Week (1887).

(A. G. D.)

1 In the baptismal certificate the name is entered as “Emé” (= Edmé-Aimé).


DORIS, in ancient geography, a small district in central Greece, forming a wedge between Mts. Oeta and Parnassus, and containing the head-waters of the Cephissus, which passes at the gorge of Dadion into the neighbouring land of Phocis. This little valley, which nowhere exceeds 4 m. in breadth and could barely give sustenance to four small townships, owed its importance partly to its command over the strategic road from Heracleia to Amphissa, which pierced the Parnassus range near Cytinium, but chiefly to its prestige as the alleged mother-country of the Dorian conquerors of Peloponnesus (see Dorians). Its history is mainly made up of petty wars with the neighbouring Oetaeans and Phocians. The latter pressed them hard in 457, when the Spartans, admitting their claim to be the Dorian metropolis, sent an army to their aid, and again during the second Sacred War (356-346). Except for a casual mention of its cantonal league in 196, Doris passed early out of history; the inhabitants may have been exterminated during the conflicts between Aetolia and Macedonia.

See Strabo, pp. 417, 427; Herodotus i. 56, viii. 31; Thucydides i. 107, iii. 92; Diodorus xii. 29, 33; W. M. Leake, Travels in Northern Greece, chap. xi. (London, 1835).

(M. O. B. C.)

DORISLAUS, ISAAC (1595-1649), Anglo-Dutch lawyer and diplomatist, was born in 1595 at Alkmaar, Holland, the son of a minister of the Dutch reformed church. He was educated at Leiden, removed to England about 1627, and was appointed to a lectureship in history at Cambridge, where his attempt to justify the Dutch revolt against Spain led to his early resignation. In 1629 he was admitted a commoner of the College of Advocates. In 1632 he made his peace at court, and on two occasions acted as judge advocate, in the bishops’ war of 1640 and in 1642 in the army commanded by Essex. In 1648 he became one of the judges of the admiralty court, and was sent on a diplomatic errand to the states general of Holland. He assisted in preparing the charge of high treason against Charles I., and, while negotiating an alliance between the Commonwealth and the Dutch Republic, was murdered at the Hague by royalist refugees on the 10th of May 1649. His remains were buried in Westminster Abbey, and moved in 1661 to St Margaret’s churchyard.


DORKING, a market town in the Reigate parliamentary division of Surrey, England, 26 m. S.S.W. of London, on the London, Brighton & South Coast and the South-Eastern & Chatham railways. Pop. of urban district (1901) 7670. It is pleasantly situated on the river Mole, in a sheltered vale near the base of Box Hill. It is the centre of an extensive residential district. The parish church of St Martin’s is a handsome edifice rebuilt in 1873. Lime of exceptionally good quality is burnt to a large extent in the neighbourhood, and forms an important article of trade; it is derived from the Lower Chalk formation. Dorking has long been famous for a finely flavoured breed of fowl distinguished by its having five toes. Several fine mansions are in the vicinity of the town, notably that of Deepdene, containing part of a gallery of sculpture collected here by Thomas Hope, the author of Anastasius. A Roman road, which crossed from the Sussex coast to the Thames, passed near the present churchyard of St Martin.


DORLÉANS, LOUIS (1542-1629), French poet and political pamphleteer, was born in 1542, in Paris. He studied under Jean Daurat, and after taking his degree in law began to practise at the bar with but slight success. He wrote indifferent verses, but was a redoubtable pamphleteer. After the League had arrested the royalist members of parliament, he was appointed (1589) advocate-general. His ”Avertissement des catholiques anglais aux Français catholiques du danger où ils sont de perdre la religion et d’expérimenter, comme en Angleterre, la cruauté des ministres s’ils reçoivent à la couronne un roi qui soit hérétique” went through several editions, and was translated into English. One of his pamphlets, Le Banquet ou après-dînée du comte d’Arète, in which he accused Henry of insincerity in his return to the Roman Catholic faith, was so scurrilous as to be disapproved of by many members of the League. When Henry at length entered Paris, Dorléans was among the number of the proscribed. He took refuge in Antwerp, where he remained for nine years. At the expiration of that period he received a pardon, and returned to Paris, but was soon imprisoned for sedition. The king, however, released him after three months in the Conciergerie, and by this means attached him permanently to his cause. His last years were passed in obscurity, and he died in 1629.


DORMER (from Lat. dormire, to sleep), in architecture, a window rising out of the roof and lighting the room in it: sometimes, however, pierced in a small gable built flush with the wall below, or corbelled out, as frequently in Scotland. In Germany, where the roofs are very lofty, there are three or four rows of dormers, one above the other, but it does not follow that the space in the roof is necessarily subdivided by floors. In some of the French châteaux the dormers (Fr. lucarne) are highly elaborated, and in some cases, as in Chambord, they form the principal architectural features. In these cases they are either placed flush with the wall or recede behind a parapet and gutter only, so as to rest on the solid wall, as they are built in stone. In Germany they assume larger proportions and constitute small gables with two or three storeys of windows. The term “dormer” arose from the windows being those of sleeping-rooms. In the phrase “dormer beam” or “dormant beam,” meaning a tie-beam, we have the same sense as in the modern “sleeper.”


DORMITORY (Lat. dormitorium, a sleeping place), the name given in monasteries to the monks’ sleeping apartment. Sometimes it formed one long room, but was more generally subdivided into as many cells or partitions as there were monks. It was generally placed on the first floor with a direct entrance into the church. The dormitories were sometimes of great length; the longest known, in the monastery of S. Michele in Bosco near Bologna (now suppressed), is said to have been over 400 ft. In some of the larger mansions of the Elizabethan period the space in the roof constitutes a long gallery, which in those days was occasionally utilized as a dormitory. The name “dormitory” is also applied to the large bedrooms with a number of beds, in schools and similar modern institutes.


DORMOUSE (a word usually taken to be connected with Lat. dormire, to sleep, with “mouse” added, cf. Germ. Schlafratte; it is not a corruption of Fr. dormeuse; Skeat suggests a connexion with Icel. dár, benumbed, cf. Eng. “doze”), the name of a small British rodent mammal having the general appearance of a squirrel. This rodent, Muscardinus avellanarius, is the sole representative of its genus, but belongs to a family—the Gliridae, or Myoxidae—containing a small number of Old World species. All the dormice are small rodents (although many of them are double the size of the British species), of arboreal habits, and for the most part of squirrel-like appearance; some of their most distinctive features being internal. In the more typical members of the group, forming the subfamily Glirinae, there are four pairs of cheek-teeth, which are rooted and have transverse enamel-folds. As the characters of the genera are given in the article Rodentia it will suffice to state that the typical genus Glis is represented by 430 the large European edible dormouse, G. vulgaris (or G. glis), a grey species with black markings known in Germany as Siebenschläfer; the genus ranges from continental Europe to Japan. The common dormouse Muscardinus avellanarius, ranging from England to Russia and Asia, is of the size of a mouse and mainly chestnut-coloured. The third genus is represented by the continental lerot, or garden-dormouse, Eliomys guercinus, which is a large parti-coloured species, with several local forms—either species or races. Lastly, Graphiurus, of which the species are also large, is solely African. In their arboreal life, and the habit of sitting up on their hind-legs with their food grasped in the fore-paws, dormice are like squirrels, from which they differ in being completely nocturnal. They live either among bushes or in trees, and make a neat nest for the reception of their young, which are born blind. The species inhabiting cold climates construct a winter nest in which they hibernate, waking up at times to feed on an accumulated store of nuts and other food. Before retiring they become very fat, and at such times the edible dormouse is a favourite article of diet on the Continent. At the beginning of the cold season the common dormouse retires to its nest, and curling itself up in a ball, becomes dormant. A warmer day than usual restores it to temporary activity, and then it supplies itself with food from its autumn hoard, again becoming torpid till roused by the advent of spring. The young are generally four in number, and are produced twice a year. They are born blind, but in a marvellously short period are able to cater for themselves; and their hibernation begins later in the season than with the adults. The fur of the dormouse is tawny above and paler beneath, with a white patch on the throat. A second subfamily is represented by the Indian Platacanthomys and the Chinese Typhlomys, in which there are only three pairs of cheek-teeth; thus connecting the more typical members of the family with the Muridae.

(R. L.*)

DORNBIRN, a township in the Austrian province of the Vorarlberg, on the right bank of the Dornbirner Ach, at the point where it flows out of the hilly region of the Bregenzerwald into the broad valley of the Rhine, on its way to the Lake of Constance. It is by rail 7½ m. S. of Bregenz, and 15 m. N. of Feldkirch. It is the most populous town in the Vorarlberg, its population in 1900 being 13,052. The name Dornbirn is a collective appellation for four villages—Dornbirn, Hatlerdorf, Oberdorf and Haselstauden—which straggle over a distance of about 3 m. It is the chief industrial centre in the Vorarlberg, the regulated Dornbirner Ach furnishing motive power for several factories for cotton spinning and weaving, worked muslin, dyeing, iron-founding and so on.

(W. A. B. C.)

DORNBURG, a town of Germany, in the grand-duchy of Saxe-Weimar, romantically situated on a hill 400 ft. above the Saale, on the railway Grossheringen-Jena and 7 m. N.E. of the latter. Pop. 700. Dornburg is an ancient town, but is chiefly famous for its three grand-ducal castles. Of these, the Altes Schloss is built on the site of an imperial stronghold (Kaiserpfalz), once a bulwark against the Slavs, often a residence of the emperors Otto II. and Otto III., and where the emperor Henry II. held a diet in 1005; the Neues Schloss in Italian style of architecture, built 1728-1748, with pretty gardens. Here Goethe was often a guest, “healing the blows of fate and the wounds of the heart in Dornburg.” The third and southernmost of the three is the so-called Stohmannsches Rittergut, purchased in 1824 and fitted as a modern palace.


DORNER, ISAAC AUGUST (1809-1884), German Lutheran divine, was born at Neuhausen-ob-Eck in Württemberg on the 20th of June 1809. His father was pastor at Neuhausen. He was educated at Maulbronn and the university of Tübingen. After acting for two years as assistant to his father in his native place he travelled in England and Holland to complete his studies and acquaint himself with different types of Protestantism. He returned to Tübingen in 1834, and in 1837 was made professor extraordinarius of theology. As a student at the university, one of his teachers had been Christian Friedrich Schmid (1794-1852), author of a well-known book, Biblische Theologie des Neuen Testamentes, and one of the most vigorous opponents of F. C. Baur. At Schmid’s suggestion, and with his encouragement, Dorner set to work upon a history of the development of the doctrine of the person of Christ, Entwicklungsgeschichte der Lehre von der Person Christi. He published the first part of it in 1835, the year in which Strauss, his colleague, gave to the public his Life of Jesus; completed it in 1839, and afterwards considerably enlarged it for a second edition (1845-1856). It was an indirect reply to Strauss, which showed “profound learning, objectivity of judgment, and fine appreciation of the moving ideas of history” (Otto Pfleiderer). The author at once took high rank as a theologian and historian, and in 1839 was invited to Kiel as professor ordinarius. It was here that he produced, amongst other works, Das Princip unserer Kirche nach dem innern Verhältniss seiner zwei Seiten betrachtet (1841). In 1843 he removed as professor of theology to Königsberg. Thence he was called to Bonn in 1847, and to Göttingen in 1853. Finally in 1862 he settled in the same capacity at Berlin, where he was a member of the supreme consistorial council. A few years later (1867) he published his valuable Geschichte der protestantischen Theologie (Eng. trans., History of Protestant Theology, 2 vols.; 1871), in which he “developed and elaborated,” as Pfleiderer says, “his own convictions by his diligent and loving study of the history of the Church’s thought and belief.” The theological positions to which he ultimately attained are best seen in his Christliche Glaubenslehre, published shortly before his death (1879-1881). It is “a work extremely rich in thought and matter. It takes the reader through a mass of historical material by the examination and discussion of ancient and modern teachers, and so leads up to the author’s own view, which is mostly one intermediate between the opposite extremes, and appears as a more or less successful synthesis of antagonistic theses” (Pfleiderer). The companion work, System der christlichen Sittenlehre, was published by his son August Dorner in 1886. He also contributed articles to Herzog-Hauck’s Realencyklopädie, and was the founder and for many years one of the editors of the Jahrbücher für deutsche Theologie. He died at Wiesbaden on the 8th of July 1884. One of the most noteworthy of the “mediating” theologians, he has been ranked with Friedrich Schleiermacher, J. A. W. Neander, Karl Nitzsch, Julius Müller and Richard Rothe.

His son, August (b. 1846), after studying at Berlin and acting as Repetent at Göttingen (1870-1873), became professor of theology and co-director of the theological seminary at Wittenberg. Amongst his works is Augustinus, sein theologisches System und seine religionsphilosoph. Anschauung (1873), and he is the author of the article on Isaac Dorner in the Allgemeine deutsche Biographie.

See Herzog-Hauck, Realencyklopädie; Allgemeine deutsche Biographie (1904); Otto Pfleiderer, The Development of Theology in Germany since Kant (1890); F. Lichtenberger, History of German Theology in the Nineteenth Century (1889); Carl Schwarz, Zur Geschichte der neuesten Theologie (1869).

(M. A. C.)

DORNOCH, a royal and police burgh and county town of Sutherlandshire, Scotland. Pop. (1901) 624. It lies on the north shore of Dornoch Firth, an arm of the North Sea, 7¾ m. S.S.E. of Mound station on the Highland railway by light railway. Its dry and bracing climate and fine golf course have brought it into great repute as a health and holiday resort. Before the Reformation it was the see of the bishopric of Caithness and Sutherland. The cathedral, built by Bishop Gilbert de Moravia (Moray) (d. 1245), the last Scot enrolled in the Calendar of Scottish saints, was damaged by fire in 1570, during the raid of the Master of Caithness and Mackay of Strathnaver, and afterwards neglected till 1837, when it was restored by the 2nd duke of Sutherland, and has since been used as the parish church. Noticeable for its high roof, low tower and dwarf spire, the church consists of an aisleless nave, chancel (adorned with Chantrey’s statue of the 1st duke) and transepts. It is the burying-place of the Sutherland family and contains the remains of sixteen earls. Of the ancient castle, which was also the bishop’s palace, only the west tower exists, the rest of the structure having been destroyed in the outrage of 1570. The county buildings adjoin it. Dornoch became a royal burgh in 1628, and, as one of the Wick burghs, returns a member to parliament. It was the scene of the last execution for witchcraft in Scotland (1722). At Embo, 2 m. N.N.E., a 431 sculptured stone commemorates the battle with the Danes in the 13th century, in which Richard de Moravia was killed. He was buried in the cathedral, where his effigy was found in the chancel. Skibo castle, about 4 m. W. of Dornoch, once a residence of the bishops of Caithness, was acquired in 1898 by Andrew Carnegie.


DOROHOI, or Dorogoi, the capital of the department of Dorohoi, Rumania; on the right bank of the river Jijia, which broadens into a lake on the north. Pop. (1900) 12,701, more than half being Jews. The Russian frontier is about 30 m. E., the Austrian 20 m. W.; and there is railway communication with Botoshani and Jassy. Dorohoi is a market for the timber and farm produce of the north Moldavian highlands; merchants from the neighbouring states flock to its great fair, held on the 12th of June. There is a church built by Stephen the Great (1458-1504).


DOROTHEUS, a professor of jurisprudence in the law school of Berytus in Syria, and one of the three commissioners appointed by the emperor Justinian to draw up a book of Institutes, after the model of the Institutes of Gaius, which should serve as an introduction to the Digest already completed. His colleagues were Tribonian and Theophilus; and their work was accomplished in 533. Dorotheus was subsequently the author of a commentary on the Digest, which is called the Index, and was published by him in 542. Fragments of this commentary, which was in the Greek language, have been preserved in the Scholia appended to the body of law compiled by order of the emperor Basilius the Macedonian and his son Leo the Wise, in the 9th century, known as the Basilico, from which it seems probable that the commentary of Dorotheus contained the substance of a course of lectures on the Digest delivered by him in the law school of Berytus, although it is not cast in a form so precisely didactic as the Index of Theophilus.


D’ORSAY, ALFRED GUILLAUME GABRIEL, Count (1801-1852), the famous dandy and wit, was born in Paris on the 4th of September 1801, and was the son of General D’Orsay, from whom he inherited an exceptionally handsome person. Through his mother he was grandson by a morganatic marriage of the king of Württemberg. In his youth he entered the French army, and served as a garde du corps of Louis XVIII. In 1822, while stationed at Valence on the Rhone, he formed an acquaintance with the earl and countess of Blessington (q.v.) which quickly ripened into intimacy, and at the invitation of the earl he accompanied the party on their tour through Italy. In the spring of 1823 he met Lord Byron at Genoa, and the published correspondence of the poet at this period contains numerous references to the count’s gifts and accomplishments, and to his peculiar relationship to the Blessington family. A diary which D’Orsay had kept during a visit to London in 1821-1822 was submitted to Byron’s inspection, and was much praised by him for the knowledge of men and manners and the keen faculty of observation it displayed. On the 1st of December 1827 Count D’Orsay married Lady Harriet Gardiner, a girl of fifteen, the daughter of Lord Blessington by his previous wife. The union, if it rendered his connection with the Blessington family less ostensibly equivocal than before, was in other respects an unhappy one, and a separation took place almost immediately. After the death of Lord Blessington, which occurred in 1829, the widowed countess returned to England, accompanied by Count D’Orsay, and her home, first at Seamore Place, then at Gore House, soon became a resort of the fashionable literary and artistic society of London, which found an equal attraction in host and in hostess. The count’s charming manner, brilliant wit, and artistic faculty were accompanied by benevolent moral qualities, which endeared him to all his associates. His skill as a painter and sculptor was shown in numerous portraits and statuettes representing his friends, which were marked by great vigour and truthfulness, if wanting in the finish that can only be reached by persistent discipline. Count D’Orsay had been from his youth a zealous Bonapartist, and one of the most frequent guests at Gore House was Prince Louis Napoleon. In 1849 he went bankrupt, and the establishment at Gore House being broken up, he went to Paris with Lady Blessington, who died a few weeks after their arrival. He endeavoured to provide for himself by painting portraits. He was deep in the counsels of the prince president, but the relation between them was less cordial after the coup d’état, of which the count had by anticipation expressed his strong disapproval. His appointment to the post of director of fine arts was announced only a few days before his death, which occurred on the 4th of August 1852.

Much information as to the life and character of Count D’Orsay is to be found in Richard Madden’s Literary Life and Correspondence of the Countess of Blessington (1855).


DORSET, EARLS, MARQUESSES AND DUKES OF, English titles one or more of which have been borne by the families of Beaufort, Grey and Sackville. About 1070 Osmund, or Osmer, an alleged son of Henry, count of Séez, by a sister of William the Conqueror, is said to have been created earl of Dorset, but the authority is a very late one and Osmund describes himself simply as bishop (of Salisbury). William de Mohun of Dunster, a partisan of the empress Matilda, appears as earl of Dorset or Somerset, these two shires being in early times united under a single sheriff. In 1397 John Beaufort, earl of Somerset (d. 1410), the eldest son of John of Gaunt, duke of Lancaster, and Catherine Swinford, was created marquess of Dorset; two years later, however, he was reduced to his former rank of earl of Somerset. In 1411 his brother Thomas, afterwards duke of Exeter, was created earl of Dorset, and in 1441 his youngest son Edmund obtained the same dignity. Two years later Edmund was created marquess of Dorset and still later duke of Somerset. Edmund’s son Henry, duke of Somerset and marquess of Dorset, was attainted during the Wars of the Roses, and was beheaded after the battle of Hexham in May 1464, when the titles became extinct. In 1475 Thomas Grey, 8th Lord Ferrers of Groby (1451-1501), a son of Sir John Grey (d. 1461) and a stepson of King Edward IV., having resigned the earldom of Huntingdon, which he had received in 1471, was created marquess of Dorset (see below). He was succeeded in this title by his son Thomas (1477-1530), and then by his grandson Henry (c. 1510-1554), who was created duke of Suffolk in 1551. When in February 1554 Suffolk was beheaded for sharing in the rising of Sir Thomas Wyat, the marquessate of Dorset again became extinct; but in 1604 Thomas Sackville (see the account of the family under Sackville, 1st Baron) was created earl of Dorset (see below), and his descendant the 7th earl was created duke in 1720. In 1843 the titles became extinct.

Thomas Grey, 1st Marquess of Dorset (1451-1501), was the elder son of Sir John Grey, 7th Lord Ferrers of Groby (1432-1461), by his wife Elizabeth Woodville, afterwards queen of Edward IV. He fought for Edward at Tewkesbury, The Grey line. and became Lord Harington and Bonville by right of his wife Cecilia, daughter of William Bonville, 6th Lord Harington (d. 1460); in 1475 he was created marquess of Dorset, and he was also a knight of the Garter and a privy councillor. After the death of Edward IV. Dorset and his brother Richard Grey were among the supporters of their half-brother, the young king Edward V.; thus they incurred the enmity of Richard duke of Gloucester, afterwards Richard III., and Richard Grey having been arrested, was beheaded at Pontefract in June 1483, while his elder brother, the marquess, saved his life by flight. Dorset was one of the leaders of the duke of Buckingham’s insurrection, and when this failed he joined Henry earl of Richmond in Brittany, but he was left behind in Paris when the future king crossed over to England in 1485. After Henry’s victory at Bosworth the marquess returned to England and his attainder was reversed, but he was suspected and imprisoned when Lambert Simnel revolted; he had, however, been released and pardoned, had marched into France and had helped to quell the Cornish rising, when he died on the 20th of September 1501.

Dorset’s sixth son, Lord Leonard Grey (c. 1490-1541), went to Ireland as marshal of the English army in 1535, being created an Irish peer as Viscount Grane in the same year, but he never assumed this title. In 1536 Grey was appointed lord deputy of Ireland in succession to Sir William Skeffington; he was active in marching against the rebels and he presided over the important 432 parliament of 1536, but he was soon at variance with the powerful family of the Butlers and with some of the privy councillors.

He did not relax his energy in seeking to restore order, but he was accused, probably with truth, of favouring the family of the Geraldines, to whom he was related, and the quarrel with the Butlers became fiercer than ever. Returning to England in 1540 he was thrown into prison and was condemned to death for treason. He was beheaded on the 28th of July 1541 (see R. Bagwell, Ireland under the Tudors, vol. i., 1885).

Thomas Grey, 2nd Marquess of Dorset (1477-1530), the eldest son of the 1st marquess, fled to Brittany with his father in 1484; after receiving several marks of the royal favour and succeeding to the title, he was imprisoned by Henry VII., and remained in prison until 1509. He was on very good terms with Henry VIII., who in 1512 appointed him to command the English army which was to invade France in conjunction with the Spanish forces under Ferdinand of Aragon. In spite of the failure which attended this enterprise, Dorset again served in France in the following year, and in 1516 he was made lieutenant of the order of the Garter. Later he was at the Field of the Cloth of Gold, and he was warden of the eastern and middle marches towards Scotland in 1523 and the following years. He received many other positions of trust and profit from the king, and he helped to bring about the fall of Cardinal Wolsey, under whom he had probably been educated. He was famous for his skill in the tournament. He died on the 10th of October 1530.

His eldest son Henry Grey, 3rd marquess of Dorset, was in 1551 created duke of Suffolk (q.v.). A younger son, Lord Thomas Grey, was beheaded in April 1554 for sharing in the rebellion of Sir Thomas Wyat; another son, Lord John Grey, was also sentenced to death for his share in this rising, but his life was spared owing to the efforts of his wife Mary, daughter of Sir Anthony Browne. Under Elizabeth, Lord John, a strong Protestant, was restored to the royal favour, and he died on the 19th of November 1569. In 1603 his son Henry (d. 1614) was created Baron Grey of Groby, and in 1628 his great-grandson Henry was made earl of Stamford.

Thomas Sackville, 1st Earl of Dorset (c. 1530-1608), English statesman and poet, son of Sir Richard Sackville and his wife Winifrede, daughter of Sir John Bruges or Bridges, lord mayor of London, was born at Buckhurst, The Sackville line. in the parish of Withyham, Sussex. In his fifteenth or sixteenth year he is said to have been entered at Hart Hall, Oxford; but it was at Cambridge that he completed his studies and took the degree of M.A. He joined the Inner Temple, and was called to the bar. He married at the age of eighteen Cicely, daughter of Sir John Baker of Sissinghurst, Kent; in 1558 he entered parliament as member for Westmorland, in 1559 he sat for East Grinstead, Sussex, and in 1563 for Aylesbury in Buckinghamshire. A visit to the continent in 1565 was interrupted by an imprisonment at Rome, caused by a rash declaration of Protestant opinions. The news of his father’s death on the 21st of April 1566 recalled him to England. On his return he was knighted in the queen’s presence, receiving at the same time the title of baron of Buckhurst. With his mother he lived at the queen’s palace of Sheen, where he entertained in 1568 Odet de Coligni, cardinal de Châtillon. In 1571 he was sent to France to congratulate Charles IX. on his marriage with Elizabeth of Austria, and he took part in the negotiations for the projected marriage of Elizabeth with the duke of Anjou. He became a member of the privy council, and acted as a commissioner at the state trials. In 1572 he was one of the peers who tried Thomas Howard, duke of Norfolk, and in 1586 he was selected to convey the sentence of death to Mary, queen of Scots, a task he is said to have performed with great consideration. He was sent in 1587 as ambassador to the Hague “to expostulate in favour of peace with a people who knew that their existence depended on war, to reconcile those to delay who felt that delay was death, and to heal animosities between men who were enemies from their cradles to their graves.”1 This task was further complicated by the parsimony and prevarication of Elizabeth. Buckhurst carried out under protest the foolish and often contradictory orders he received. His plain speaking on the subject of Leicester’s action in the Netherlands displeased the queen still more. She accused him on his return of having followed his instructions too slavishly, and ordered him to keep to his own house for nine months. His disgrace was short, for in 1588 he was presented with the order of the Garter, and was sent again to the Netherlands in 1589 and 1598. He was elected chancellor of the university of Oxford in 1591, and in 1599 he succeeded Lord Burghley as lord high treasurer of England. In 1601 as high steward he pronounced sentence on Essex, who had been his rival for the chancellorship and his opponent in politics. James I. confirmed him in the office of lord treasurer, the duties of which he performed with the greatest impartiality. He was created earl of Dorset in 1604, and died suddenly on the 19th of April 1608, as he was sitting at the council table at Whitehall. His eldest son, Robert, the 2nd earl (1561-1609), was a member of parliament and a man of great learning. Two other sons were William (c. 1568-1591), a soldier who was killed in the service of Henry IV. of France, and Thomas (1571-1646), also a soldier.

It is not by his political career, distinguished as it was, that Sackville is remembered, but by his share in early life in two works, each of which was, in its way, a new departure in English literature. In A Myrroure for Magistrates, printed by Thomas Marshe in 1559, he has sometimes been erroneously credited with the inception of the general plan as well as with the most valuable contributions. But there had been an earlier edition, for the editor, William Baldwin, states in his preface that the work was begun and partly printed “four years agone.” He also says that the printer (John Wayland) had designed the work as a continuation of Lydgate’s Fall of Princes derived from the narrative of Bochas. Fragments of this early edition are extant, the title page being sometimes found bound up with Lydgate’s book. It runs A Memoriall of such princes, as since the tyme of Richard the seconde, have been unfortunate in the realme of England, while the 1559 edition has the running title A briefe memorial of unfortunate Englysh princes. The disconnected poems by various authors were given a certain continuity by the simple device of allowing the ghost of each unfortunate hero “to bewail unto me [Baldwin] his grievous chances, heavy destinies and woefull misfortunes.” After a delay caused by an examination by Stephen Gardiner, bishop of Worcester, the book appeared. It contained nineteen tragic legends by six poets, William Baldwin, George Ferrers, “Master” Cavyll, Thomas Chaloner, Thomas Phaer and John Skelton. In 1563 appeared a second edition with eight additional poems by William Baldwin, John Dolman, Sackville, Francis Segar, Thomas Churchyard and Cavyll. Sackville contributed the Complaint of Henry Stafford, duke of Buckingham, to which he prefixed an Induction. This was evidently designed as an introduction to a version of the whole work, and, being arbitrarily transposed (1610) to the beginning by a later editor, Richard Niccols, led to the attribution of the general design to Sackville, an error which was repeated by Thomas Warton. The originators were certainly Baldwin and his “printer.” In 1574 Thomas Marshe printed a series of new tragedies by John Higgins as the Firste parte of the Mirour for Magistrates.... From the coming of Brute to the Incarnation. The seventh edition (1578) contained for the first time the two tragedies of Eleanor Cobham and Humphrey duke of Gloucester. In 1587, when the original editor was dead, the two quite separate publications of Baldwin and Higgins were combined. The primary object of this earliest of English miscellanies was didactic. It was to be a kind of textbook of British history, illustrating the evils of ambition. The writers pretended to historical accuracy, but with the notable exceptions of Churchyard and Sackville they paid little attention to form. The book did much to promote interest in English history, and Mr W. J. Courthope has pointed out that the subjects of Marlowe’s Edward II., of Shakespeare’s Henry VI., Richard II. and Richard III. are already dealt with in the Myrroure.

Sackville’s Induction opens with a description of the oncoming of winter. The poet meets with Sorrow, who offers to lead him to 433 the infernal regions that he may see the sad estate of those ruined by their ambition, and thus learn the transient character of earthly joy. At the approaches of Hell he sees a group of terrible abstractions, Remorse of Conscience, Dread, Misery, Revenge, Care, &c., each vividly described. The last of these was War, on whose shield he saw depicted the great battles of antiquity. Finally, penetrating to the realm of Pluto himself, he is surrounded by the shades, of whom the duke of Buckingham is the first to advance, thus introducing the Complaint. To this induction the epithet “Dantesque” has been frequently applied, but in truth Sackville’s models were Gavin Douglas and Virgil. The dignity and artistic quality of the narrative of the fall of Buckingham are in strong contrast to the crude attempts of Ferrers and Baldwin, and make the work one of the most important between the Canterbury Tales and the Faerie Queene.

Sackville has also the credit of being part author with Thomas Norton of the first legitimate tragedy in the English language. This was Gorboduc or Ferrex and Porrex, performed as part of the Christmas festivities (1560-1561) by the society of the Inner Temple, and afterwards on the 18th of January 1561 before Elizabeth at Whitehall. The argument is as follows:

“Gorboduc, king of Brittaine, devided his Realme in his lyfe time to his Sones, Ferrex and Porrex. The Sonnes fell to dyvision and discention. The yonger kylled the elder. The Mother, that more dearely loved thelder, fr revenge kylled the yonger. The people, moved with the Crueltie of the facte, rose in Rebellion, and Slewe both father and mother. The Nobilitie assembled, and most terribly destroyed the Rebelles. And afterwards for want of Issue of the Prince, wherby the Succession of the Crowne became uncertayne, they fell to Ciuill warre, in whiche both they and many of their Issues were slayne, and the Lande for a longe tyme almoste desolate, and myserablye wasted.”

The argument shows plainly enough the didactic intention of the whole, and points the moral of the evils of civil discord. The story is taken from Book II. chap. xvi. of Geoffrey of Monmouth’s history. It was first printed (1565) in an unauthorized edition as The Tragedie of Gorboduc “whereof three Actes were wrytten by Thomas Nortone, and the two laste by Thomas Sackvyle.” Norton’s share has been generally minimized, and it seems safe to assume that Sackville is responsible for the general design. In 1570 appeared an authentic edition, The Tragedie of Ferrex and Porrex, with a preface from the printer to the reader stating that the authors were “very much displeased that she (the tragedy) so ran abroad without leave.” The tragedies of Seneca were now being translated, and the play is conceived on Senecan lines. The plot was no doubt chosen for its accumulated horrors from analogy with the tragic subjects of Oedipus and Thyestes. None of the crimes occur on the stage, but the action is described in lofty language by the characters. The most famous and harrowing scene is that in which Marcello relates the murder of Porrex by his mother (Act IV. sc. ii.). The paucity of action is eked out by a dumb show to precede each act, and the place of the Chorus is supplied by four “ancient and sage men of Britain.” In the variety of incident, however, the authors departed from the classical model. The play is written in excellent blank verse, and is the first example of the application of Surrey’s innovation to drama. Jasper Heywood in the poetical address prefixed to his translation of the Thyestes alludes to “Sackvylde’s Sonnets sweetly sauste,” but only one of these has survived. It is prefixed to Sir T. Hoby’s translation of Castiglione’s Courtier. Sackville’s poetical preoccupations are sufficiently marked in the subject matter of these two works, which remain the sole literary productions of an original mind.

The best edition of the Mirror for Magistrates is that of Joseph Haslewood (1815). Gorboduc was edited for the Shakespeare Society by W. D. Cooper in 1847; in 1883 by Miss L. Toulmin Smith for C. Vollmöller’s Englische Sprach-und Litteraturdenkmale (Heilbronn, 1883). The Works of Sackville were edited by C. Chapple (1820) and by the Hon. and Rev. Reginald Sackville-West (1859). See also A Mirror for Magistrates (1898) by Mr W. F. Trench; an excellent account in Mr W. J. Courthope’s History of English Poetry, vol. i. pp. 111 et seq.; and an important article by Dr J. W. Cunliffe in the Cambridge History of English Literature, vol. iii.

Edward Sackville, 4th Earl of Dorset (1591-1652), son of the 2nd earl, succeeded his brother Richard, the 3rd earl (1590-1624), in March 1624. He had attained much notoriety by killing Edward Bruce, 2nd Lord Kinloss, in a duel, in August 1613, the place in the Netherlands where this encounter took place being called Bruceland in quite recent times, and in 1620 he was one of the leaders of the English contingent which fought for James I.’s son-in-law, Frederick V., elector palatine of the Rhine, at the battle of the White Hill, near Prague. In the House of Commons, where he represented Sussex, Sackville was active in defending Bacon and in advocating an aggressive policy with regard to the recovery of the Rhenish Palatinate; twice he was ambassador to France, and he was interested in Virginia and the Bermuda Islands. Under Charles I. he was a privy councillor and lord chamberlain to Queen Henrietta Maria. He was frequently employed by the government from the accession of Charles until the outbreak of the Civil War, when he joined the king at York, but he disliked the struggle and was constant in his efforts to secure peace. At Oxford he was lord chamberlain to the king and lord president of his council, but Charles did not altogether approve of his pacific attitude, and is said on one occasion to have remarked to him “Your voice is the voice of Jacob, but your hands are the hands of Esau.” He died on the 17th of July 1652. His wife Mary (d. 1645), daughter of Sir George Curzon, was governess to the sons of Charles I., the future kings Charles II. and James II. His character is thus summed up by S. R. Gardiner: “Pre-eminent in beauty of person, and in the vigour of a cultivated intellect, he wanted nothing to fit him for the highest places in the commonwealth but that stern sense of duty without which no man can be truly great.”

Charles Sackville, 6th Earl of Dorset (1638-1706), English poet and courtier, son of Richard Sackville, 5th earl (1622-1677), was born on the 24th of January 1638. His mother was Frances Cranfield, sister and heiress of Lionel, 3rd earl of Middlesex, to whose estates and title he succeeded in 1674, being created Baron Cranfield and 4th earl of Middlesex in 1675. He succeeded to his father’s estates and title in August 1677. Buckhurst was educated privately, and spent some time abroad with a private tutor, returning to England shortly before the Restoration. In Charles II.’s first parliament he sat for East Grinstead in Sussex. He had no taste for politics, however, but won a reputation as courtier and wit at Whitehall. He bore his share in the excesses for which Sir Charles Sedley and the earl of Rochester were notorious. In 1662 he and his brother Edward, with three other gentlemen, were indicted for the robbery and murder of a tanner named Hoppy. The defence was that they were in pursuit of thieves, and mistook Hoppy for a highwayman. They appear to have been acquitted, for when in 1663 Sir Charles Sedley was tried for a gross breach of public decency in Covent Garden, Buckhurst, who had been one of the offenders, was asked by the lord chief justice “whether he had so soon forgot his deliverance at that time.” Something in his character made his follies less obnoxious to the citizens than those of the other rakes, for he was never altogether unpopular, and Rochester is said to have told Charles II. that he did not “know how it was, my Lord Dorset might do anything, yet was never to blame.” In 1665 he volunteered to serve under the duke of York in the Dutch War. His famous song, “To all you ladies now at Land,” was written, according to Prior, on the night before the victory gained over “foggy Opdam” off Harwich (June 3, 1665). Dr Johnson, with the remark that “seldom any splendid story is wholly true,” says that the earl of Orrery had told him it was only retouched on that occasion. In 1667 Pepys laments that Buckhurst had lured Nell Gwyn away from the theatre, and that with Sedley the two kept “merry house” at Epsom. Next year the king was paying court to Nell, and her “Charles the First,” as she called Buckhurst, was sent on a “sleeveless errand” into France to be out of the way. His gaiety and wit secured the continued favour of Charles II., but did not especially recommend him to James II., who could not, moreover, forgive Dorset’s lampoons on his mistress, Catharine Sedley, countess of Dorchester. On James’s accession, therefore, he retired from court. He concurred in the invitation to William of Orange, who made him privy councillor, lord chamberlain (1689), and knight of the Garter (1692). During 434 William’s absences in 1695-1698 he was one of the lord justices of the realm.

He was a generous patron of men of letters. When Dryden was dismissed from the laureateship, he made him an equivalent pension from his own purse. Matthew Prior, in dedicating his Poems on Several Occasions (1709) to Dorset’s son, affirms that his opinion was consulted by Edmund Waller; that the duke of Buckingham deferred the publication of his Rehearsal until he was assured that Dorset would not “rehearse upon him again”; and that Samuel Butler and Wycherley both owed their first recognition to him. Prior’s praise of Dorset is no doubt extravagant, but when his youthful follies were over he appears to have developed sterling qualities, and although the poems he has left are very few, none of them are devoid of merit. Dryden’s “Essay on Satire” and the dedication of the “Essay on Dramatic Poesy” are addressed to him. Walpole (Catalogue of Noble Authors, iv.) says that he had as much wit as his first master, or his contemporaries Buckingham and Rochester, without the royal want of feeling, the duke’s want of principles or the earl’s want of thought; and Congreve reported of him when he was dying that he “slabbered” more wit than other people had in their best health. He was three times married, his first wife being Mary, widow of Charles Berkeley, earl of Falmouth. He died at Bath on the 29th of January 1706.

The fourth act of Pompey the Great, a tragedy translated out of French by certain persons of honour, is by Dorset. The satires for which Pope classed him with the masters in that kind seem to have been short lampoons, with the exception of A faithful catalogue of our most eminent ninnies (reprinted in Bibliotheca Curiosa, ed. Goldsmid, 1885). The Works of the Earls of Rochester, Roscommon and Dorset, the Dukes of Devonshire, Buckinghamshire, &c., with Memoirs of their Lives (1731) is catalogued (No. 20841) by H. G. Bohn in 1841. His Poems are included in Anderson’s and other collections of the British poets.

Lionel Cranfield Sackville, 1st Duke of Dorset (1688-1765), the only son of the 6th earl, was born on the 18th of January 1688. He succeeded his father as 7th earl of Dorset in January 1706, and was created duke of Dorset in 1720. He was lord steward of the royal household from 1725 to 1730, and lord-lieutenant of Ireland from 1730 to 1737; he was again lord steward from 1737 to 1745, and was lord president of the council from 1745 to 1751. In 1750 he was appointed lord-lieutenant of Ireland for the second time, and after a stormy viceroyalty he was dismissed from office in 1755. The duke, who was several times one of the lords justices of Great Britain and held many other positions of trust, died on the 10th of October 1765. He left three sons: Charles, the 2nd duke; John Philip (d. 1765); and George, who took the additional name of Germain in 1770, and in 1782 was created Viscount Sackville (q.v.).

Charles Sackville, 2nd Duke of Dorset (1711-1769), an associate of Frederick, prince of Wales, was a member of parliament for many years and a lord of the treasury under Henry Pelham; he died on the 5th of January 1769, when his nephew, John Frederick (1745-1799), became the 3rd duke. This nobleman was ambassador in Paris from 1783 to 1789, and lord steward of the household from 1789 to 1799; he died on the 19th of July 1799, and was succeeded by his only son, George John Frederick (1793-1815). When the 4th duke died unmarried in February 1815, the titles passed to his kinsman, Charles Sackville Germain (1767-1843), son and heir of the 1st Viscount Sackville, who thus became 5th duke of Dorset. When he died on the 29th of July 1843 the titles became extinct.


1 J. L. Motley, Hist. of the United Netherlands (vol. ii. p. 216, ed. 1867).


DORSETSHIRE (Dorset), a south-western county of England, bounded N.E. by Wiltshire, E. by Hampshire, S. by the English Channel, W. by Devonshire and N.W. by Somersetshire. The area is 987.9 sq. m. The surface is for the most part broken. A line of hills or downs, forming part of the system to which the general name of the Western Downs is applied, enters the county in the north-east near Shaftesbury, and strikes across it in a direction generally W. by S., leaving it towards Axminster and Crewkerne in Devonshire. East of Beaminster in the south-west another line, the Purbeck Downs, branches S.E. to the coast, which it follows as far as the district called the Isle of Purbeck in the south-east of the county. Both these ranges occasionally exceed a height of 900 ft. Of the principal rivers and streams, the Stour rises just outside the county in Wiltshire, and flows with a general south-easterly course to join the Hampshire Avon close to its mouth. It receives the Cale, Lidden and other streams in its upper course, and breaches the central hills in its middle course between Sturminster Newton and Blandford. The Lidden and Cale are the chief streams of the well-watered and fertile district known as the Vale of Blackmore. The small river Piddle or Trent and the larger Frome, rising in the central hills, traverse a plain tract of open country between the central and southern ranges, and almost unite their mouths in Poole Harbour. In the north-west the Yeo, collecting many feeders, flows northward to join the Parret and so sends its waters to the Bristol Channel. The Char, the Brit and the Bride, with their feeders, water many picturesque short valleys in the south-west. The coast is always beautiful, and in some parts magnificent. In the east it is broken by the irregular, lake-like inlet of Poole Harbour, pleasantly diversified with low islands, shallow, and at low tide largely drained. South of this a bold foreland, the termination of the southern hills (here called Ballard Down) divides Studland Bay from Swanage Bay, after which the coast line turns abruptly westward round Durlston Head. The peninsula thus formed with Poole Harbour on the north is known as the Isle of Purbeck, an oblong projection measuring 10 m. by 7. St Albans or Aldhelms Head is the next salient feature, after which the fine cliffs are indented with many little bays, of which the most noteworthy is the almost landlocked Lulworth Cove. The coast then turns southward to embrace Weymouth Bay and Portland Roads, where a harbour of refuge with massive breakwaters is protected to the south by the Isle of Portland. The isle is connected with the mainland by Chesil Bank, a remarkable beach of shingle. After this the coast is less broken than before and continues highly picturesque as far as the confines of the county near Lyme Regis. This small town, with Charmouth, Bridport, Weymouth, Lulworth Cove and Swanage, are in considerable favour as watering-places.

Geology.—Occupying as it does the central and most elevated part of the county, the Chalk is the most prominent geological formation in Dorsetshire. It sweeps in a south-westerly direction, as a belt of high ground about 12 m. in width, from Cranborne Chase, through Blandford, Milton Abbas and Frampton to Dorchester; westward it reaches a point just north of Beaminster. From about Dorchester the Chalk outcrop narrows and turns south-eastward by Portisham, Bincombe, to West Lulworth, thence the crop proceeds eastward as the ridge of the Purbeck Hills, and finally runs out to sea as the headland between Studland and Swanage Bays.

Upon the Chalk in the eastern part of the county are the Eocene beds of the Hampshire Basin. These are fringed by the Reading Beds and London Clay, which occur as a narrow belt from Cranborne through Wimborne Minster, near Bere Regis and Piddletown; here the crop swings round south-eastward through West Knighton, Winfrith and Lulworth, and thence along the northern side of the Purbeck Hills to Studland. Most of the remaining Eocene area is occupied by the sands, gravel and clay of the Bagshot series. The Agglestone Rock near Studland is a hard mass of the Bagshot formation; certain clays in the same series in the Wareham district have a world-wide reputation for pottery purposes; since they are exported from Poole Harbour they are often known as “Poole Clay.” From beneath the Chalk the Selbornian or Gault and Upper Greensand crops out as a narrow, irregular band. The Gault clay is only distinguishable in the northern and southern districts. Here and there the Greensand forms prominent hills, as that on which the town of Shaftesbury stands. The Upper Greensand appears again as outliers farther west, forming the high ground above Lyme Regis, Golden Cap, and Pillesden and Lewesden Pens. The Lower Greensand crops out on the south side of the Purbeck Hills and may be seen at Punfield Cove and Worbarrow Bay, but this formation thins out towards the west. By the action of the agencies of denudation upon the faulted anticline of the Isle of Purbeck, the Wealden beds are brought to light in the vale between Lulworth and Swanage; a similar cause has accounted for their appearance at East Chaldon. South of the strip of Weald Clay is an elevated plateau consisting of Purbeck Beds which rest upon Portland Stone and Portland Sand. Cropping out from beneath the Portland beds is the Kimmeridge Clay with so-called “Coal” bands, which forms the lower platform near the village of that name.

The Middle Purbeck building stone and Upper Purbeck Paludina marble have been extensively quarried in the Isle of Purbeck. An interesting feature in the Lower Purbeck is the “Dirt bed,” the remains of a Jurassic forest, which may be seen near Mupe Bay and 435 on the Isle of Portland, where both the Purbeck and Portland formations are well exposed, the latter yielding the well-known freestones. In the north-west of the county the Kimmeridge Clay crops in a N.-S. direction from the neighbourhood of Gillingham by Woolland to near Buckland Newton; in the south, a strip runs E. and W. between Abbotsbury, Upway and Osmington Mill. Next in order come the Corallian Beds and Oxford Clay which follow the line of the Kimmeridge Clay, that is, they run from the north to the south-west except in the neighbourhood of Abbotsbury and Weymouth, where these beds are striking east and west.

Below the Oxford Clay is the Cornbrash, which may be seen near Redipole, Stalbridge and Stourton; then follows the Forest Marble, which usually forms a strong escarpment over the Fuller’s Earth beneath—at Thornford the Fuller’s Earth rock is quarried. Next comes the Inferior Oolite, quarried near Sherborne and Beaminster; the outcrop runs on to the coast at Bridport. Beneath the Oolites are the Midford sands, which are well exposed in the cliff between Bridport and Burton Brandstock. Except where the Greensand outliers occur, the south-western part of the county is occupied by Lower and Middle Lias beds. These are clays and marls in the upper portions and limestones below. Rhaetic beds, the so-called “White Lias,” are exposed in Pinhay Bay.

Many of the formations in Dorsetshire are highly fossiliferous, notably the Lias of Lyme Regis, whence Ichthyosaurus and other large reptiles have been obtained; remains of the Iguanodon have been taken from the Wealden beds of the Isle of Purbeck; the Kimmeridge Clay, Inferior Oolite, Forest Marble and Fuller’s Earth are all fossil-bearing rocks. The coast exhibits geological sections of extreme interest and variety; the vertical and highly inclined strata of the Purbeck anticline are well exhibited at Gad Cliff or near Ballard Point; at the latter place the fractured fold is seen to pass into an “overthrust fault.”

Climate and Agriculture.—The air of Dorsetshire is remarkably mild, and in some of the more sheltered spots on the coast semi-tropical plants are found to flourish. The district of the clays obtains for the county the somewhat exaggerated title of the “garden of England,” though the rich Vale of Blackmore and the luxuriant pastures and orchards in the west may support the name. Yet Dorsetshire is not generally a well-wooded county, though much fine timber appears in the richer soils, in some of the sheltered valleys of the chalk district, and more especially upon the Greensand. About three-fourths of the total area is under cultivation, and of this nearly five-eighths is in permanent pasture, while there are in addition about 26,000 acres of hill pasturage; the chalk downs being celebrated of old as sheep-walks. Wheat, barley and oats are grown about equally. Turnips occupy nearly three-fourths of the average under green crops. Sheep are largely kept, though in decreasing numbers. The old horned breed of Dorsetshire were well known, but Southdowns or Hampshires are now frequently preferred. Devons, shorthorns and Herefords are the most common breeds of cattle. Dairy farming is an important industry.

Other Industries.—The quarries of Isles of Portland and Purbeck are important. The first supplies a white freestone employed for many of the finest buildings in London and elsewhere. Purbeck marble is famous through its frequent use by the architects of many of the most famous Gothic churches in England. A valuable product of Purbeck is a white pipeclay, largely applied to the manufacture of china, for which purpose it is exported to the Potteries of Staffordshire. Industries, beyond those of agriculture and quarrying, are slight, though some shipbuilding is carried on at Poole, and paper is made at several towns. Other small manufactures are those of flax and hemp in the neighbourhood of Bridport and Beaminster, of bricks, tiles and pottery in the Poole district, and of nets (braiding, as the industry is called) in some of the villages. There are silk-mills at Sherborne and elsewhere. There are numerous fishing stations along the coast, the fishing being mostly coastal. There are oyster beds in Poole Harbour. The chief ports are Poole, Weymouth, Swanage, Bridport, and Lyme Regis. The harbour of refuge at Portland, under the Admiralty, is an important naval station, and is fortified.

Communications.—The main line of the London & South Western railway serves Gillingham and Sherborne in the north of the county. Branches of this system serve Wimborne, Poole, Swanage, Dorchester, Weymouth and Portland. The two last towns, with Bridport, are served by the Great Western railway; the Somerset & Dorset line (Midland and South Western joint) follows the Stour valley by Blandford and Wimborne; and Lyme Regis is the terminus of a light railway from Axminster on the South Western line.

Population and Administration.—The area of the ancient county is 632,270 acres, with a population in 1891 of 194,517, and in 1901 of 202,936. The area of the administrative county is 625,578 acres. The county contains 35 hundreds. It is divided into northern, eastern, southern and western parliamentary divisions, each returning one member. It contains the following municipal boroughs—Blandford Forum (pop. 3649), Bridport (5710), Dorchester, the county town (9458), Lyme Regis (2095), Poole (19,463), Shaftesbury (2027), Wareham (2003), Weymouth and Melcombe Regis (19,831). The following are other urban districts—Portland (15,199), Sherborne (5760), Swanage (3408), Wimborne Minster (3696). Dorsetshire is in the western circuit, and assizes are held at Dorchester. It has one court of quarter sessions, and is divided into nine petty sessional divisions. The boroughs of Bridport, Dorchester, Lyme Regis, Poole, and Weymouth and Melcombe Regis have separate commissions of the peace, and the borough of Poole has in addition a separate court of quarter sessions. There are 289 civil parishes. The ancient county, which is almost entirely in the diocese of Salisbury, contains 256 ecclesiastical parishes or districts wholly or in part.

History.—The kingdom of Wessex originated with the settlement of Cerdic and his followers in Hampshire in 495, and at some time before the beginning of the 8th century the tide of conquest and colonization spread beyond the Frome and Kennet valleys and swept over the district which is now Dorsetshire. In 705 the West Saxon see was transferred to Sherborne, and the numerous foundations of religious houses which followed did much to further the social and industrial development of the county; though the wild and uncivilized state in which the county yet lay may be conjectured from the names of the hundreds and of their meeting-places, at barrows, boulders and vales. In 787 the Danes landed at Portland, and in 833 they arrived at Charmouth with thirty-five ships and fought with Ecgbert. The shire is first mentioned by name in the Saxon Chronicle in 845, when the Danes were completely routed at the mouth of the Parret by the men of Dorsetshire under Osric the ealdorman. In 876 the invaders captured Wareham, but were driven out next year by Alfred, and 120 of their ships were wrecked at Swanage. During the two following centuries Dorset was constantly ravaged by the Danes, and in 1015 Canute came on a plundering expedition to the mouth of the Frome. Several of the West Saxon kings resided in Dorsetshire, and Æthelbald and Æthelbert were buried at Sherborne, and Æthelred at Wimborne. In the reign of Canute Wareham was the shire town; it was a thriving seaport, with a house for the king when he came there on his hunting expeditions, a dwelling for the shire-reeve and accommodation for the leading thegns of the shire. At the time of the Conquest Dorset formed part of Harold’s earldom, and the resistance which it opposed to the Conqueror was punished by a merciless harrying, in which Dorchester, Wareham and Shaftesbury were much devastated, and Bridport utterly ruined.

No Englishman retained estates of any importance after the Conquest, and at the time of the Survey the bulk of the land, with the exception of the forty-six manors held by the king, was in the hands of religious houses, the abbeys of Cerne, Milton and Shaftesbury being the most wealthy. There were 272 mills in the county at the time of the Survey, and nearly eighty men were employed in working salt along the coast. Mints existed at Shaftesbury, Wareham, Dorchester and Bridport, the three former having been founded by Æthelstan. The forests of Dorsetshire were favourite hunting-grounds of the Norman kings, and King John in particular paid frequent visits to the county.

No precise date can be assigned for the establishment of the shire system in Wessex, but in the time of Ecgbert the kingdom was divided into definite pagi, each under an ealdorman, which no doubt represented the later shires. The Inquisitio Geldi, drawn up two years before the Domesday Survey, gives the names of the 39 pre-Conquest hundreds of Dorset. The 33 hundreds and 436 21 liberties of the present day retain some of the original names, but the boundaries have suffered much alteration. The 8000 acres of Stockland and Dalwood reckoned in the Dorset Domesday are now annexed to Devon, and the manor of Holwell now included in Dorset was reckoned with Somerset until the 19th century. Until the reign of Elizabeth Dorset and Somerset were united under one sheriff.

After the transference of the West Saxon see from Sherborne to Sarum in 1075, Dorset remained part of that diocese until 1542, when it was included in the newly formed diocese of Bristol. The archdeaconry was coextensive with the shire, and was divided into five rural deaneries at least as early as 1291.

The vast power and wealth monopolized by the Church in Dorsetshire tended to check the rise of any great county families. The representatives of the families of Mohun, Brewer and Arundel held large estates after the Conquest, and William Mohun was created earl of Dorset by the empress Maud. The families of Clavel, Lovell, Maundeville, Mautravers, Peverel and St Lo also came over with the Conqueror and figure prominently in the early annals of the county.

Dorsetshire took no active part in the struggles of the Norman and Plantagenet period. In 1627 the county refused to send men to La Rochelle, and was reproved for its lack of zeal in the service of the state. On the outbreak of the Civil War of the 17th century the general feeling was in favour of the king, and after a series of royalist successes in 1643 Lyme Regis and Poole were the only garrisons in the county left to the parliament. By the next year however, the parliament had gained the whole county with the exception of Sherborne and the Isle of Portland. The general aversion of the Dorsetshire people to warlike pursuits is demonstrated at this period by the rise of the “clubmen,” so called from their appearance without pikes or fire-arms at the county musters, whose object was peace at all costs, and who punished members of either party discovered in the act of plundering.

In the 14th century Dorsetshire produced large quantities of wheat and wool, and had a prosperous clothing trade. In 1626 the county was severely visited by the plague, and from this date the clothing industry began to decline. The hundred of Pimperne produced large quantities of saltpeter in the 17th century, and the serge manufacture was introduced about this time. Portland freestone was first brought into use in the reign of James I., when it was employed for the new banqueting house at Whitehall, and after the Great Fire it was extensively used by Sir Christopher Wren. In the 18th century Blandford, Sherborne and Lyme Regis were famous for their lace, but the industry has now declined.

The county returned two members to parliament in 1290, and as the chief towns acquired representation the number was increased, until in 1572 the county and nine boroughs returned a total of twenty members. Under the Reform Act of 1832 the county returned three members, and Corfe Castle was disfranchised. By the Representation of the People Act of 1868 Lyme Regis was disfranchised, and by the Redistribution Act of 1885 the remaining boroughs were disfranchised.

Antiquities.—Remains of medieval castles are inconsiderable, with the notable exception of Corfe Castle and the picturesque ruins of Sherborne Castle, both destroyed after the Civil War of the 17th century. The three finest churches in the county are the abbey church of Sherborne, Wimborne Minster and Milton Abbey church, a Decorated and Perpendicular structure erected on the site of a Norman church which was burnt. It has transepts, chancel and central tower, but the nave was not built. This was a Benedictine foundation of the 10th century, and the refectory of the 15th century is incorporated in the mansion built in 1772. At Ford Abbey part of the buildings of a Cistercian house are similarly incorporated. There are lesser monastic remains at Abbotsbury, Cerne and Bindon. The parish churches of Dorsetshire are not especially noteworthy as a whole, but those at Cerne Abbas and Beaminster are fine examples of the Perpendicular style, which is the most common in the county. A little good Norman work remains, as in the churches of Bere Regis and Piddletrenthide, but both these were reconstructed in the Perpendicular period; Bere Regis church having a superb timber roof of that period.

The dialect of the county, perfectly distinguishable from those of Wiltshire and Somersetshire, yet bearing many common marks of Saxon origin, is admirably illustrated in some of the poems of William Barnes (q.v.). Many towns, villages and localities are readily to be recognized from their descriptions in the “Wessex” novels of Thomas Hardy (q.v.).

A curious ancient Survey of Dorsetshire was written by the Rev. Mr Coker, about the middle of the 17th century, and published from his MS. (London, 1732). See also J. Hutchins, History and Antiquities of the County of Dorset (London, 1774); 2nd ed. by R. Gough and E. B. Nichols (1796-1815); 3rd ed. by W. Shipp and J. W. Hodson (1861-1873); C. Warne, Ancient Dorset (London, 1865); R. W. Eyton, A Key to Domesday, exemplified by an analysis and digest of the Dorset Survey (London, 1878); C. H. Mayo, Bibliotheca Dorsetiensis (London, 1885); W. Barnes, Glossary of Dorset Dialect (Dorchester, 1886); H. J. Moule, Old Dorset (London, 1893); Victoria County History, Dorsetshire.


DORSIVENTRAL (Lat. dorsum, the back, venter, the belly), a term used to describe an organ which has two surfaces differing from each other in appearance and structure, as an ordinary leaf.


DORT, SYNOD OF. An assembly of the Reformed Dutch Church, with deputies from Switzerland, the Palatinate, Nassau, Hesse, East Friesland, Bremen, Scotland and England, called to decide the theological differences existing between the Arminians (or Remonstrants) and the Calvinists (or Counter-Remonstrants), was held at Dort or Dordrecht (q.v.) in the years 1618 and 1619. The government of Louis XIII. prohibited the attendance of French delegates. During the life of Arminius a bitter controversy had sprung up between his followers and the strict Calvinists, led by Francis Gomar, his fellow-professor at Leiden; and, in order to decide their disputes, a synodical conference was proposed, but Arminius died before it could be held. At the conference held at the Hague in 1610 the Arminians addressed a remonstrance to the states-general in the form of five articles, which henceforth came to be known as the five points of Arminianism. In these they reacted against both the supralapsarian and the infralapsarian developments of the doctrine of predestination and combated the irresistibility of grace; they held that Christ died for all men and not only for the elect, and were not sure that the elect might not fall from grace. This conference had no influence in reconciling the opposing parties, and another, held at Delft in the year 1613, was equally unsuccessful. In 1614, at the instance of the Arminian party, an edict was passed by the states-general, in which toleration of the opinions of both parties was declared and further controversy forbidden; but this act only served, by rousing the jealousy of the Calvinists, to fan the controversial flame into greater fury. Gradually the dispute pervaded all classes of society, and the religious questions became entangled with political issues; the partisans of the house of Orange espoused the cause of the stricter Calvinism, whereas the bourgeois oligarchy of republican tendencies, led by Oldenbarnevelt and Hugo Grotius, stood for Arminianism. In 1617 Prince Maurice of Orange committed himself definitely to the Calvinistic party, found an occasion for throwing Oldenbarnevelt and Grotius into prison, and in November of that year called a synod intended to crush the Arminians. This synod, which assembled at Dort in November 1618, was strictly national—called by the national authority to decide a national dispute, and not intended to have more than a national influence. The foreign deputies were invited to attend, only to assist by their advice in the settlement of a controversy which concerned the Netherland church alone, and which the Netherland church alone could decide. At the fourth sitting it was decided to cite Simon Episcopius and several other Remonstrants to appear within fourteen days before the synod, to state and justify their doctrines. It was also agreed to allow the Arminian deputies to take part in the deliberations, only on condition that they forbore to consult with, or in any way assist, 437 their cited brethren, but this they refused. During the interval between the citation and the appearance of the accused, the professorial members of the synod were instructed to prepare themselves to be able to confute the Arminian errors, and the synod occupied itself with deliberations as to a new translation of the Bible, for which a commission was named, made arrangements for teaching the Heidelberg catechism, and granted permission to the missionaries of the East Indies to baptize such children of heathen parents as were admitted into their families. At the 25th sitting Episcopius and the others cited appeared, when Episcopius surprised the deputies by a bold and outspoken defence of his views, and even went so far as to say that the synod, by excluding the Arminian deputies, could now only be regarded as a schismatic assembly. The Remonstrants were asked to file copious explanations of the five points in dispute (Sententia Remonstrantium), but objecting to the manner in which they were catechized, they were, at the 57th sitting, dismissed from the synod as convicted “liars and deceivers.” The synod then proceeded in their absence to judge them from their published writings, and came to the conclusion that as ecclesiastical rebels and trespassers they should be deprived of all their offices. The synodical decision in regard to the five points is contained in the canons adopted at the 136th session held on the 23rd of April 1619; the points were: unconditional election, limited atonement, total depravity, irresistibility of grace, final perseverance of the saints. The issue of supralapsarianism v. infralapsarianism was avoided. These doctrinal decisions and the sentence against the Remonstrants were, at the 144th sitting, read in Latin before a large audience in the great church. The Remonstrants were required to subscribe the condemnation, and many of them refused and were banished. The synod was concluded on the 9th of May 1619, by a magnificent banquet given by the chief magistrate of Dort. The Dutch deputies remained a fortnight longer to attend to ecclesiastical business. Though the canons of Dort were adopted by but two churches outside of Holland, the synod ranks as the most impressive assemblage of the Reformed Church.

Authorities.Acta synodi nationalis ... Dordrechti habitae (Lugd. Bat. 1620, official edition); Acta der Nationale Synode te Dordrecht 1618 (Leiden, 1887), French translation (Leiden, 1622 and 1624, 2 vols.), for the Canons, and the Sententia Remonstrantium, E. F. Karl Müller, Die Bekenntnisschriften der reformierten Kirche (Leipzig, 1903), p. lix. ff., 843 ff.; for canons and abridged translation used by the Reformed Church in America, P. Schaff, The Creeds of Christendom (3rd ed., New York, 1877), 550 ff. See also H. Heppe, in Niedner’s Zeitschrift für die historische Theologie, Bd. 23 (Hamburg, 1853), 226-327 (letters of Hessian deputies); Acta et scripta synodalia Dordracena ministrorum Remonstrantium, Hardervici, 1620 (valuable side-lights); A. Schweizer, Die protestantischen Centraldogmen in ihrer Entwicklung innerhalb der reformierten Kirche, zweite Hälfte (Zürich, 1856), 25-224; H. C. Rogge in Herzog-Hauck, Realencyklopädie, Bd. 4 (Leipzig, 1898), 798-802; H. H. Kuyper, De Post-Acta of Nahandelingen van de Nationale Synode van Dordrecht, een historische Studie (Amsterdam, 1899, new material); J. Reitsma, Geschiednis van de Hervorming en de Hervormde Kerk der Nederlanden (2nd ed. Groningen, 1899); F. Loofs, Dogmengeschichte (4th ed., Halle, 1906), 935 ff.; T. Van Oppenraij, La Prédestination dans l’Eglise réformée des Pays-Bas depuis l’origine jusqu’au synode national de Dordrecht (Louvain, 1906).

(W. W. R.*)

DORTMUND, a town of Germany, the chief commercial centre of the Prussian province of Westphalia, on the Emscher, in a fertile plain, 50 m. E. from Düsseldorf by rail. Pop. (1875) 57,742; (1895) 111,232; (1905) 175,292. Since the abolition of the old walls in 1863 and the conversion of their site into promenades, the town has rapidly assumed a modern appearance. The central part, however, with its winding narrow streets, is redolent of its historical past, when, as one of the leading cities of the Hanseatic League, it enjoyed commercial supremacy over all the towns of Westphalia. Among its ancient buildings must be mentioned the Reinoldikirche, with fine stained-glass windows, the Marienkirche, the nave of which dates from the 11th century, the Petrikirche, with a curious altar, and the Dominican church, with beautiful cloisters. The 13th-century town hall was restored in 1899 and now contains the municipal antiquarian museum, having been superseded by a more commodious building. Among the chief modern structures may be mentioned the magnificent post office, erected in 1895, the provincial law courts, the municipal infirmary and the large railway station. To the W. of the last there existed down to 1906 (when it was removed) one of the ancient lime trees of the Königshof, where the meetings of the Vehmgericht were held (see Fehmic Courts). But the real interest of Dortmund centres in its vast industries, which owe their development to the situation of the town in the centre of the great Westphalian coal basin. In the immediate vicinity are also extensive beds of iron ore, and this combination of mineral wealth has enabled the town to become a competitor with Essen, Oberhausen, Duisburg and Hagen in the products of the iron industry. These in Dortmund more particularly embrace steel railway rails, mining plant, wire ropes, machinery, safes and sewing machines. Dortmund has also extensive breweries, and, in addition to the manufactured goods already enumerated, does a considerable trade in corn and wood. Besides being well furnished with a convenient railway system, linking it with the innumerable manufacturing towns and villages of the iron district, it is also connected with the river Ems by the Dortmund-Ems Canal, 170 m. in length.

Dortmund, the Throtmannia of early history, was already a town of some importance in the 9th century. In 1005 the emperor Henry II. held here an ecclesiastical council, and in 1016 an imperial diet. The town was walled in the 12th century, and in 1387-1388 successfully withstood the troops of the archbishop of Cologne, who besieged it for twenty-one months. About the middle of the 13th century it joined the Hanseatic League. At the close of the Thirty Years’ War the population had become reduced to 3000. In 1803 Dortmund lost its rights as a free town, and was annexed to Nassau. The French occupied it in 1806, and in 1808 it was made over by Napoleon to the grand-duke of Berg, and became the chief town of the department of Ruhr. Through the cession of Westphalia by the king of the Netherlands, on the 31st of May 1815, it became a Prussian town.

See Thiersch, Geschichte der Freireichsstadt Dortmund (Dort, 1854), and Ludoff, Bau- und Kunstdenkmäler in Dortmund (Paderborn, 1895); also A. Shadwell, Industrial Efficiency (London, 1906).


DORY, or John Dory (Zeus faber), an Acanthopterygian fish, the type of the family Zeidae, held in such esteem by the ancient Greeks that they called it Zeus after their principal divinity. Its English name is probably a corruption of the French jaune dorée, and has reference to the prevailing golden-yellow colour of the living fish. The body in the dory is much compressed, and is nearly oval in form, while the mouth is large and capable of extensive protrusion. It possesses two dorsal fins, of which the anterior is armed with long slender spines, and the connecting membrane is produced into long tendril-like filaments; while a row of short spines extends along the belly and the roots of the anal and dorsal fins. The colour of the upper surface is olive-brown; the sides are yellowish, and are marked with a prominent dark spot, on account of which the dory divides with the haddock the reputation of being the fish from which Peter took the tribute money. It is an inhabitant of the Atlantic coasts of Europe, the Mediterranean and the Australian seas. It is occasionally abundant on the coasts of Devon and Cornwall, and is also found, though more sparingly, throughout the British seas. It is exceedingly voracious, feeding on molluscs, shrimps and the young of other fish; and Jonathan Couch (1789-1870), author of a History of British Fishes, states that from the stomach of a single dory he has taken 25 flounders, some 2½ in. long, 3 fatherlashers half grown and 5 stones from the beach, one 1½ in. in length. They are often taken in the fishermen’s nets off the Cornwall and Devon coast, having entered these in pursuit of pilchards. They are seldom found in deep water, preferring sandy bays, among the weeds growing on the bottom of which they lie in wait for their prey, and in securing this they are greatly assisted by their great width of gape, by their power of protruding the mouth, and by the slender filaments of the first dorsal fins, which float like worms in the water, while the greater part of the body is buried in the sand, and thus they entice the smaller fishes to come within easy reach of the capacious jaws. The dory often attains a weight of 12 ℔, although those usually brought into the market do not average more than 6 or 7 ℔. It is highly valued as an article of food.

438

The family Zeidae has assumed special interest of late, O. Thilo1 and G. A. Boulenger2 having shown that they have much in common with the flat-fishes or Pleuronectidae and must be nearly related to the original stock from which this asymmetrical type has been evolved, especially if the Upper Eocene genus Amphistium be taken into consideration. This affinity is further supported by the observations made by L. W. Byrne3 on the asymmetry in the number and arrangement of the bony plates at the base of the dorsal and anal fins in the young of the John Dory.

(G. A. B.)

1 “Die Vorfahren der Schollen,” Biol. Centralbl. xxii. (1902), p. 717.

2 “On the systematic position of the Pleuronectidae,” Ann. and Mag. N. H. x. (1902), p. 295.

3 “On the number and arrangement of the bony plates of the young John Dory,” Biometrika, ii. (1902), p. 115.


DOSITHEUS MAGISTER, Greek grammarian, flourished at Rome in the 4th century a.d. He was the author of a Greek translation of a Latin grammar, intended to assist the Greek-speaking inhabitants of the empire in learning Latin. The translation, at first word for word, becomes less frequent, and finally is discontinued altogether. The Latin grammar used was based on the same authorities as those of Charisius and Diomedes, which accounts for the many points of similarity. Dositheus contributed very little of his own. Some Greek-Latin exercises by an unknown writer of the 3rd century, to be learnt by heart and translated, were added to the grammar. They are of considerable value as illustrating the social life of the period and the history of the Latin language. Of these Έρμηνεύματα (Interpretamenta), the third book, containing a collection of words and phrases from everyday conversation (καθημερινὴ ὁμιλία) has been preserved. A further appendix consisted of Anecdotes, Letters and Rescripts of the emperor Hadrian; fables of Aesop; extracts from Hyginus; a history of the Trojan War, abridged from the Iliad; and a legal fragment, ἐλευθερώσεων (De manumissionibus).

Editions: Grammatica in H. Keil, Grammatici Latini, vii. and separately (1871); Hermeneumata by G. Götz (1892) (in G. Löwe’s Corpus glossariorum Latinorum, iii.) and E. Böcking (1832), which contains the appendix (including the legal fragment); see also C. Lachmann, Versuch über Dositheus (1837); H. Hagen, De Dosithei magistri quae feruntur glossis (1877).


DOSSAL (dossel, dorsel or dosel; Fr. dos, back), an ecclesiastical ornamented cloth suspended behind the altar.


DOSSERET, or impost block (a Fr. term, from dos, back), in architecture, the cubical block of stone above the capitals in a Byzantine church, used to carry the arches and vault, the springing of which had a superficial area greatly in excess of the column which carried them.


DOST MAHOMMED KHAN (1793-1863), founder of the dynasty of the Barakzai in Afghanistan, was born in 1793. His elder brother, the chief of the Barakzai, Fatteh Khan, took an important part in raising Mahmud to the sovereignty of Afghanistan in 1800 and in restoring him to the throne in 1809. That ruler repaid his services by causing him to be assassinated in 1818, and thus incurred the enmity of his tribe. After a bloody conflict Mahmud was deprived of all his possessions but Herat, the rest of his dominions being divided among Fatteh Khan’s brothers. Of these Dost Mahommed received for his share Ghazni, to which in 1826 he added Kabul, the richest of the Afghan provinces. From the commencement of his reign he found himself involved in disputes with Ranjit Singh, the Sikh ruler of the Punjab, who used the dethroned Saduzai prince, Shuja-ul-Mulk, as his instrument. In 1834 Shuja made a last attempt to recover his kingdom. He was defeated by Dost Mahommed under the walls of Kandahar, but Ranjit Singh seized the opportunity to annex Peshawar. The recovery of this fortress became the Afghan amir’s great concern. Rejecting overtures from Russia, he endeavoured to form an alliance with England, and welcomed Alexander Burnes to Kabul in 1837. Burnes, however, was unable to prevail on the governor-general, Lord Auckland, to respond to the amir’s advances. Dost Mahommed was enjoined to abandon the attempt to recover Peshawar, and to place his foreign policy under British guidance. In return he was only promised protection from Ranjit Singh, of whom he had no fear. He replied by renewing his relations with Russia, and in 1838 Lord Auckland set the British troops in motion against him. In March 1839 the British force under Sir Willoughby Cotton advanced through the Bolan Pass, and on the 26th of April it reached Kandahar. Shah Shuja was proclaimed amir, and entered Kabul on the 7th of August, while Dost Mahommed sought refuge in the wilds of the Hindu Kush. Closely followed by the British, Dost was driven to extremities, and on the 4th of November 1840 surrendered as a prisoner. He remained in captivity during the British occupation, during the disastrous retreat of the army of occupation in January 1842, and until the recapture of Kabul in the autumn of 1842. He was then set at liberty, in consequence of the resolve of the British government to abandon the attempt to intervene in the internal politics of Afghanistan. On his return from Hindustan Dost Mahommed was received in triumph at Kabul, and set himself to re-establish his authority on a firm basis. From 1846 he renewed his policy of hostility to the British and allied himself with the Sikhs; but after the defeat of his allies at Gujrat on the 21st of February 1849 he abandoned his designs and led his troops back into Afghanistan. In 1850 he conquered Balkh, and in 1854 he acquired control over the southern Afghan tribes by the capture of Kandahar. On the 30th of March 1855 Dost Mahommed reversed his former policy by concluding an offensive and defensive alliance with the British government. In 1857 he declared war on Persia in conjunction with the British, and in July a treaty was concluded by which the province of Herat was placed under a Barakzai prince. During the Indian Mutiny Dost Mahommed punctiliously refrained from assisting the insurgents. His later years were disturbed by troubles at Herat and in Bokhara. These he composed for a time, but in 1862 a Persian army, acting in concert with Ahmad Khan, advanced against Kandahar. The old amir called the British to his aid, and, putting himself at the head of his warriors, drove the enemy from his frontiers. On the 26th of May 1863 he captured Herat, but on the 9th of June he died suddenly in the midst of victory, after playing a great rôle in the history of Central Asia for forty years. He named as his successor his son, Shere Ali Khan.

(E. I. C.)

DOSTOIEVSKY, FEODOR MIKHAILOVICH (1821-1881), Russian author, born at Moscow, on the 30th of October 1821, was the second son of a retired military surgeon of a decayed noble family. He was educated at Moscow and at the military engineering academy at St Petersburg, which he left in 1843 with the grade of sub-lieutenant. Next year his father died, and he resigned his commission in order to devote himself to literature—thus commencing a long struggle with ill-health and penury. In addition to the old Russian masters Gogol and Pushkin, Balzac and George Sand supplied him with literary ideals. He knew little of Dickens, but his first story is thoroughly Dickensian in character. The hero is a Russian “Tom Pinch,” who entertains a pathetic, humble adoration for a fair young girl, a solitary waif like himself. Characteristically the Russian story ends in “tender gloom.” The girl marries a middle-aged man of property; the hero dies of a broken heart, and his funeral is described in lamentable detail. The germ of all Dostoievsky’s imaginative work may be discovered here. The story was submitted in manuscript to the Russian critic, Bielinski, and excited his astonishment by its power over the emotions. It appeared in the course of 1846 in the Recueil de Saint-Pétersbourg, under the title of “Poor People.” An English version, Poor Folk, with an introduction by Mr George Moore, appeared in 1894. The successful author became a regular contributor of short tales to the Annals of the Country, a monthly periodical conducted by Kraevsky; but he was wretchedly paid, and his work, though revealing extraordinary power and intensity, commonly lacks both finish and proportion. Poverty and physical suffering robbed him of the joy of life and filled him with bitter thoughts and morbid imaginings. During 1847 he became an enthusiastic member of the revolutionary reunions of the political agitator, Petrachevski. Many of the students and younger members did little more than discuss the theories of Fourier and other economists at these gatherings. Exaggerated 439 reports were eventually carried to the police, and on the 23rd of April 1849 Dostoievsky and his brother, with thirty other suspected personages, were arrested. After a short examination by the secret police they were lodged in the fortress of St Peter and St Paul at St Petersburg, in which confinement Feodor wrote his story A Little Hero. On the 22nd of December 1849 the accused were all condemned to death and conveyed in vans to a large scaffold in the Simonovsky Place. As the soldiers were preparing to carry out the sentence, the prisoners were informed that their penalty was commuted to exile in Siberia. The novelist’s sentence was, four years in Siberia and enforced military service in the ranks for life. On Christmas eve 1849 he commenced the long journey to Omsk, and remained in Siberia, “like a man buried alive, nailed down in his coffin,” for four terrible years. His Siberian experiences are graphically narrated in a volume to which he gave the name of Recollections of a Dead-House (1858). It was known in an English translation as Buried Alive in Siberia (1881; another version, 1888). His release only subjected him to fresh indignities as a common soldier at Semipalatinsk; but in 1858, through the intercession of an old schoolfellow, General Todleben, he was made an under-officer; and in 1859, upon the accession of Alexander II., he was finally recalled from exile. In 1858 he had married a widow, Madame Isaiev, but she died at St Petersburg in 1867 after a somewhat stormy married life.

After herding for years with the worst criminals, Dostoievsky obtained an exceptional insight into the dark and seamy side of Russian life. He formed new conceptions of human life, of the balance of good and evil in man, and of the Russian character. Psychological studies have seldom, if ever, found a more intense form of expression than that embodied by Dostoievsky in his novel called Crime and Punishment. The hero Raskolnikov is a poor student, who is led on to commit a murder partly by self-conceit, partly by the contemplation of the abject misery around him. Unsurpassed in poignancy in the whole of modern literature is the sensation of compassion evoked by the scene between the self-tormented Raskolnikov and the humble street-walker, Sonia, whom he loves, and from whom, having confessed his crime, he derives the idea of expiation. Raskolnikov finally gives himself up to the police and is exiled to Siberia, whither Sonia follows him. The book gave currency to a number of ideas, not in any sense new, but specially characteristic of Dostoievsky: the theory, for instance, that in every life, however fallen and degraded, there are ecstatic moments of self-devotion; the doctrine of purification by suffering, and by suffering alone; and the ideal of a Russian people forming a social state at some future period bound together by no obligation save mutual love and the magic of kindness. In this visionary prospect, as well as in his objection to the use of physical force, Dostoievsky anticipated in a remarkable manner some of the conspicuous tenets of his great successor Tolstoy. The book electrified the reading public in Russia upon its appearance in 1866, and its fame was confirmed when it appeared in Paris in 1867. To his remarkable faculty of awakening reverberations of melancholy and compassion, as shown in his early work, Dostoievsky had added, by the admission of all, a rare mastery over the emotions of terror and pity. But such mastery was not long to remain unimpaired. Crime and Punishment was written when he was at the zenith of his power. His remaining works exhibit frequently a marvellous tragic and analytic power, but they are unequal, and deficient in measure and in balance. The chief of them are: The Injured and the Insulted, The Demons (1867), The Idiot (1869), The Adult (1875), The Brothers Karamzov (1881).

From 1865, when he settled in St Petersburg, Dostoievsky was absorbed in a succession of journalistic enterprises, in the Slavophil interest, and suffered severe pecuniary losses. He had to leave Russia, in order to escape his creditors, and to seek refuge in Germany and Italy. He was further harassed by troubles with his wife, and his work was interrupted by epileptic fits and other physical ailments. It was under such conditions as these that his most enduring works were created. He managed finally to return to Russia early in the seventies, and was for some time director of The Russian World. From 1876 he published a kind of review, entitled Carnet d’un écrivain, to the pages of which he committed many strange autobiographical facts and reflections. The last eight years of his life were spent in comparative prosperity at St Petersburg, where he died on the 9th of February 1881.

His life had been irremediably seared by his Siberian experiences. He looked prematurely old; his face bore an expression of accumulated sorrow; in disposition he had become distrustful, taciturn, contemptuous—his favourite theme the superiority of the Russian peasant over every other class; as an artist, though uncultured, he had ever been subtle and sympathetic, but latterly he was tortured by tragic visions and morbidly preoccupied by exceptional and perverted types. M. de Vogüé, in his admirable Ecrivains russes, has worked out with some success a parallel between the later years of Dostoievsky and those of Jean Jacques Rousseau. Siberia effectually convinced the novelist of the impotence of Nihilism in such a country as Russia; but though he was assailed by ardent Liberals for the reactionary trend of his later writings, Dostoievsky became, towards the end of his life, an extremely popular figure, and his funeral, on the 12th of February 1881, was the occasion of one of the most remarkable demonstrations of public feeling ever witnessed in the Russian capital. The death of the Russian novelist was not mentioned in the London press; it is only since 1885, when Crime and Punishment first appeared, in English, that his name has become at all familiar in England, mainly through French translations.

A complete edition of his novels was issued at St Petersburg in fourteen volumes (1882-1883). Two critical studies by Tchij and Zelinsky appeared at Moscow in 1885, and a German life by Hoffmann at Vienna in 1899.

(T. Se.)

DOUAI, a town of northern France, capital of an arrondissement in the department of Nord, 20 m. S. of Lille on the Northern railway between that city and Cambrai. Pop. (1906) town, 21,679; commune, 33,247. Douai is situated in a marshy plain on the banks of the Scarpe which intersects the town from south to north, and supplies water to a canal skirting it on the west. The old fortifications, of which the Porte de Valenciennes (15th century) is the chief survival, have been demolished to make room for boulevards and public gardens. The industrial towns of Dorignies, Sin-le-Noble and Aniche are practically suburbs of Douai. Of the churches, that of Notre-Dame (12th and 14th centuries) is remarkable for the possession of a fine altarpiece of the early 16th century, composed of wooden panels painted by Jean Bellegambe, a native of Douai. The principal building of the town is a handsome hôtel de ville, partly of the 15th century, with a lofty belfry. The Palais de Justice (18th century) was formerly the town house (refuge) of the abbey of Marchiennes. Houses of the 16th, 17th and 18th centuries are numerous. There is a statue of Madame Desbordes Valmore, the poet (d. 1859), a native of the town. The municipal museum contains a library of over 85,000 volumes as well as 1800 MSS., and a fine collection of sculpture and paintings. Douai is the seat of a court of appeal, a court of assizes and a subprefect, and has a tribunal of first instance, a board of trade-arbitrators, an exchange, a chamber of commerce and a branch of the Bank of France. Its educational institutions include a lycée, training colleges, a school of mines, an artillery school, schools of music, agriculture, drawing, architecture, &c., and a national school for instruction in brewing and other industries connected with agriculture. In addition to other iron and engineering works, Douai has a large cannon foundry and an arsenal; coal-mining and the manufacture of glass and bottles and chemicals are carried on a large scale in the environs; among the other industries are flax-spinning, rope-making, brewing and the manufacture of farm implements, oil, sugar, soap and leather. Trade, which is largely water-borne, is in grain and agricultural products, coal and building material.

Douai, the site of which was occupied by a castle (Castrum Duacense) as early as the 7th century, belonged in the middle ages to the counts of Flanders, passed in 1384 to the dukes of Burgundy, and so in 1477 with the rest of the Netherlands to Spain. In 1667 it was captured by Louis XIV., and was ultimately ceded to France by the treaty of Utrecht in 1713. Historically Douai is mainly important as the centre of the political and religious propaganda of the exiled English Roman Catholics. 440 In 1562 Philip II. of Spain founded a university here, in which several English scholars were given chairs; and in connexion with this William Allen (q.v.) in 1568 founded the celebrated English college. It was here that the “Douai Bible” was prepared (see Vol. III. p. 901). There were also an Irish and a Scots college and houses of English Benedictines and Franciscans. All these survived till 1793, when the university was suppressed.

See F. Brassart, Hist. du château et de la châtellenie de Douai (Douai, 1877-87); C. Mine, Hist. pop. de Douai (ib. 1861); B. Ward, Dawn of the Catholic Revival (London, 1909); Handecœur, Hist. du Collège anglais, Douai (Reims, 1898); Daucoisne, Établissements britanniques à Douai (Douai, 1881).


DOUARNENEZ, a fishing-port of western France, in the department of Finistère, on the southern shore of the Bay of Douarnenez 15 m. N.W. of Quimper by rail. Pop. (1906) 13,472. Its sardine fishery, which is carried on from the end of June to the beginning of December, gives occupation to about 800 boats, and between 3000 and 4000 men, and the preserving of the fish is an important industry. Mackerel fishing, boat-building and rope and net making also occupy the inhabitants. There is a lighthouse on the small island of Tristan off Douarnenez.


DOUBLE (from the Mid. Eng. duble, the form which gives the present pronunciation, through the Old Fr. duble, from Lat. duplus, twice as much), twice as much, or large, having two parts, having a part repeated, coupled, &c. The word appears as a substantive with the special meaning of the appearance to a person of his own apparition, generally regarded as a warning, or of such an apparition of one living person to another, the German Doppelgänger (see Apparitions). Another word often used with this meaning is “fetch.” According to the New English Dictionary, “fetch” is chiefly of Irish usage, and may possibly be connected with “fetch,” to bring or carry away, but it may be a separate word. The Corpus Glossary of the beginning of the 10th century seems to identify a word fæcce with mære, meaning a goblin which appears in “nightmare.” “Double” is also used of a person whose resemblance to another is peculiarly striking or remarkable, so that confusion between them may easily arise.


DOUBLE BASS (Fr. contrebasse; Ger. Kontrabass, Gross Bass Geige; Ital. contrabasso, violone), the largest member of the modern family of stringed instruments played with a bow, known as the violin family, and the lowest in pitch. The double bass differs slightly in construction from the other members of the family in that it has slanting shoulders (one of the features of the viola da gamba, see Violin); that is to say that where the belly is joined by the neck and finger-board, it has a decided point, whereas in the violin, viola and violoncello, the finger-board is at right-angles to the horizontal part of a wide curve. It is probable that the shoulders of the double bass were made drooping for the sake of additional strength of construction on account of the strain caused by the tension of the strings. The double bass was formerly made with a flat back—another characteristic of the viol family—whereas now the back is as often found arched as flat. The bow is for obvious reasons shorter and stouter than the violin bow.

The technique of the double bass presents certain difficulties inherent in an instrument of such large proportions. The stretches for the fingers are very great, almost double those required for the violoncello, and owing to the thickness of the strings great force is required to press them against the finger-board when they are vibrating. The performer plays standing owing to the great size of the instrument.

The double bass sometimes has three strings tuned in England and Italy in fourths; 1 in France and Germany to fifths. Owing to the scoring of modern composers, however, it was found necessary to adopt an accordance of four strings in order to obtain the additional lower notes required, although this entails the sacrifice of beauty of tone, the three-stringed instrument being more sonorous. Some orchestras make a compromise dividing the double basses into two equal sections of three and four-stringed basses. The four strings are tuned in fourths:—. Mr A. C. White, finding that an additional lower compass was required, first tuned his double bass with three strings to afterwards adding a fourth string, the lower D. By this accordance the third and fourth strings gain additional power and clearness from the fact that the first and second, being their octaves higher, vibrate in sympathy, obviating the necessity of making the ’cello play in octaves with the double basses to increase the tone when the lowest register is used. In order to obtain equal sonority on his double bass with four strings, Mr White2 found it necessary to have a wider bridge measuring about 5 in., so that the distance between the strings should remain the same as on a double bass with three strings, thus allowing plenty of room for vibration. The neck was also widened in proportion. A five-stringed double bass was sometimes used in Germany tuned either to or to but such instruments have been almost superseded by those with four strings. A somewhat larger double bass with five strings by Karl Otho of Leipzig was introduced between 1880 and 1890 with the following accordance:—

The practical compass of the double bass extends from (real sounds) with all chromatic intervals. In order to avoid using numerous ledger lines the music is written an octave higher. The quality of tone is very powerful but somewhat rough, and varies greatly in its gradations. The notes of the lowest register, when played piano, sound weird and sometimes grotesque, and are sometimes used instead of the kettledrum; when played forte the tone is grand and full. The lowest octave is mainly used as a fundamental octave bass to ’cello, bassoon or trombone. The tone of the pizzicato is full and rich owing to the slowness of the vibrations, and it changes character according to the harmonies which lie above it: with a chord of the diminished seventh above it, for instance, the pizzicato sounds like a menace, but with the common chord calm and majestic. Both natural and artificial harmonics are possible on the double bass, the former being the best; but they are seldom used in orchestral works. As an instance of their use may be cited the scene by the Nile at the beginning of the third act of Verdi’s Aida, where harmonics are indicated for both ’cellos and double basses.

The technical capabilities of the double bass are necessarily somewhat more limited than those of the violoncello. Quick passages, though possible, are seldom written for it; they cannot sound clear owing to the time required for the strings to vibrate. An excellent effect is produced by what is known as the intermittent tremolo: owing to the elasticity of the bow, it rebounds several times on the strings when a single blow is sharply struck, forming a series of short tremolos. The double bass is the foundation of the whole orchestra and therefore of great importance; it plays the lowest part, often, as its name indicates, only doubling the ’cello part an octave lower. It is only since the beginning of the 19th century that an independent voice has occasionally been allotted to it, as in the Scherzo of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony in C minor:—

These opening bars are played soli by ’cellos and double basses, a daring innovation of Beethoven’s which caused quite a consternation at first in musical circles.

The remote origin of the double bass is the same as that of the violin.3 It was evolved from the bass viol; whether the transformation took place simultaneously with that of the violin from the treble viol or preceded it, has not been definitely proved, but both Gasparo da Salo and Maggini constructed double basses, which were in great request in the churches. De Salo made one with three strings for St Mark’s, Venice, which is still preserved there.4 It was Dragonetti’s favourite concert instrument, presented to him by the monks of St Mark, and, according to the desire expressed in his will, the instrument was restored after his death to St Mark’s, where it is at present preserved. Dragonetti used a straight bow similar to the violoncello bow, held overhand with the hair slanting towards the neck of the instrument; it 441 was introduced into England from Paris, and is a favourite with orchestral players. Praetorius gives an illustration of a sub-bass viol da gamba or gross contra-bass geige5 “recently constructed,” which displaced the other large contra-bass viols; of which he also gives an illustration.6

Giovanni Bottesini (1822-1889) was the greatest virtuoso on the double bass that the world has ever known. It was not only the perfection of his technique and tone which won him artistic fame, but also the delicacy of his style and his exquisite taste in phrasing.

(K. S.)

1 The real sounds are an octave lower.

2 The Double Bass (Novello, Music Primers, No. 32), p. 6.

3 See Kathleen Schlesinger, The Instruments of the Orchestra, Part II. “The Precursors of the Violin Family” (1908-1909).

4 See Laurent Grillet, Les Ancêtres du violon et du violoncelle (Paris, 1901), tome ii. p. 159; Willebald Leo von Lustgendorff, Die Geigen und Lautenmacher vom Mittelalter bis zur Gegenwart (Frankfurt a. M., 1904), p. 50; A. C. White, The Double Bass, p. 8.

5 M. Praetorius, Syntagma music. (Wolfenbüttel, 1618 and 1620), pp. 54-55 and pl. v. (1).

6 Ib. pl. vi. No. 4.


DOUBLEDAY, ABNER (1819-1893), American soldier, was born at Ballston Spa, New York, on the 26th of June 1819, and graduated from West Point in 1842. He served in the U.S. artillery during the Mexican War, being present at the battles of Monterey and Buena Vista. He was second in command at Fort Sumter, Charleston, South Carolina, when it was bombarded and taken by the Confederates in 1861, and later in the campaign of that year he served in the Shenandoah valley as a field officer. In February 1862 he was made a brigadier-general of volunteers and employed in the lines of Washington. He commanded a division in the Army of the Potomac in the second Bull Run campaign and at Antietam, becoming major-general U.S.V. in November 1862. He continued to command his division in the Fredericksburg and Chancellorsville campaigns, and on the first day of the battle of Gettysburg he led the I. corps, and for a time all the Union forces on the field, after the death of General Reynolds. In the latter part of the war he was employed in various administrative and military posts; in July 1863 he was breveted colonel, and in March 1865 brigadier-general and major-general U.S.A. General Doubleday continued in the army after the war, becoming colonel U.S.A. in 1867; he retired in 1873. He published two important works on the Civil War, Reminiscences of Forts Sumter and Moultrie (1876) and Chancellorsville and Gettysburg (1882), the latter being a volume of the series “Campaigns of the Civil War.” He died at Mendham, New Jersey, on the 26th of January 1893.

His younger brother, Ulysses Doubleday (1824-1893), fought through the Civil War as an officer of volunteers, was breveted brigadier-general U.S.V. in March 1865, and commanded a brigade at the battle of Five Forks (1st April).


DOUBLEDAY, THOMAS (1790-1870), English politician and author, was born at Newcastle-on-Tyne in February 1790. In early life he adopted the views of William Cobbett, and was active in promoting the agitation which resulted in the passing of the Reform Bill of 1832. As secretary of the Northern Political Union of Whigs and Radicals he took a prominent part in forwarding the interests of Earl Grey and the reforming party. In 1858-1859 he was a member of the council of the Northern Reform Union; and to the last he was a keen observer of political events. He succeeded his father, George Doubleday, as partner in a firm of soap manufacturers at Newcastle, but devoted his attention rather to literature than to mercantile affairs. On the failure of the firm he obtained the office of registrar of St Andrew’s parish, Newcastle, a post which he held until appointed secretary to the coal trade. He died at Bulman’s Village, Newcastle-on-Tyne, on the 18th of December 1870. In 1832 Doubleday published an Essay on Mundane Moral Government, and in 1842 he attacked some of the principles of Malthus in his True Law of Population. He also wrote A Political Life of Sir Robert Peel (London, 1856); A Financial, Statistical and Monetary History of England from 1688 (London, 1847); Matter for Materialists (London, 1870); The Eve of St Mark, a Romance of Venice; and three dramas, The Statue Wife, Diocletian and Caius Marius, in addition to some fishing songs, and many contributions to various newspapers and periodicals.


DOUBLET (a Fr. word, diminutive of double, folded or of two thicknesses), a close-fitting garment, with or without sleeves, extending from the neck to a little below the waist, worn by men of all ranks and ages from the 14th century to the time of Charles II., when it began to be superseded by coat and waistcoat. The doublet was introduced into England from France, and was originally padded for defence or warmth. “Doublet” is also used of a pair or couple—a thing that is the facsimile of another; as in philology, one of two words differing in form, but represented by an identical root, as “alarm” or “alarum”; in optics, of a pair of lenses, combined, for example, to correct aberration. In the work of the lapidary a doublet is a counterfeit gem, made by cementing two pieces of plain glass or crystal on each side of a layer of glass (coloured to represent the stone counterfeited); a thin portion of a genuine stone may be cemented upon an inferior one, as a layer of diamond upon a topaz, or ruby on a garnet.


DOUBS, a river of eastern France, rising in the Jura at the foot of the Noirmont ridge at a height of 3074 ft. and flowing into the Saône. Its course is 269 m. in length, though the distance from its source to its mouth is only 56 m. in direct line; its basin has an area of 3020 sq. m. Flowing N.E. the river traverses the lake of St Point and passes Pontarlier; thenceforth its course lies chiefly through wooded gorges of great grandeur. After skirting the town of Morteau, below which it expands into the picturesque lake of Chaillexon and descends over the Falls of the Doubs (88 ft. in height), the river for about 28 m. forms the frontier between France and Switzerland. Flowing into the latter country for a short distance, it turns abruptly west, then north, and finally at Voujeaucourt, south-west. Just below that town the river is joined by the canal from the Rhone to the Rhine, to accommodate which its course has been canalized as far as Dole. Till it reaches Besançon which lies on a peninsula formed by the river, the Doubs passes no town of importance except Pontarlier. Some distance below Besançon it enters the department of Jura, passes Dole, and leaving the region of hill and mountain, issues into a wide plain. Traversing this, it receives the waters of the Loue, its chief affluent, and broadening out to a width of 260 ft., at length reaches the Saône at Verdun. Below Dole the river is navigable only for some 8 m. above its mouth.


DOUBS, a frontier department of eastern France, formed in 1790 of the ancient principality of Montbéliard and of part of the province of Franche-Comté. It is bounded E. and S.E. by Switzerland, N. by the territory of Belfort and by Haute Saône, and W. and S.W. by Jura. Pop. (1906) 298,438. Area, 2030 sq. m. The department takes its name from the river Doubs, by which it is traversed. Between the Ognon, which forms the north-western limit of the department, and the Doubs, runs a range of low hills known as “the plain.” The rest of Doubs is mountainous, four parallel chains of the Jura crossing it from N.E. to S.W. The Lomont range, the lowest of these chains, dominates the left bank of the Doubs. The central region is occupied by hilly plateaux covered with pasturage and forests, while the rest of the department is traversed by the remaining three mountain ranges, the highest and most easterly of which contains the Mont d’Or (4800 ft.), the culminating point of Doubs. Besides the Doubs the chief rivers are its tributaries, the Dessoubre, watering the east of the department, and the Loue, which traverses its south-western portion. The climate is in general cold and rainy, and the winters are severe. The soil is stony and loamy, and at the higher levels there are numerous peat-bogs. Approximately a fifth of the total area is planted with cereals; more than a third is occupied by pasture. In its agricultural aspect the department may be divided into three regions. The highest, on which the snow usually lies from six to eight months in the year, is in part barren, but on its less exposed slopes is occupied by forests of fir trees, and affords good pasturage for cattle. In the second or lower region the oak, beech, walnut and sycamore flourish; and the valleys are susceptible of cultivation. The region of the plain is the most fertile, and produces all kinds of cereals as well as hemp, vegetables, vines and fruit. Cattle-rearing and dairy-farming receive much attention; large quantities of cheese, of the nature of Gruyère, are produced, mainly by the co-operative cheese-factories or fruitières. The rivers of the department abound in gorges and falls of great beauty. The most important manufactures are watches, made chiefly at Besançon and Morteau, hardware (Hérimoncourt and Valentigney), and machinery. 442 Large iron foundries are found at Audincourt (pop. 5317) and other towns. The distillation of brandy and absinthe, and the manufacture of cotton and woollen goods, automobiles and paper, are also carried on. Exports include watches, live-stock, wine, vegetables, iron and hardware; cattle, hides, timber, coal, wine and machinery are imported. Large quantities of goods, in transit between France and Switzerland, pass through the department. Among its mineral products are building stone and lime, and there are peat workings. Doubs is served by the Paris-Lyon railway, the line from Dôle to Switzerland passing, via Pontarlier, through the south of the department. The canal from the Rhône to the Rhine traverses it for 84 miles.

The department is divided into the arrondissements of Besançon, Baume-les-Dames, Montbéliard and Pontarlier, with 27 cantons and 637 communes. It belongs to the académie (educational circumscription) and the diocese of Besançon, which is the capital, the seat of an archbishop and of a court of appeal, and headquarters of the VII. army corps. Besides Besançon the chief towns are Montbéliard and Pontarlier (qq.v.). Ornans, a town on the Loue, has a church of the 16th century and ruins of a feudal castle, which are of antiquarian interest. Montbenoît on the Doubs near Pontarlier has the remains of an Augustine abbey (13th to 16th centuries). The cloisters are of the 15th century, and the church contains, among other works of art, some fine stalls executed in the 16th century. Lower down the Doubs is the town of Morteau, with the Maison Pertuisier, a house of the Renaissance period, and a church which still preserves remains of a previous structure of the 13th century. Baume-les-Dames owes the affix of its name to a Benedictine convent founded in 763, to which only noble ladies were admitted. Numerous antiquities have been found at Mandeure (near Montbéliard), which stands on the site of the Roman town of Epomanduodurum.


DOUCE, FRANCIS (1757-1834), English antiquary, was born in London in 1757. His father was a clerk in Chancery. After completing his education he entered his father’s office, but soon quitted it to devote himself to the study of antiquities. He became a prominent member of the Society of Antiquaries, and for a time held the post of keeper of manuscripts in the British Museum, but was compelled to resign it owing to a quarrel with one of the trustees. In 1807 he published his Illustrations of Shakespeare and Ancient Manners (2 vols. 8vo), which contained some curious information, along with a great deal of trifling criticism and mistaken interpretation. An unfavourable notice of the work in The Edinburgh Review greatly irritated the author, and made him unwilling to venture any further publications. He contributed, however, a considerable number of papers to the Archaeologia and The Gentleman’s Magazine. In 1833 he published a Dissertation on the various Designs of the Dance of Death, the substance of which had appeared forty years before. He died on the 30th of March 1834. By his will he left his printed books, illuminated manuscripts, coins, &c., to the Bodleian library; his own manuscript works to the British Museum, with directions that the chest containing them should not be opened until the 1st of January 1900; and his paintings, carvings and miscellaneous antiquities to Sir Samuel Meyrick, who published an account of them, entitled The Doucean Museum.


DOUGLAS, the name of a Scottish noble family, now represented by the dukes of Hamilton (Douglas-Hamilton, heirs-male), the earls of Home (Douglas-Home) who also bear the title of Baron Douglas of Douglas, the dukes of Buccleuch and Queensberry (Montagu-Douglas-Scott), the earls of Morton (Douglas), the earls of Wemyss (Wemyss-Charteris-Douglas), and the baronets Douglas of Carr, of Springwood, of Glenbervie, &c. The marquessate of Douglas and the earldom of Angus, the historic dignities held by the two chief branches of the family, the Black and the Red Douglas, are merged in the Hamilton peerage. The name represented the Gaelic dubh glas, dark water, and Douglasdale, the home of the family in Lanarkshire, is still in the possession of the earls of Home. The first member of the family to emerge with any distinctness was William de Douglas, or Dufglas, whose name frequently appears on charters from 1175 to 1213. He is said to have been brother, or brother-in-law, of Freskin of Murray, the founder of the house of Murray. His second son, Brice (d. 1222), became bishop of Moray, while the estate fell to the eldest, Sir Archibald (d. c. 1240).

Sir William of Douglas (d. 1298), called “le hardi,” Archibald’s grandson, was the first formally to assume the title of lord of Douglas. After the death of his first wife, Elizabeth, daughter of Alexander the Steward, he abducted from the manor of the La Zouches at Tranent an heiress, Eleanor of Lovain, widow of William de Ferrers, lord of Groby in Leicestershire, who in 1291 appeared by proxy in the court of the English king, Edward I., to answer for the offence of marrying without his permission. He gave a grudging allegiance to John de Baliol, and swore fealty to Edward I. in 1291; but when the Scottish barons induced Baliol to break his bond with Edward I. he commanded at Berwick Castle, which he surrendered after the sack of the town by the English in 1296. After a short imprisonment Douglas was restored to his Scottish estates on renewing his homage to Edward I., but his English possessions were forfeited. He joined Wallace’s rising in 1297, and died in 1298, a prisoner in the Tower of London.

His son, Sir James of Douglas (1286-1330), lord of Douglas, called the “Good,” whose exploits are among the most romantic in Scottish history, was educated in Paris. On his return he found an Englishman, Robert de Clifford, in possession of his estates. His offer of allegiance to Edward I. being refused, he cast in his lot with Robert Bruce, whom he joined before his coronation at Scone in 1306. From the battle of Methven he escaped with Bruce and the remnant of his followers, and accompanied him in his wanderings in the Highlands. In the next year they returned to the south of Scotland. He twice outwitted the English garrison of Douglas and destroyed the castle. One of these exploits, carried out on Palm Sunday, the 19th of March 1307, with barbarities excessive even in those days, is known as the “Douglas Larder.” Douglas routed Sir John de Mowbray at Ederford Bridge, near Kilmarnock, and was entrusted with the conduct of the war in the south, while Bruce turned to the Highlands. In 1308 he captured Thomas Randolph (afterwards earl of Moray), soon to become one of Bruce’s firm supporters, and a friendly rival of Douglas, whose exploits he shared. He made many successful raids on the English border, which won for him the dreaded name of the “Black Douglas” in English households. Through the capture of Roxburgh Castle in 1314 by stratagem, the assailants being disguised as black oxen, he secured Teviotdale; and at Bannockburn, where he was knighted on the battlefield, he commanded the left wing with Walter the Steward. During the thirteen years of intermittent warfare that followed he repeatedly raided England. He slew Sir Robert de Nevill, the “Peacock of the North,” in single combat in 1316, and in 1319 he invaded Yorkshire, in company with Randolph, defeating an army assembled by William de Melton, archbishop of York, at Mitton-on-Swale (September 20), in a fight known as “The Chapter of Myton.” In 1322 he captured the pass of Byland in Yorkshire, and forced the English army to retreat. He was rewarded by the “Emerald Charter,” granted by Bruce, which gave him criminal jurisdiction over the family estates, and released the lords of Douglas from various feudal obligations. The emerald ring which Bruce gave Douglas in ratification of the charter is lost, but another of the king’s gifts, a large two-handed sword (bearing, however, a later inscription), exists at Douglas Castle. In a daring night attack on the English camp in Weardale in 1327 Douglas came near capturing Edward III. himself. After laying waste the northern counties he retreated, without giving battle to the English. Before his death in 1329 Bruce desired Douglas to carry his heart to Palestine in redemption of his unfulfilled vow to go on crusade. Accordingly Sir James set out in 1330, bearing with him a silver casket containing the embalmed heart of Bruce. He fell fighting with the Moors in Spain on the 25th of August of that year, and was buried in St Bride’s Church, Douglas. Since his day the Douglases have borne a human heart in their coat of arms. Sir James was said to have fought in seventy battles and to have conquered in fifty-seven. His exploits, as told in Froissart’s Chronicles and in John 443 Barbour’s Bruce, are familiar from Scott’s Tales of a Grandfather and Castle Dangerous. His half-brother, Sir Archibald, defeated Edward Baliol at Annan in 1332, and had just been appointed regent of Scotland for David II. when he risked a pitched battle at Halidon Hill, where he was defeated and killed (1333), with his nephew William, lord of Douglas. The inheritance fell to his brother, a churchman, Hugh the “Dull” (b. 1294), who surrendered his lands to David II.; and a re-grant was made to William Douglas, next referred to.

William Douglas, 1st Earl of Douglas (c. 1327-1384), had been educated in France, and returned to Scotland in 1348. In 1353 he killed in Ettrick Forest his kinsman, William,1 the knight of Liddesdale (c. 1300-1353), known as the “Flower of Chivalry,” who had been warden of the western marches during David II.’s minority, and had taken a heroic share in driving the English from southern Scotland. Liddesdale had in 1342 lost the king’s favour by the murder of Sir Alexander Ramsay of Dalhousie, whom David had made constable of the castle of Roxburgh and sheriff of Teviotdale in his place; he was taken prisoner at Nevill’s Cross in 1346, and only released on becoming liegeman of Edward III. for the lands of Liddesdale and the castle of the Hermitage; Liddesdale2 was also accused of contriving the murder of Sir David Barclay in 1350. Some of his lands fell to his kinsman and murderer, who was created earl of Douglas in 1358. In 1357 his marriage with Margaret, sister and heiress of Thomas, 13th earl of Mar, eventually brought him the estates and the earldom of Mar. During a short truce with the warden of the English marches he had served in France, being wounded at Poitiers in 1356. He was one of the securities for the payment of David II.’s ransom, and in consequence of the royal misappropriation of some moneys raised for this purpose Douglas was for a short time in rebellion in 1363. In 1364 he joined David II. in seeking a treaty with England which should deprive Robert the Steward, formerly an ally of Douglas, of the succession by putting an English prince on the Scottish throne. The independence of Scotland was to be guaranteed, and a special clause provided for the restoration of the English estates of the Douglas family. On the accession of Robert II. he was nevertheless reconciled, becoming justiciar of southern Scotland, and the last years of his life were spent in making and repelling border raids. He died at Douglas in May 1384, and was succeeded by his son James. By his wife’s sister-in-law, Margaret Stewart, countess of Angus in her own right, and widow of the 13th earl of Mar, he had a son George, afterwards 1st earl of Angus.

James, 2nd Earl of Douglas and Mar (c. 1358-1388), married Lady Isabel Stewart, daughter of Robert II. In 1385 he made war on the English with the assistance of a French contingent under John de Vienne. He allowed the English to advance to Edinburgh, wisely refusing battle, and contented himself with a destructive counter-raid on Carlisle. Disputes soon arose between the allies, and the French returned home at the end of the year. In 1388 Douglas captured Hotspur Percy’s pennon in a skirmish near Newcastle. Percy sought revenge in the battle of Otterburn (August 1388), which ended in a victory for the Scots and the capture of Hotspur and his brother, though Douglas fell in the fight. The struggle, narrated by Froissart, is celebrated in the English and Scottish ballads called “Chevy Chase” and “The Battle of Otterburn.” Sir Philip Sidney “never heard the olde song of Percy and Douglas that I found not my heart mooved more than with a trumpet” (Apologie for Poetrie). The 2nd earl left no legitimate male issue. His natural sons William and Archibald became the ancestors of the families of Douglas of Drumlanrig (see Queensberry) and Douglas of Cavers. His sister Isabel became countess of Mar, inheriting the lands of Mar and his unentailed estates.

The earldom and entailed estates of Douglas reverted by the patent of 1358 to Archibald Douglas, 3rd Earl of Douglas, called “The Grim” (c. 1328-c. 1400), a natural son of the “good” Sir James. With his cousin, the 1st earl of Douglas, he had fought at Poitiers, where he was taken prisoner, but was released through ignorance of his real rank. On his return to Scotland he became constable and sheriff of Edinburgh, and, later, warden of the western marches, where his position was strengthened by his becoming lord of Galloway in 1369 and by his purchase of the earldom of Wigtown in 1372. He further increased his estates by his marriage with Joanna Moray, heiress of Bothwell. During the intervals of war with the English he imposed feudal law on the border chieftains, drawing up a special code for the marches. He was twice sent on missions to the French court. The power of the Black Douglas overshadowed the crown under the weak rule of Robert III., and in 1399 he arranged a marriage between David, duke of Rothesay, the king’s son and heir, and his own daughter, Marjory Douglas. Rothesay was already contracted to marry Elizabeth Dunbar, daughter of the earl of March, who had paid a large sum for the honour. March, alienated from his allegiance by this breach of faith on the king’s part, now joined the English forces. A natural son of Archibald, Sir William of Douglas, lord of Nithisdale (d. 1392), married Egidia, daughter of Robert III.

Archibald the Grim was succeeded by his eldest son, Archibald, 4th Earl of Douglas, 1st duke of Touraine, lord of Galloway and Annandale (1372-1424), who married in 1390 Lady Margaret Stewart, eldest daughter of John, earl of Carrick, afterwards King Robert III. In 1400 March and Hotspur Percy had laid waste eastern Scotland as far as Lothian when they were defeated by Douglas (then master of Douglas) near Preston. With the regent, Robert, duke of Albany, he was suspected of complicity in the murder (March 1402) of David, duke of Rothesay, who was in their custody at Falkland Castle, but both were officially declared guiltless by the parliament. In that year Douglas raided England and was taken prisoner at Homildon Hill by the Percys. He fought on the side of his captors at Shrewsbury (1403), and was taken prisoner by the English king Henry IV. He became reconciled during his captivity with the earl of March, whose lands had been conferred on Douglas, but were now, with the exception of Annandale, restored. He returned to Scotland in 1409, but was in constant communication with the English court for the release of the captive king James I. In 1412 he had visited Paris, when he entered into a personal alliance with John the Fearless, duke of Burgundy, and in 1423 he commanded a contingent of 10,000 Scots sent to the help of Charles VII. against the English. He was made lieutenant-general in the French army, and received the peerage-duchy of Touraine with remainder to his heirs-male. The new duke was defeated and slain at Verneuil (1424) with his second son, James; his persistent ill-luck earned him the title of the Tyneman (the loser).

Archibald, 5th Earl of Douglas (c. 1391-1439), succeeded to his father’s English and Scottish honours, though he never touched the revenues of Touraine. He fought at Baugé in 1421, and was made count of Longueville in Normandy.

His two sons, William, 6th Earl (1423?-1440), and David, were little more than boys at the time of their father’s death in 1439. They can hardly have been guilty of any real offence when, on the 24th of November 1440, they were summoned to court by Sir William Crichton, lord chancellor of Scotland, and, after a mock trial in the young king’s presence, were beheaded forthwith in the courtyard of Edinburgh Castle. This murder broke up the dangerous power wielded by the Douglases. The lordships of Annandale and Bothwell fell to the crown; Galloway to the earl’s sister Margaret, the “Fair Maid of Galloway”; while the Douglas lands passed to his great-uncle James Douglas, 7th Earl of Douglas, called the “Gross,” of Balvany (1371-1444), lord of Abercorn and Aberdour, earl of Avondale (cr. 1437), younger son of the 3rd earl.

The latter’s sons, William (c. 1425-1452) and James (1426-1488), 444 became 8th and 9th earls respectively; Archibald became earl of Moray by marriage with Elizabeth Dunbar, daughter and co-heiress of James, earl of Moray; Hugh was created earl of Ormond in 1445; John was lord of Balvany; Henry became bishop of Dunkeld.

The power of the Black Douglases was restored by the 8th earl, who recovered Wigtown, Galloway and Bothwell by marriage (by papal dispensation) with his cousin, the Fair Maid of Galloway. He was soon high in favour with James II., and procured the disgrace of Crichton, his kinsmen’s murderer, by an alliance with his rival, Sir Alexander Livingstone. In 1450 James raided the earl’s lands during his absence on a pilgrimage to Rome; but their relations seemed outwardly friendly until in 1452 the king invited Douglas to Stirling Castle under a safe-conduct, in itself, however, a proof of strained relations. There James demanded the dissolution of a league into which Douglas had entered with Alexander Lindsay, the “Tiger” earl (4th) of Crawford. On Douglas’s refusal the king murdered him (February 22) with his own hands, the courtiers helping to despatch him. The tales of the hanging of Sir Herbert Herries of Terregles and the murder of McLellan of Bombie by Douglas rest on no sure evidence.

James Douglas, 9th Earl (and last), denounced his brother’s murderers and took up arms, but was obliged by the desertion of his allies to submit. He obtained a papal dispensation to marry his brother’s widow, in order to keep the family estates together. He intrigued with the English court, and in 1455 rebelled once more. Meanwhile another branch of the Douglas family, known as the Red Douglas, had risen into importance (see Angus, earls of), and George Douglas, 4th earl of Angus (d. 1463), great-grandson of the 1st earl of Douglas, took sides with the king against his kinsmen. James Douglas, again deserted by his chief allies, fled to England, and his three brothers, Ormond, Moray and Balvany, were defeated by Angus at Arkinholm on the Esk. Moray was killed, Ormond taken prisoner and executed, while Balvany escaped to England. Their last stronghold, the Thrieve in Galloway, fell, and the lands of the Douglases were declared forfeit, and were divided among their rivals, the lordship of Douglas falling to the Red Douglas, 4th earl of Angus. In England the earl of Douglas intrigued against his native land; he was employed by Edward IV. in 1461 to negotiate a league with the western highlanders against the Scottish kingdom. In 1484 he was taken prisoner while raiding southern Scotland, and was relegated to the abbey of Lindores, where he died in 1488.

The title of Douglas was restored in 1633 when William, 11th earl of Angus (1589-1660), was created 1st Marquess of Douglas by Charles I. In 1645 he joined Montrose at Philiphaugh, and was imprisoned in 1646 at Edinburgh Castle, only obtaining his release by signing the Covenant. His eldest son, Archibald, created earl of Ormond, Lord Bothwell and Hartside, in 1651, predeceased his father; Lord James Douglas (c. 1617-1645) and his half-brother, Lord George Douglas (c. 1636-1692), created earl of Dumbarton in 1675, successively commanded a Scots regiment3 in the French service. William (1635-1694), created earl of Selkirk in 1646, became 3rd duke of Hamilton after his marriage (1656) with Anne, duchess of Hamilton in her own right. By the failure of heirs in the elder branches of the family the dukes of Hamilton (q.v.) became heirs-male of the house of Douglas.

James Douglas, 2nd Marquess of Douglas (1646-1700), succeeded his grandfather in 1660. His eldest son, John, by courtesy earl of Angus, raised a regiment of 1200 men, first known as the Angus regiment, later as the Cameronians (26th Foot). He was killed at its head at Steinkirk in 1692. The younger son, Archibald, 3rd Marquess (1694-1761), was created duke of Douglas in 1703, but the dukedom became extinct on his death, without heirs, in 1761. He was a consistent supporter of the Hanoverian cause, and fought at Sheriffmuir. The heir-presumptive to the Douglas estates was his sister, Lady Jane Douglas (1698-1753), who in 1746 secretly married Colonel, afterwards Sir, John Steuart of Grandtully, by whom she had twin sons, born in Paris in 1748. These children were alleged to be spurious, and when Lady Jane and the younger of the two boys died in 1753, the duke refused to acknowledge the survivor as his nephew; but in 1760 he was induced, under the influence of his wife, to revoke a will devising the estates to the Hamiltons in favour of Lady Jane’s son, Archibald James Edward Steuart (1748-1827), 1st baron Douglas of Douglas (cr. 1790) in the British peerage. The inheritance of the estates was disputed by the Hamiltons, representing the male line, but the House of Lords decided in favour of Douglas in 1769. Three of his sons succeeded Archibald Douglas as Baron Douglas, but as they left no male issue the title passed to the earls of Home, Cospatrick Alexander, 11th earl of Home, having married a granddaughter of Archibald, 1st Baron Douglas. Their descendants, the earls of Home, represent the main line of Douglas on the female side.

Authorities.—David Hume of Godscroft (1560?-1630), who was secretary to Archibald Douglas, 8th earl of Angus, wrote a History of the House and Race of Douglas and Angus, printed under his daughter’s superintendence (Edinburgh, 1644). He was a partial historian, and his account can only be accepted with caution. Modern authorities are Sir William Fraser, The Douglas Book (4 vols., Edinburgh, 1885), and Sir H. Maxwell, History of the House of Douglas (2 vols., 1902). See also G. E. C.[okayne]’s Peerage, and Douglas’s Scots Peerage; Calendar of State Papers, Scottish Series, The Hamilton Papers, &c.


1 A descendant of a younger son of the original William de Douglas.

2 On the murder of the knight of Liddesdale, his lands, with the exception of Liddesdale and the Hermitage forfeited to the crown and then secured by his nephew, fell to his nephew, Sir James Douglas of Dalkeith and Aberdour (d. 1420), whose great-grandson James Douglas, 3rd Lord Dalkeith (d. 1504), became earl of Morton in 1458 on his marriage with Lady Joan Stewart, third daughter of James I. His grandson, the 3rd earl, left daughters only, of whom the eldest, Margaret, married James Hamilton, earl of Arran, regent of Scotland, ancestor of the dukes of Hamilton; Elizabeth married in 1543 James Douglas, who became by this marriage 4th earl of Morton.

3 Transferred to the British service in 1669 and eventually known as the Royal Scots regiment.


DOUGLAS, SIR CHARLES, Bart. (d. 1789), British admiral, a descendant of the Scottish earls of Morton, was promoted lieutenant in the navy on the 4th of December 1753. Nothing is known of his early life. He became commander on the 24th of February 1759, and attained to post rank in 1761. When the War of American Independence began, he took an active part in the defence of Canada in 1775, and he afterwards commanded the “Stirling Castle” 64 in the battle of the Ushant, 27th of July 1778. His reputation is based first on the part he played in the battle of Dominica, 12th of April 1782, and then on the improvements in gunnery which he introduced into the British navy. It appears from the testimony of Sir F. Thesiger (d. 1805), who was present on the quarter-deck of the flagship, that Sir Charles Douglas, who was then captain of the fleet, first pointed out to Rodney the possibility and the advantage of passing through the French line. His advice was taken with reluctance. On the other hand, Lord Hood accuses Douglas of living in such abject fear of his admiral that he did not venture to speak with the freedom which his important post entitled him to take. His more certain claim to be ranked high among naval officers is founded on the many improvements he introduced into naval gunnery. Some account of these will be found in the writings of his son. He became rear-admiral on the 24th of September 1787, and died suddenly of apoplexy in February 1789. He was made a baronet for his services in the West Indies.

There is a life of Sir Charles Douglas in Charnock, Biogr. Nav. vi. 427.


DOUGLAS, GAVIN (1474?-1522), Scottish poet and bishop, third son of Archibald, 5th earl of Angus (called the “great earl of Angus” and “Bell-the-Cat”), was born c. 1474, probably at one of his father’s seats. He was a student at St Andrews, 1489-1494, and thereafter, it is supposed, at Paris. In 1496 he obtained the living of Monymusk, Aberdeenshire, and later he became parson of Lynton (mod. Linton) and rector of Hauch (mod. Prestonkirk), in East Lothian; and about 1501 was preferred to the deanery or provostship of the collegiate church of St Giles, Edinburgh, which he held with his parochial charges. From this date till the battle of Flodden, in September 1513, he appears to have been occupied with his ecclesiastical duties and literary work. Indeed all the extant writings by which he has earned his place as a poet and translator belong to this period. After the disaster at Flodden he was completely absorbed in public business. Three weeks after the battle he, still provost of St Giles, was admitted a burgess of Edinburgh, his father, the “Great Earl,” being then civil provost of the capital. The latter dying soon afterwards (January 1514) in Wigtownshire, where he had gone as justiciar, and his son having been killed at Flodden, the succession fell to Gavin’s nephew Archibald (6th earl). The marriage of this youth to James IV.’s widow on the 6th of August 1514 did much to 445 identify the Douglases with the English party in Scotland, as against the French party led by Albany, and incidentally to determine the political career of his uncle Gavin. During the first weeks of the queen’s sorrow after the battle, Gavin, with one or two colleagues of the council, acted as personal adviser, and it may be taken for granted that he supported the pretensions of the young earl. His own hopes of preferment had been strengthened by the death of many of the higher clergy at Flodden. The first outcome of the new connexion was his appointment to the abbacy of Aberbrothock by the queen regent, before her marriage, probably in June 1514. Soon after the marriage she nominated him archbishop of St Andrews, in succession to Elphinstone, archbishop-designate. But Hepburn, prior of St Andrews, having obtained the vote of the chapter, expelled him, and was himself in turn expelled by Forman, bishop of Moray, who had been nominated by the pope. In the interval, Douglas’s rights in Aberbrothock had been transferred to James Beaton, archbishop of Glasgow, and he was now without title or temporality. The breach between the queen’s party and Albany’s had widened, and the queen’s advisers had begun an intrigue with England, to the end that the royal widow and her young son should be removed to Henry’s court. In those deliberations Gavin Douglas took an active part, and for this reason stimulated the opposition which successfully thwarted his preferment.

In January 1515 on the death of George Brown, bishop of Dunkeld, Douglas’s hopes revived. The queen nominated him to the see, which he ultimately obtained, though not without trouble. For the earl of Athole had forced his brother, Andrew Stewart, prebendary of Craig, upon the chapter, and had put him in possession of the bishop’s palace. The queen appealed to the pope and was seconded by her brother of England, with the result that the pope’s sanction was obtained on the 18th of February 1515. Some of the correspondence of Douglas and his friends incident to this transaction was intercepted. When Albany came from France and assumed the regency, these documents and the “purchase” of the bishopric from Rome contrary to statute were made the basis of an attack on Douglas, who was imprisoned in Edinburgh Castle, thereafter in the castle of St Andrews (under the charge of his old opponent, Archbishop Hepburn), and later in the castle of Dunbar, and again in Edinburgh. The pope’s intervention procured his release, after nearly a year’s imprisonment. The queen meanwhile had retired to England. After July 1516 Douglas appears to have been in possession of his see, and to have patched up a diplomatic peace with Albany.

On the 17th of May 1517 the bishop of Dunkeld proceeded with Albany to France to conduct the negotiations which ended in the treaty of Rouen. He was back in Scotland towards the end of June. Albany’s longer absence in France permitted the party-faction of the nobles to come to a head in a plot by the earl of Arran to seize the earl of Angus, the queen’s husband. The issue of this plot was the well-known fight of “Clear-the-Causeway,” in which Gavin Douglas’s part stands out in picturesque relief. The triumph over the Hamiltons had an unsettling effect upon the earl of Angus. He made free of the queen’s rents and abducted Lord Traquair’s daughter. The queen set about to obtain a divorce, and used her influence for the return of Albany as a means of undoing her husband’s power. Albany’s arrival in November 1521, with a large body of French men-at-arms, compelled Angus, with the bishop and others, to flee to the Borders. From this retreat Gavin Douglas was sent by the earl to the English court, to ask for aid against the French party and against the queen, who was reported to be the mistress of the regent. Meanwhile he was deprived of his bishopric, and forced, for safety, to remain in England, where he effected nothing in the interests of his nephew. The declaration of war by England against Scotland, in answer to the recent Franco-Scottish negotiations, prevented his return. His case was further complicated by the libellous animosity of Beaton, archbishop of St Andrews (whose life he had saved in the “Clear-the-Causeway” incident), who was anxious to thwart his election to the archbishopric of St Andrews, now vacant by the death of Forman. In 1522 Douglas was stricken by the plague which raged in London, and died at the house of his friend Lord Dacre. During the closing years of exile he was on intimate terms with the historian Polydore Vergil, and one of his last acts was to arrange to give Polydore a corrected version of Major’s account of Scottish affairs. Douglas was buried in the church of the Savoy, where a monumental brass (removed from its proper site after the fire in 1864) still records his death and interment.

Douglas’s literary work, now his chief claim to be remembered, belongs, as has been stated, to the period 1501-1513, when he was provost of St Giles. He left four poems.

1. The Palice of Honour, his earliest work, is a piece of the later type of dream-allegory, extending to over 2000 lines in nine-lined stanzas. In its descriptions of the various courts on their way to the palace, and of the poet’s adventures—first, when he incautiously slanders the court of Venus, and later when after his pardon he joins in the procession and passes to see the glories of the palace—the poem carries on the literary traditions of the courts of love, as shown especially in the “Romaunt of the Rose” and “The Hous of Fame.” The poem is dedicated to James IV., not without some lesson in commendation of virtue and honour. No MS. of the poem is extant. The earliest known edition (c. 1553) was printed at London by William Copland; an Edinburgh edition, from the press of Henry Charteris, followed in 1579. From certain indications in the latter and the evidence of some odd leaves discovered by David Laing, it has been concluded that there was an earlier Edinburgh edition, which has been ascribed to Thomas Davidson, printer, and dated c. 1540.

2. King Hart is another example of the later allegory, and, as such, of higher literary merit. Its subject is human life told in the allegory of King Heart in his castle, surrounded by his five servitors (the senses), Queen Plesance, Foresight and other courtiers. The poem runs to over 900 lines and is written in eight-lined stanzas. The text is preserved in the Maitland folio MS. in the Pepysian library, Cambridge. It is not known to have been printed before 1786, when it appeared in Pinkerton’s Ancient Scottish Poems.

3. Conscience is in four seven-lined stanzas. Its subject is the “conceit” that men first clipped away the “con” from “conscience” and left “science” and “na mair.” Then they lost “sci,” and had nothing but “ens” (“that schrew, Riches and geir”).

4. Douglas’s longest, last, and in some respects most important work is his translation of the Aeneid, the first version of a great classic poet in any English dialect. The work includes the thirteenth book by Mapheus Vegius; and each of the thirteen books is introduced by a prologue. The subjects and styles of these prologues show great variety: some appear to be literary exercises with little or no connexion with the books which they introduce, and were perhaps written earlier and for other purposes. In the first, or general, prologue, Douglas claims a higher position for Virgil than for his master Chaucer, and attacks Caxton for his inadequate rendering of a French translation of the Aeneid. That Douglas undertook this work and that he makes a plea for more accurate scholarship in the translation have been the basis of a prevalent notion that he is a Humanist in spirit and the first exponent of Renaissance doctrine in Scottish literature. Careful study of the text will not support this view. Douglas is in all important respects even more of a medievalist than his contemporaries; and, like Henryson and Dunbar, strictly a member of the allegorical school and a follower, in the most generous way, of Chaucer’s art. There are several early MSS. of the Aeneid extant: (a) in the library of Trinity College, Cambridge, c. 1525, (b) the Elphynstoun MS. in the library of the university of Edinburgh, c. 1525, (c) the Ruthven MS. in the same collection, c. 1535, (d) in the library of Lambeth Palace, 1545-1546. The first printed edition appeared in London in 1553. An Edinburgh edition was issued from the press of Thomas Ruddiman in 1710.

For Douglas’s career see, in addition to the public records and general histories, Bishop Sage’s Life in Ruddiman’s edition, and that by John Small in the first volume of his edition of the Works of Gavin 446 Douglas (4 vols., 1874, the only collected edition of Douglas’s works). A new edition of the texts is much to be desired. On Douglas’s place in Scottish literature see Scotland: Scottish Literature, also G. Gregory Smith’s Transition Period (1900) and chapters in the Cambridge History of English Literature, vol. ii. (1908). P. Lange’s dissertation Chaucer’s Einfluss auf die Originaldichtungen des Schotten Gavin Douglas (Halle, 1882) draws attention to Douglas’s indebtedness to Chaucer. Further discussion of the question of Douglas’s alleged Humanism will be found in Courthope’s History of English Poetry, i. (1895), T. F. Henderson’s Scottish Vernacular Literature (1898), and J. H. Millar’s Literary History of Scotland (1903). For the language of the poems see G. Gregory Smith’s Specimens of Middle Scots (1902).

(G. G. S.)

DOUGLAS, SIR HOWARD, Bart. (1776-1861), British general, younger son of Admiral Sir Charles Douglas, was born at Gosport in 1776, and entered the Royal Military Academy in 1790. He was commissioned second lieutenant in the Royal Artillery in 1794, becoming first lieutenant a few months later. In 1795 he was shipwrecked while in charge of a draft for Canada, and lived with his men for a whole winter on the Labrador coast. Soon after his return to England in 1799 he was made a captain-lieutenant, and in the same year he married. In his regimental service during the next few years, he was attached to all branches of the artillery in succession, becoming captain in 1804, after which he was placed on half-pay to serve at the Royal Military College. Douglas was at this time (1804) appointed to a majority in the York Rangers, a corps immediately afterwards reduced, and he remained on the roll of its officers until promoted major-general. The senior department of the R.M.C. at High Wycombe, of which he was in charge, was the forerunner of the Staff College. Douglas, since 1806 a brevet lieutenant-colonel, served in 1808-1809 in the Peninsula and was present at Corunna, after which he took part in the Walcheren expedition. In 1809 he succeeded to the baronetcy on the death of his half-brother, Vice-admiral Sir William Henry Douglas. In 1812 he was employed in special missions in the north of Spain, and took part in numerous minor operations in this region, but he was soon recalled, the home government deeming his services indispensable to the Royal Military College. He became brevet colonel in 1814 and C.B. in 1815. In 1816 appeared his Essay on the Principles and Construction of Military Bridges (subsequent editions 1832, 1853); in 1819, Observations on the Motives, Errors and Tendency of M. Carnot’s System of Defence, and in the following year his Treatise on Naval Gunnery (of which numerous editions and translations appeared up to the general introduction of rifled ordnance). In 1821 he was promoted major-general. Douglas’s criticisms of Carnot led to an important experiment being carried out at Woolwich in 1822, and his Naval Gunnery became a standard text-book, and indeed first drew attention to the subject of which it treated. From 1823 to 1831 Sir Howard Douglas was governor of New Brunswick, and, while there, he had to deal with the Maine boundary dispute of 1828. He also founded Fredericton College, of which he was the first chancellor. On his return to Europe he was employed in various missions, and he published about this time Naval Evolutions, a controversial work dealing with the question of “breaking the line” (London, 1832). From 1835 to 1840 Douglas, now a G.C.M.G., was lord high commissioner of the Ionian Islands, where, amongst other reforms, he introduced a new code of laws. In 1837 he became a lieutenant-general, in 1840 a K.C.B., in 1841 a civil G.C.B., and in 1851 a general. From 1842 to 1847 Douglas sat in parliament, where he took a prominent part in debates on military and naval matters and on the corn laws. He was frequently consulted on important military questions. His later works included Observations on the Modern System of Fortification, &c. (London, 1859), and Naval Warfare Under Steam (London, 1858 and 1860). He died on the 9th of November 1861 at Tunbridge Wells. Sir Howard Douglas was a F.R.S., one of the founders of the R.G.S., and an honorary D.C.L. of Oxford University. Shortly before his death he declined the offer of a military G.C.B.

See S. W. Fullom, Life of Sir Howard Douglas (London, 1862), and Gentleman’s Magazine, 3rd series, xii. 90-92.


DOUGLAS, JOHN (1721-1807), Scottish man of letters and Anglican bishop, was the son of a small shopkeeper at Pittenweem, Fife, where he was born on the 14th of July 1721. He was educated at Dunbar and at Balliol College, Oxford, where he took his M.A. degree in 1743, and as chaplain to the 3rd regiment of foot guards he was at the battle of Fontenoy, 1745. He then returned to Balliol as a Snell exhibitioner; became vicar of High Ercall, Shropshire, in 1750; canon of Windsor, 1762; bishop of Carlisle, 1787 (and also dean of Windsor, 1788); bishop of Salisbury, 1791. Other honours were the degree of D.D., 1758, and those of F.R.S. and F.S.A. in 1778. Douglas was not conspicuous as an ecclesiastical administrator, preferring to his livings the delights of London in winter and the fashionable watering-places in summer. Under the patronage of the earl of Bath he entered into a good many literary controversies, vindicating Milton from W. Lauder’s charge of plagiarism (1750), attacking David Hume’s rationalism in his Criterion of Miracles (1752), and the Hutchinsonians in his Apology for the Clergy (1755). He also edited Captain Cook’s Journals, and Clarendon’s Diary and Letters (1763). He died on the 18th of May 1807, and a volume of Miscellaneous Works, prefaced by a short biography, was published in 1820.


DOUGLAS, STEPHEN ARNOLD (1813-1861), American statesman, was born at Brandon, Vermont, on the 23rd of April 1813. His father, a physician, died in July 1813, and the boy was under the care of a bachelor uncle until he was fourteen, when his uncle married and Douglas was thrown upon his own resources. He was apprenticed to a cabinetmaker in Middlebury, Vt., and then to another in Brandon, but soon abandoned this trade. He attended schools at Brandon and Canandaigua (N.Y.), and began the study of law. In 1833 he went West, and finally settled in Jacksonville, Illinois, where he was admitted to the bar in March 1834, and obtained a large practice. From the first he took an active interest in politics, identifying himself with the Jackson Democrats, and his rise was remarkably rapid even for the Middle West of that period. In February 1835 he was elected public prosecutor of the first judicial circuit, the most important at that time in Illinois; in 1835 he was one of several Democrats in Morgan county to favour a state Democratic convention to elect delegates to the national convention of 1836—an important move toward party regularity; in December 1836 he became a member of the state legislature. In 1837 he was appointed by President Van Buren registrar of the land office at Springfield, which had just become the state capital. In 1840 he did much to carry the state for Van Buren; and for a few months he was secretary of state of Illinois. He was a judge of the supreme court of Illinois from 1841 to 1843. In 1843 he was elected to the national House of Representatives.

In Congress, though one of the youngest members, he at once sprang into prominence by his clever defence of Jackson during the consideration by the House of a bill remitting the fine imposed on Jackson for contempt of court in New Orleans. He was soon recognized as one of the ablest and most energetic of the Democratic leaders. An enthusiastic believer in the destiny of his country and more especially of the West, and a thoroughgoing expansionist, he heartily favoured in Congress the measures which resulted in the annexation of Texas and in the Mexican War—in the discussion of the annexation of Texas he suggested as early as 1845 that the states to be admitted should come in slave or free, as their people should vote when they applied to Congress for admission, thus foreshadowing his doctrine of “Popular Sovereignty.” He took an active share in the Oregon controversy, asserting his unalterable determination, in spite of President Polk’s faltering from the declaration of his party’s platform, not to “yield up one inch” of the territory to Great Britain, and advocating its occupation by a military force; indeed he consistently regarded Great Britain as the natural and foremost rival of the United States, the interests of the two nations, he thought, being always opposed, and few senators fought more vigorously the Clayton-Bulwer Treaty or Great Britain’s reassertion of the right of search on the high seas. He ardently supported the policy of making Federal appropriations (of land, but not of money) for internal improvements of a national character, being a prominent advocate of the construction, by government aid, of a trans-continental railway, 447 and the chief promoter (1850) of the Illinois Central; in 1854 he suggested that Congress should impose tonnage duties from which towns and cities might themselves pay for harbour improvement, &c. To him as chairman of the committee on territories, at first in the House, and then in the Senate, of which he became a member in December 1847, it fell to introduce the bills for admitting Texas, Florida, Iowa, Wisconsin, Minnesota, California and Oregon into the Union, and for organizing the territories of Minnesota, Oregon, New Mexico, Utah, Washington, Kansas and Nebraska. In 1848 he introduced a bill proposing that all the territory acquired from Mexico should be admitted into the Union as a single state, and upon the defeat of this bill proposed others providing for the immediate admission of parts of this territory.

In the bitter debates concerning the keenly disputed question of the permission of slavery in the territories, Douglas was particularly prominent. Against slavery itself he seems never to have had any moral antipathy; he married (1847) the daughter1 of a slaveholder, Colonel Robert Martin of North Carolina, and a cousin of Douglas’s colleague in Congress, D. S. Reid; and his wife and children were by inheritance the owners of slaves, though he himself never was. He did more probably than any other one man, except Henry Clay, to secure the adoption of the Compromise Measures of 1850. In 1849 the Illinois legislature demanded that its representatives and senators should vote for the prohibition of slavery in the Mexican cession, but next year this sentiment in Illinois had grown much weaker, and, both there and in Congress, Douglas’s name was soon to become identified with the so-called “popular sovereignty” or “squatter sovereignty” theory, previously enunciated by Lewis Cass, by which each territory was to be left to decide for itself whether it should or should not have slavery. In 1850 his power of specious argument won back to him his Chicago constituents who had violently attacked him for not opposing the Fugitive Slave Law.

The bill for organizing the territories of Kansas and Nebraska, which Douglas reported in January 1854 and which in amended form was signed by the president on the 30th of May, reopened the whole slavery dispute—wantonly, his enemies charged, for the purpose of securing Southern support,—and caused great popular excitement, as it repealed the Missouri Compromise, and declared the people of “any state or territory” “free to form and regulate their domestic institutions in their own way, subject only to the Constitution of the United States.” The passage of this Kansas-Nebraska Bill, one of the most momentous in its consequences ever passed by the Federal Congress, was largely a personal triumph for Douglas, who showed marvellous energy, adroitness and resourcefulness, and a genius for leadership. There was great indignation throughout the free states; and even in Chicago Douglas was unable to win for himself a hearing before a public meeting. In 1852, and again in 1856, he was a candidate for the presidential nomination in the national Democratic convention, and though on both occasions he was unsuccessful, he received strong support. In 1857 he broke with President Buchanan and the “administration” Democrats and lost much of his prestige in the South, but partially restored himself to favour in the North, and especially in Illinois, by his vigorous opposition to the method of voting on the Lecompton constitution, which he maintained to be fraudulent, and (in 1858) to the admission of Kansas into the Union under this constitution. In 1858, when the Supreme Court, after the vote of Kansas against the Lecompton constitution, had decided that Kansas was a “slave” territory, thus quashing Douglas’s theory of “popular sovereignty,” he engaged in Illinois in a close and very exciting contest for the senatorship with Abraham Lincoln, the Republican candidate, whom he met in a series of debates (at Ottawa, Freeport, Jonesboro, Charleston, Galesburg, Quincy and Alton), in one of which, that at Freeport, Douglas was led to declare that any territory, by “unfriendly legislation,” could exclude slavery, no matter what the action of the Supreme Court. This, the famous “Freeport Doctrine,” lost to Douglas the support of a large element of his party in the South, and in Illinois his followers did not poll so large a vote as Lincoln’s. Douglas, however, won the senatorship by a vote in the legislature of 54 to 46. In the Senate he was not reappointed chairman of the committee on territories. In 1860 in the Democratic national convention in Charleston the adoption of Douglas’s platform brought about the withdrawal from the convention of Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, South Carolina, Florida, Texas and Arkansas. The convention adjourned to Baltimore, where the Virginia, North Carolina, Tennessee, Kentucky and Maryland delegations left it, and where Douglas was nominated for the presidency by the Northern Democrats; he campaigned vigorously but hopelessly, boldly attacking disunion, and in the election, though he received a popular vote of 1,376,957, he received an electoral vote of only 12—Lincoln receiving 180. Douglas urged the South to acquiesce in Lincoln’s election. On the outbreak of the Civil War, he denounced secession as criminal, and was one of the strongest advocates of maintaining the integrity of the Union at all hazards. At Lincoln’s request he undertook a mission to the border states and the North-west to rouse the spirit of Unionism; he spoke in West Virginia, Ohio and Illinois. He died on the 3rd of June 1861 at Chicago, where he was buried on the shore of Lake Michigan; the site was afterwards bought by the state, and an imposing monument with a statue by Leonard Volk now stands over his grave.

In person Douglas was conspicuously small, being hardly five feet in height, but his large head and massive chest and shoulders gave him the popular sobriquet “The Little Giant.” His voice was strong and carried far, he had little grace of delivery, and his gestures were often violent. As a resourceful political leader, and an adroit, ready, skilful tactician in debate, he has had few equals in American history.

See Allen Johnson’s Stephen A. Douglas: A Study in American Politics (New York, 1908), W. G. Brown’s Stephen Arnold Douglas (Boston, 1902), and an excellent review of his later life in James Ford Rhodes’s History of the United States from the Compromise of 1850 (New York, 1893-1906); also P. O. Ray, Repeal of the Missouri Compromise (Cleveland, Ohio, 1909), and E. C. Carr, Stephen A. Douglas (Chicago, 1909).


1 Her death in 1853 was a great blow to him and embittered him. in November 1856 he married Adèle Cutts, a Maryland belle, a grandniece of Dolly Madison, and a Roman Catholic, who became the leader of Washington society, especially in the winter of 1857-1858, when Douglas was in revolt against Buchanan.


DOUGLAS, the capital of the Isle of Man, a municipal borough and a favourite watering-place. Pop. (1901) 19,223. It stands on a fine semicircular bay on the east coast of the island, at the common mouth of two streams, the Awin-Dhoo and Awin-Glass, 62 m. W.N.W. of Fleetwood and 80 m. N.W. of Liverpool. The older streets are irregular and narrow, but the town has greatly extended in modern times, with numerous terraces of good dwelling-houses. A fine parade sweeps round the bay, which, from Derby Castle on the north to Douglas Head on the south, has a circuit exceeding 2 m. Low hills, penetrated by the valleys of the Dhoo and Glass, encircle the town on the north, west and south, the southern spur projecting seaward in the promontory of Douglas Head. The harbour, in the river mouth, lies immediately north of this; vessels drawing 9 ft. may enter it during neap tides, and those drawing 13 ft. during spring tides. A castellated building, called the Tower of Refuge, erected in 1832, marks the dangerous Conister rocks, north of the harbour entrance. The Battery pier protects the entrance on the south-west, and there is a short pier (the Red pier) within the harbour, while the Victoria pier on the north, at which passengers can land and embark at all heights of the tide, was erected in 1872. There is regular daily communication with Liverpool by the steamers of the Isle of Man Steam Packet Company, and during the season there are connexions with Fleetwood, Barrow, Dublin, Belfast and Glasgow. Douglas is connected by electric tramway northward with Laxey, the summit of the mountain of Snaefell and Ramsey, and southward with Port Soderick, while the Isle of Man railway runs to Peel in the west, and Castletown and Port Erin in the south-west. The town has services of cable and horse trams. The various popular attractions of Douglas include theatres, dancing halls, a race-course and two golf links Howstrake and Quarter Bridge. The shore of the bay is of firm 448 sand (covered at high tide), and the sea-bathing is good. Among buildings and institutions in Douglas may be mentioned the legislative buildings (1893), the town hall (1899), the large free library, the court house and the Isle of Man hospital. Castle Mona, erected in 1804 by John, 4th duke of Arrol and lord of Man, is transformed into an hotel. St George’s church, the oldest remaining in Douglas, dates from 1780. Douglas was incorporated in 1895, and is governed by a mayor, six aldermen and eighteen councillors.


DOUGLAS, a village of Lanarkshire, Scotland. Pop. (1901) 1206. It is situated on Douglas water, 3 m. from Douglas station on the branch line from Carstairs to Ayr, 11 m. by road S.S.W. of Lanark. It is a place of ancient aspect, bearing evident signs of decay, but possesses peculiar interest as the original home of the great Douglas family. Of the old castle, Scott’s Castle Dangerous, only a tower exists. The stronghold repeatedly changed hands during the wars waged against Edward I. for the independence of Scotland. The modern castle is the seat of the earl of Home. Only the choir and spire remain of the 12th-century church of St Bride, the patron saint of the Douglases. The vault beneath the choir was, until 1761, the burial-place of the family, and it contains a silver case said to hold the ashes of the heart of the “good Sir James” (1286-1330). In 1879 the choir was restored and the tombs (including that of Sir James Douglas) repaired. David Hackston of Rathillet, the Covenanter, is stated to have been captured in the village (in a house still standing) after the battle of Aird’s Moss in 1680. On the hill of Auchensaugh (1286 ft.), 2½ m. S.E., the Cameronians assembled in 1712 to renew the Solemn League and Covenant. This gathering, the “Auchensaugh Wark,” as it was called, led up to the secession of the Reformed Presbyterians from the Kirk.


DOUGLASS, FREDERICK (1817-1895), American orator and journalist, was born in Tuckahoe, Talbot county, Maryland, probably in February 1817. His mother was a negro slave of exceptional intelligence, and his father was a white man. Until nearly eight years of age, he was under the care of his grandmother; then he lived for a year on the plantation of Colonel Edward Lloyd, of whose vast estate his master, Captain Aaron Anthony, was manager. After a year he was sent to Baltimore, where he lived in the family of Hugh Auld, whose brother, Thomas, had married the daughter of Captain Anthony; Mrs Auld treated him with marked kindness and without her husband’s knowledge began teaching him to read. With money secretly earned by blacking boots he purchased his first book, the Columbian Orator; he soon learned to write “free passes” for runaway slaves. Upon the death of Captain Anthony in 1833, he was sent back to the plantation to serve Thomas Auld, who hired him out for a year to one Edward Covey, who had a wide reputation for disciplining slaves, but who did not break Frederick’s spirit. Although a new master, William Freeland, who owned a large plantation near St Michael’s, Md., treated him with much kindness, he attempted to escape in 1836, but his plans were suspected, and he was put in jail. From lack of evidence he was soon released, and was then sent to Hugh Auld in Baltimore, where he was apprenticed as a ship caulker. He learned his trade in one year, and in September 1838, masquerading as a sailor, he escaped by railway train from Baltimore to New York city. For the sake of greater safety he soon removed to New Bedford, Massachusetts, where he changed his name from Frederick Augustus Washington Bailey to Frederick Douglass, “Douglass” being adopted at the suggestion of a friend who greatly admired Scott’s Lady of the Lake. For three years he worked as a day labourer in New Bedford. An extempore speech made by him before an anti-slavery meeting at Nantucket, Mass., in August 1841 led to his being appointed one of the agents of the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society, and in this capacity he delivered during the next four years numerous addresses against slavery, chiefly in the New England and middle states. To quiet the suspicion that he was an impostor, in 1845 he published the Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave. Fearing his recapture, his friends persuaded him to go to England, and from August 1845 to April 1847 he lectured in Ireland, Scotland and England, and did much to enlist the sympathy of the British public with the Abolitionists in America. Before his return a sum of £150 was raised by subscription to secure his legal manumission, thus relieving him from the fear of being returned to slavery in pursuance of the Fugitive Slave Law. From 1847 to 1860 he conducted an anti-slavery weekly journal, known as The North Star, and later as Frederick Douglass’s Paper, at Rochester, New York, and, during this time, also was a frequent speaker at anti-slavery meetings. At first a follower of Garrison and a disunionist, he allied himself after 1851 with the more conservative political abolitionists, who, under the leadership of James G. Birney, adhered to the national Constitution and endeavoured to make slavery a dominant political issue. He disapproved of John Brown’s attack upon Harper’s Ferry in 1859, and declined to take any part in it. During the Civil War he was among the first to suggest the employment of negro troops by the United States government, and two of his sons served in the Union army. After the war he was for several years a popular public lecturer; in September 1866 he was a delegate to the national Loyalist convention at Philadelphia; and in 1869 he became the editor, at Washington, of a short-lived weekly paper, The New National Era, devoted to the interests of the negro race. In 1871 he was assistant secretary of the Santo Domingo commission, appointed by President Grant. He was marshal of the District of Columbia from 1877 to 1881, was recorder of deeds for the district from 1881 to 1886, and from 1889 to 1891 was the American minister resident and consul-general in the Republic of Haiti. He died in Anacostia Heights, District of Columbia, on the 20th of February 1895. He was widely known for his eloquence, and was one of the most effective orators whom the negro race has produced in America.

His autobiography appeared, after two revisions, as The Life and Times of Frederick Douglass (London, 1882). See F. M. Holland, Frederick Douglass, The Colored Orator (New York, 1891); C. W. Chesnutt, Frederick Douglass, (Boston, 1899); and Booker T. Washington, Frederick Douglass (Philadelphia, 1907), in the series of American Crisis Biographies.


DOUKHOBORS, a name given by the Russian Orthodox clergy to a community of nonconformist peasants. The word etymologically signifies “spirit-fighters,” being originally intended by the priesthood to convey that they fight against the Spirit of God; but the Doukhobors themselves accepted the term as signifying that they fight, not against, but for and with the Spirit. Of late, however, they have decided to give up this name and call themselves “Christians of the Universal Brotherhood.” This religious community was first heard of in the middle of the 18th century. By the end of that century or the beginning of the 19th their doctrine had become so clearly defined, and the number of their members had so greatly increased, that the Russian government and Church, considering this sect to be peculiarly obnoxious, started an energetic campaign against it. The foundation of the Doukhobors’ teaching consists in the belief that the Spirit of God is present in the soul of man, and directs him by its word within him. They understand the coming of Christ in the flesh, his works, teaching and sufferings, in a spiritual sense. The object of the sufferings of Christ, in their view, was to give an example of suffering for truth. Christ continues to suffer in us even now when we do not live in accordance with the behests and spirit of his teaching. The whole teaching of the Doukhobors is penetrated with the Gospel spirit of love. Worshipping God in the spirit, they affirm that the outward Church and all that is performed in it and concerns it has no importance for them. The Church is where two or three are gathered together, i.e. united in the name of Christ. They pray inwardly at all times; on fixed days they assemble for prayer-meetings, at which they greet each other fraternally with low bows, thereby acknowledging every man as a bearer of the Divine Spirit. Their teaching is founded on tradition, which is called among them the “Book of Life,” because it lives in their memory and hearts. It consists of sacred songs or chants, partly composed independently, partly formed out of the contents of the Bible, which, however, has evidently been gathered by them orally, as until quite lately they were almost entirely 449 illiterate and did not possess any written book. They found alike their mutual relations and their relations to other people—and not only to people, but to all living creatures—exclusively on love, and therefore they hold all people equal and brethren. They extend this idea of equality also to the government authorities, obedience to whom they do not consider binding upon them in those cases when the demands of these authorities are in conflict with their conscience; while in all that does not infringe what they regard as the will of God they willingly fulfil the desire of the authorities. They consider killing, violence, and in general all relations to living beings not based on love as opposed to their conscience and to the will of God. They are industrious and abstemious in their lives, and when living up to the standard of their faith they present one of the nearest approaches to the realization of the Christian ideal which have ever been attained. In many ways they have thus a close resemblance to the Quakers or Society of Friends. For these beliefs and practices the Doukhobors long endured cruel persecution. Under Nicholas I., in the years 1840 and 1850, the Doukhobors, who on religious grounds refused to participate in military service, were all banished from the government of Tauris—whither they had been previously transported from various parts of Russia by Alexander I.—to Transcaucasia, near the Turkish frontier. But neither the severe climate nor the neighbourhood of wild and warlike hillmen shook their faith, and in the course of half a century, in one of the most unhealthy and unfertile localities in the Caucasus, they transformed this wilderness into flourishing colonies, and continued to live a Christian and laborious life, making friends with, instead of fighting, the hillmen. But the wealth to which they attained in the Caucasus weakened for a time their moral fervour, and little by little they began to depart somewhat from the requirements of their belief. As soon, however, as events happened among them which disturbed their outward tranquillity, the religious spirit which had guided their fathers immediately revived within them. In 1887, in the reign of the tsar Alexander III., universal military service was introduced in the Caucasus; and even those for whom, as in the case of the Doukhobors, it had formerly been replaced with banishment, were called upon to serve. This measure took the Doukhobors unawares, and at first they outwardly submitted to it. About the same time, by the decision of certain government officials, the right to the possession of the public property of the Doukhobors (valued at about £50,000) passed from the community to one of their members, who had formed out of the more demoralized Doukhobors a group of his own personal adherents, which was henceforth called the “Small Party.” Soon afterwards several of the most respected representatives of the community were banished to the government of Archangel. This series of calamities was accepted by the Doukhobors as a punishment from God, and a spiritual awakening of a most energetic character ensued. The majority (about 12,000 in number) resolved to revive in practice the traditions left them by their fathers, which they had departed from during the period of opulence. They again renounced tobacco, wine, meat and every kind of excess, many of them dividing up all their property in order to supply the needs of those who were in want, and they collected a new public fund. They also renounced all participation in acts of violence, and therefore refused military service. In confirmation of their sincerity, in the summer of 1895 the Doukhobors of the “Great Party,” as they were called in distinction from the “Small Party,” burnt all the arms which they, like other inhabitants of the Caucasus, had taken up for their protection from wild animals, and those who were in the army refused to continue service. At the commencement of the reign of the tsar Nicholas II., in 1895, the Doukhobors became the victims of a series of persecutions, Cossack soldiers plundering, insulting, beating and maltreating both men and women in every way. More than 400 families of Doukhobors who were living in the province of Tiflis were ruined and banished to Georgian villages. Of 4000 thus exiled, more than 1000 died in the course of the first two years from exhaustion and disease; and more would have perished had not information reached Count Leo Tolstoy and his friends, and through them the Society of Friends in England. Funds were immediately raised by sympathizers for alleviating the sufferings of the starving victims. At the same time an appeal, written by Tolstoy and some of his friends, requesting the help of public opinion in favour of the oppressed Doukhobors, was circulated in St Petersburg and sent to the emperor and higher government officials. The Doukhobors themselves asked for permission to leave Russia, and the Society of Friends petitioned the emperor to the same effect. In March 1898 the desired permission was granted, and the first party of Doukhobors, 1126 in number, were able in the summer of 1898 to sail from Batum for Cyprus, which was originally chosen for their settlement because at that time funds were not sufficient for transferring them to any other British territory. But as contributions accumulated, it was found possible to send a number of Doukhobor emigrants to Canada, whither they arrived in two parties, numbering above 4000, in January 1899. They were joined in the spring of the same year by the Cyprus party, and another party of about 2000 arrived from the Caucasus. In all about 7500 Doukhobor immigrants arrived in Canada. The Canadian government did their best to facilitate the immigration, and allotted land to the Doukhobors in the provinces of Assiniboia near Yorktown and of Saskatchewan near Thunder Hill and Prince Albert. They were very cordially received by the population of the Canadian port towns. In April 1901, in the Canadian House of Commons, the minister of justice made a statement about them in which he said that “not a single offence had been committed by the Doukhobors; they were law-abiding, and if good conduct was a recommendation, they were good immigrants.... The large tracts of land demanded population, and if they were not given to crime, the conclusion was that they would make good citizens.” About eighteen months after they arrived in Canada the Doukhobors sent the Society of Friends a collective letter in which they sincerely thanked the English and American Friends for all the generous help of every kind they had received at their hands, but begged the Quakers to cease sending them any more pecuniary support, as they were now able to stand on their own feet, and therefore felt it right that any further help should be directed to others who were more in need of it. At Yorktown in the summer of 1907 the Doukhobors established one of the largest and best brick-making plants in Canada, a significant testimony to the way in which the leaders of the community were working in the interests of the whole. Now and again small bodies broke off from the main community and adopted a semi-nomadic life, but these formed a very small percentage of the total number, which in 1908 was over 8000.

See also Christian Martyrdom in Russia, by V. Tchertkoff (The Free Age Press, Christchurch, Hants); Aylmer Maude, A Peculiar People, the Doukhobors.

(V. T.)

DOULLENS, a town of northern France, capital of an arrondissement in the department of Somme, on the Authie, 27 m. N. of Amiens by rail. Pop. (1906) 4495. It has a citadel of the 15th and 16th centuries which has often served as a state prison and is now used as a reformatory for girls. There are also a belfry of the 17th century and two old churches. The town is the seat of a sub-prefect and has a tribunal of first instance; it has trade in phosphates, of which there are workings in the vicinity, and carries on cotton-spinning and the manufacture of leather, paper and sugar. Doullens, the ancient Dulincum, was seat of a viscountship and an important stronghold in the middle ages. In 1475 it was burnt by Louis XI. for openly siding with the house of Burgundy. In 1595 it was besieged and occupied by the Spaniards, but was restored to France by the treaty of Vervins (1598).


DOULTON, SIR HENRY (1820-1897), English inventor and manufacturer of pottery, born in Vauxhall on the 25th of July 1820, was from the age of fifteen actively employed in the pottery works of his father, John Doulton, at Lambeth. One of the first results of his many experiments was the production of good enamel glazes. In 1846 he initiated in Lambeth the pipe works, in which he superintended the manufacture of the drainage and sanitary appliances which have helped to make the firm of Doulton famous. In 1870 the manufacture of “Art pottery” 450 was begun at Lambeth, and in 1877 works were opened at Burslem, where almost every variety of china and porcelain, as well as artistic earthenware, has been produced. Works have since been opened at Rowley Regis, Smethwick, St Helens, Paisley and Paris. After the Paris exhibition of 1878 Henry Doulton was made a chevalier of the Legion of Honour. In 1872 the “Art department” was instituted in the Doulton works, giving employment to both male and female artists, amongst whom such workers as George Tinworth and the Misses Barlow have obtained a reputation outside their immediate sphere. In 1887 Doulton received the honour of knighthood, and a few years later was awarded the Albert medal by the Society of Arts. He married in 1849 the daughter of Mr J. L. Kennaby; she died in 1888. Sir Henry Doulton took an active interest, as almoner, in St Thomas’s hospital. He died in London on the 18th of November 1897.


DOUMER, PAUL (1857-  ), French politician, was born at Aurillac. He studied law and made his debut in politics as chef de cabinet to Floquet, when president of the chamber in 1885. In 1888 he was elected Radical deputy for the department of the Aisne. Defeated in the general elections of September 1889, he was elected again in 1890 by the arrondissement of Auxerre. As minister of finance in the Bourgeois cabinet (from the 3rd of November 1895 to the 21st of April 1896) he tried without success to introduce an income-tax. In January 1897 he became governor of Indo-China, where he carried out important public works. In 1902 he returned to France and was elected by Laon to the chamber as a Radical. He refused, however, to support the Combes ministry, and formed a Radical dissident group, which grew in strength and eventually caused the fall of the ministry. Doumer became a prominent personage in Paris and was elected president of the chamber in January 1905, being re-elected in January 1906. At the presidential election of the 17th of January 1906 he was a candidate in opposition to M. Fallières and obtained only 371 votes against 449; and the new chamber passed him over as its new president in favour of Henri Brisson. As an author he is known by his L’Indo-Chine française (1904), and Le Livre de mes fils (1906).


DOUMIC, RENÉ (1860-  ), French critic and man of letters, was born in Paris, and after a distinguished career at the École Normale began to teach rhetoric at the Collège Stanislas. He was a contributor to the Moniteur, the Journal des Débats and the Revue bleue, but was best known as the independent and uncompromising literary critic of the Revue des Deux Mondes. His works include: Éléments d’histoire littéraire (1888); Portraits d’écrivains (1892); De Scribe à Ibsen (1893); Écrivains d’aujour-d’hui (1894); Études sur la littérature française (5 vols., 1896-1905); Les Jeunes (1896); Essais sur le théâtre contemporain (1897); Les Hommes et les idées du XIX^e siècle (1903); and an edition of the Lettres d’Elvire à Lamartine (1905).


DOUNE, a police burgh of Perthshire, Scotland, 8¾ m. N.W. of Stirling by the Caledonian railway. Pop. (1901) 930. It is situated on the left bank of the Teith, here crossed by the bridge built in 1535 by Robert Spittal, tailor to James IV. The town was once famous for its pistols and sporrans (as the purses worn with the kilt are called), which were in great request by the clansmen of the Highlands. Doune Castle, now in ruins, occupies a commanding position on the Teith, at the point where it is joined by the Ardoch. It is believed to have been built by Murdoch, 2nd duke of Albany (d. 1425), and was sometimes a residence of the sovereigns, among them James V. and Queen Mary. A nephew of Rob Roy held it for Prince Charlie, and it figures in Scott’s Waverley. It belongs to the earl of Moray (Murray), who derives from it his title of Lord Doune, and was the home of James Stewart, the “bonnie earl” of Moray, murdered at Donibristle in Fife by the earl of Huntly (1592). The braes of Doune lie to the north-west of the town and extend towards Uam Var. Deanston (pop. 652), 1 m. S.W. of Doune, on the right bank of the Teith, was the scene of the labours of James Smith (1789-1850), the agricultural engineer, who was also manager of the cotton mills established there in 1785. On his farm Smith carried out his experiments in deep and thorough draining, and also invented a reaping machine, the subsoil plough and numerous other valuable appliances.


DOURO (Span. Duero, Port. Douro, anc. Durius), a river of the Iberian Peninsula. The Douro rises south of the Sierra de la Demanda, in the Pico de Urbion, an isolated mountain mass 7389 ft. high. It describes a wide curve eastwards past Soria, then flows westward across the Castilian table-land, passing south of Valladolid, with Toro and Zamora on its right bank; then from a point 3 m. E. of Paradella to Barca d’Alva it flows south-west and forms the frontier between Spain and Portugal for 65 m. It crosses Portugal in a westerly direction through a narrow and tortuous bed, and enters the Atlantic 3 m. below Oporto at São Jõao da Foz. The length of the Douro, which is greater than that of any other Iberian river except the Tagus and Guadiana, is probably about 485 m.; but competent authorities differ widely in their estimates, the extremes given being 420 and 507 m. In Spain the Douro receives from the right the rivers Pisuerga, Valderaduey and Esla, and from the left several small streams which drain the Sierra Guadarrama, besides the more important rivers Adaja, Tormes and Yeltes; in Portugal it receives the Agueda, Côa and Paiva from the left, and the Sabor, Túa and Tamega from the right. The area drained by the Douro and its tributaries is upwards of 37,500 sq. m., and includes the greater part of the vast plateau of Old Castile, between the watersheds of the Cantabrian Mountains, on the north, and the Guadarrama, Gredos, Gata and Estrella ranges, on the south. The lower stream is beset with numerous rapids, called pontos, and is subject to swift and violent inundations. On this account navigation is attended with difficulties and risks between its mouth and Barca d’Alva; but a railway, running for the most part along the right bank, skirts the river during the greater part of its course through Portugal. The mouth of the river is partly blocked by a sandy bar; only ships of light draught can enter, while those of greater burden are accommodated at the harbour of Leixões, an artificial basin constructed about 3 m. N. On its way through Portugal the Douro traverses the Paiz do Vinho, one of the richest wine-producing territories in the world; large quantities of wine are conveyed to Oporto in sailing boats. The Douro yields an abundance of fish, especially trout, shad and lampreys.


DOUROUCOULI, apparently the native name (perhaps derived from their cries) of a small group of American monkeys ranging from Nicaragua to Amazonia and eastern Peru, and forming the genus Nyctipithecus. In addition to the absence of prehensile power in their tails, douroucoulis, also known as night-apes, are distinguished by their large eyes, the sockets of which occupy nearly the whole front of the upper part of the skull, the partition between the nostrils being in consequence narrower than usual. The ears are short, and the hair round the eyes forms a disk. Douroucoulis live in parties, and are purely nocturnal, sleeping during the day in hollow trees, and coming out at night to feed on insects and fruits, when they utter piercing cat-like screams.


DOUSA, JANUS [Jan van der Does], lord of Noordwyck (1545-1604), Dutch statesman, historian, poet and philologist, and the heroic defender of Leiden, was born at Noordwyck, in the province of Holland, on the 6th of December 1545. He began his studies at Lier in Brabant, became a pupil of Henry Junius at Delft in 1560, and then passed on in succession to Louvain, Douai and Paris. Here he studied Greek under Pierre Dorat, professor at the Collège Royal, and became acquainted with the chancellor L’Hôpital, Turnebus, Ronsard and other eminent men. On his return in 1565 he married Elizabeth van Zuylen. His name stands in the list of nobles who in that year formed a league against Philip II. of Spain, but he does not appear to have taken any active part in public affairs till 1572, when he was sent as a member of an embassy to England. He was not, however, at first very eager to commit himself to the fortunes of William the Silent, prince of Orange, but having once chosen his side, he threw himself heart and soul into the struggle for freedom from the Spanish yoke. Fortunately for Leiden he was residing in the town at the time of the famous siege. He held no post in the government, but in the hour of need he, though not trained to 451 arms, took the command of a company of troops. His fearlessness and unshaken resolution had no small influence in encouraging the regents and the citizens to prolong the defence. On the foundation of the university of Leiden by William the Silent, Dousa was appointed first curator, and he held this office for nearly thirty years. Through his friendships with foreign scholars he drew to Leiden many illustrious teachers and professors. After the assassination of the prince of Orange in 1584, Dousa undertook a private journey to England to try and persuade Queen Elizabeth to support the cause of the states, and in 1585 he went at the head of a formal embassy for the same purpose. About the same time he was appointed keeper of the archives of Holland (registermeester van Holland), and the opportunities thus afforded him of historical research he turned to good account. He had three sons and five daughters. All his sons acquired a reputation for learning, but two of them died before their father. Dousa was author of several volumes of Latin verse and of philological commentaries on Horace, Plautus, Catullus and other Latin poets. His principal work is the Annals of Holland, which first appeared in a metrical form in 1599, and was published in prose under the title of Bataviae Hollandiaeque annales in 1601. Dousa also took part as editor or contributor in various other publications. He died at Noordwyck on the 8th of October 1604, and was interred at the Hague; but no monument was erected to his memory till 1792, when one of his descendants placed a tomb to his honour in the church of Noordwyck. There are good portraits of the Great Dousa, as he is often called, by Visscher and Houbraken.


DOUVILLE, JEAN BAPTISTE (1794?-1837), French traveller, was born at Hambye, in the department of Manche. Having at an early age inherited a fortune, he decided to gratify his taste for foreign travel. According to his own profession he visited India, Kashmir, Khorasan, Persia, Asia Minor and many parts of Europe. In 1826 he went to South America, and in 1827 left Brazil for the Portuguese possessions on the west coast of Africa, where his presence in March 1828 is proved by the mention made of him in letters of Castillo Branco, the governor-general of Loanda. In May 1831 he reappeared in France, claiming to have pushed his explorations into the very heart of central Africa. His story was readily accepted by the Société de Géographie of Paris, which hastened to recognize his services by assigning him the great gold medal, and appointing him their secretary for the year 1832. On the publication of his narrative, Voyage au Congo et dans l’intérieur de l’Afrique équinoxiale, which occupied three volumes and was accompanied by an elaborate atlas, public enthusiasm ran high. Before the year 1832 was out, however, it was established that Douville’s Voyage was romance and not verity. He had probably been inspired by the appearance of René Caillié’s account of his journey to Timbuktu, and wished to obtain a share of the fame attaching to African explorers. Douville tried vainly to establish the truth of his story in Ma Défense (1832), and Trente mois de ma vie, ou quinze mois avant et quinze mois après mon voyage au Congo (1833). Mlle Audrun, a lady to whom he was about to be married, committed suicide from grief at the disgrace; and the adventurer withdrew in 1833 to Brazil, and proceeded to make explorations in the valley of the Amazon. According to Dr G. Gardner, in his Travels in the Interior of Brazil (1846), he was murdered in 1837 on the banks of the Sao Francisco for charging too high for his medical assistance. Douville may well have explored part of the province of Angola, and Sir Richard Burton maintained that the Frenchman’s descriptions of the country of the Congo were lifelike; that his observations on the anthropology, ceremonies, customs and maladies of the people were remarkably accurate; and that even the native words used in his narrative were “for the most part given with unusual correctness.” It has been shown, however, that the chief source of Douville’s inspiration was a number of unpublished Portuguese manuscripts to which he had access.


DOUW (or Dow), GERHARD (1613-1680), Dutch painter, was born at Leiden on the 7th of April 1613. His first instructor in drawing and design was Bartholomew Dolendo, an engraver; and he afterwards learned the art of glass-painting under Peter Kouwhoorn. At the age of fifteen he became a pupil of Rembrandt, with whom he continued for three years. From the great master of the Flemish school he acquired his skill in colouring, and in the more subtle effects of chiaroscuro; and the style of Rembrandt is reflected in several of his earlier pictures, notably in a portrait of himself at the age of twenty-two, in the Bridgewater House gallery, and in the “Blind Tobit going to meet his Son,” at Wardour Castle. At a comparatively early point in his career, however, he had formed a manner of his own distinct from, and indeed in some respects antagonistic to, that of his master. Gifted with unusual clearness of vision and precision of manipulation, he cultivated a minute and elaborate style of treatment; and probably few painters ever spent more time and pains on all the details of their pictures down to the most trivial. He is said to have spent five days in painting a hand; and his work was so fine that he found it necessary to manufacture his own brushes. Notwithstanding the minuteness of his touch, however, the general effect was harmonious and free from stiffness, and his colour was always admirably fresh and transparent. He was fond of representing subjects in lantern or candle light, the effects of which he reproduced with a fidelity and skill which no other master has equalled. He frequently painted by the aid of a concave mirror, and to obtain exactness looked at his subject through a frame crossed with squares of silk thread. His practice as a portrait painter, which was at first considerable, gradually declined, sitters being unwilling to give him the time that he deemed necessary. His pictures were always small in size, and represented chiefly subjects in still life. Upwards of 200 are attributed to him, and specimens are to be found in most of the great public collections of Europe. His chef-d’œuvre is generally considered to be the “Woman sick of the Dropsy,” in the Louvre. The “Evening School,” in the Amsterdam gallery, is the best example of the candlelight scenes in which he excelled. In the National Gallery, London, favourable specimens are to be seen in the “Poulterer’s Shop,” and a portrait of himself. Douw’s pictures brought high prices, and it is said that President Van Spiring of the Hague paid him 1000 florins a year simply for the right of pre-emption. Douw died in 1680. His most celebrated pupil was Francis Mieris.


DOVE, a river of England, tributary to the Trent, rising in Axe Edge, Derbyshire, and through almost its entire course forming the boundary of that county with Staffordshire. In its upper course it traverses a fine narrow valley, where the limestone hills exhibit many picturesque cliffs, gullies and caves. Dovedale, that part of the valley which lies between Dove Holes and Thorpe Cloud (or with a wider significance between the towns of Hartington and Ashbourne), is especially famous. Below Thorpe Cloud the Dove receives on the west the waters of the Manifold, which, like its tributary the Hamps, and other streams in the limestone district, has part of its course below ground. Near the village of Rocester the Churnet joins the Dove on the west, and then the course of the main stream, hitherto southerly, bends nearly easterly on passing Uttoxeter, and, winding through a widening valley, joins the Trent at Newton Solney, a short distance below Burton-on-Trent. The length of the valley is about 40 m. and the total fall of the river about 1450 ft. The Dove is well known for its trout-fishing, and the portion of the upper valley called Beresford Dale, below Hartington, has a special interest for fishermen through its associations with Izaak Walton and his friend Charles Cotton, whose fishing-house stands near the Pike Pool, a reach of the river with a lofty rock rising from its centre.


DOVE (Dutch duyve, Dan. due, Ice. dufa, Ger. Taube), a name most commonly applied by ornithologists to the smaller members of the group of birds usually called pigeons (Columbae); but no sharp distinction can be drawn between pigeons and doves, and in general literature the two words are used almost indifferently, while no one species can be pointed out to which the word dove, taken alone, seems to be absolutely proper. The largest of the group to which the name is applicable is perhaps the ring-dove, or wood-pigeon, also called in many parts of 452 Britain cushat and queest (Columba palumbus, Linn.), a very common bird throughout the British Islands and most parts of Europe. It associates in winter in large flocks, the numbers of which (owing partly to the destruction of predaceous animals, but still more to the modern system of agriculture, and the growth of plantations in many districts that were before treeless) have increased enormously. In former days, when the breadth of land in Britain under green crops was comparatively small, these birds found little food in the dead season, and this scarcity was a natural check on their superabundance. But since the extended cultivation of turnips and plants of similar use the case is altered, and perhaps at no time of the year has provender become more plentiful than in winter. The ring-dove may be easily distinguished from other European species by its larger size, and especially by the white spot on either side of its neck, forming a nearly continuous “ring,” whence the bird takes its name, and the large white patches in its wings, which are very conspicuous in flight. It breeds several times in the year, making for its nest a slight platform of sticks on the horizontal bough of a tree, and laying therein two eggs—which, as in all the Columbae, are white. It is semi-domestic in the London parks.

Plate I.

ROCK DOVE OR BLUE ROCK PIGEON, Columba livia. STOCK DOVE, Columba oenas.
AMERICAN WILD CARRIER PIGEON,
Ectopistes migratorius.
RING DOVE OR WOOD PIGEON,
Columba palumbus.
(After the coloured drawings by Mme. Knip (Pauline de Courcelles), painter to the Empress Marie Louise, in Les Pigeons. Text by C. J. Themminck, Paris, 1811.)

Plate II.

CROWNED PIGEON, Goura coronata
(After Mme. Knip, as above.)
NICOBAR PIGEON, Caloenas nicobarica.
(After Mme. Knip, as above.)
Photographs of two typical pedigree Homing or Racing Pigeons, colours black and blue chequer, bred and shown by Frederick Romer, Esq., prize-winners in races from France to England.
By permission of the proprietors of the Racing Pigeon.

The stock-dove (C. aenas of most authors) is a smaller species, with many of the habits of the former, but breeding by preference in the stocks of hollow trees or in rabbit-holes. It is darker in colour than the ring-dove, without any white on its neck or wings, and is much less common and more locally distributed.

The rock-dove (C. livia, Temm.) much resembles the stock-dove, but is of a lighter colour, with two black bars on its wings, and a white rump. In its wild state it haunts most of the rocky parts of the coast of Europe, from the Faeroes to the Cyclades, and, seldom going inland, is comparatively rare. Yet, as it is without contradiction the parent-stem of all British domestic pigeons, its numbers must far exceed those of both the former put together. In Egypt and various parts of Asia it is represented by what Charles Darwin has called “wild races,” which are commonly accounted good “species” (C. schimperi, C. affinis, C. intermedia, C. leuconota, and so forth), though they differ from one another far less than do nearly all the domestic forms, of which more than 150 kinds that “breed true,” and have been separately named, are known to exist. Very many of these, if found wild, would have unquestionably been ranked by the best ornithologists as distinct “species” and several of them would as undoubtedly have been placed in different genera. These various breeds are classified by Darwin1 in four groups as follows:—

Group I., composed of a single Race, that of the “Pouters,” having the gullet of great size, barely separated from the crop, and often inflated, the body and legs elongated, and a moderate bill. The most strongly marked sub-race, the Improved English Pouter, is considered to be the most distinct of all domesticated pigeons.

Group II. includes three Races:—(1) “Carriers,” with a long pointed bill, the eyes surrounded by much bare skin, and the neck and body much elongated; (2) “Runts,” with a long, massive bill, and the body of great size; and (3) “Barbs,” with a short, broad bill, much bare skin round the eyes, and the skin over the nostrils swollen. Of the first four and of the second five sub-races are distinguished.

Group III. is confessedly artificial, and to it are assigned five Races:—(1) “Fan-tails,” remarkable for the extraordinary development of their tails, which may consist of as many as forty-two rectrices in place of the ordinary twelve; (2) “Turbits” and “Owls,” with the feathers of the throat diverging, and a short thick bill; (3) “Tumblers,” possessing the marvellous habit of tumbling backwards during flight, or, in some breeds, even on the ground, and having a short, conical bill; (4) “Frill-backs,” in which the feathers are reversed; and (5) “Jacobins,” with the feathers of the neck forming a hood, and the wings and tail long.

Group IV. greatly resembles the normal form, and comprises two Races:—(1) “Trumpeters,” with a tuft of feathers at the base of the neck curling forward, the face much feathered, and a very peculiar voice, and (2) Pigeons scarcely differing in structure from the wild stock.

Besides these some three or four other little-known breeds exist, and the whole number of breeds and sub-breeds almost defies computation. The difference between them is in many cases far from being superficial, for Darwin has shown that there is scarcely any part of the skeleton which is constant, and the modifications that have been effected in the proportions of the head and sternal apparatus are very remarkable. Yet the proof that all these different birds have descended from one common stock is nearly certain. Here there is no need to point out its bearing upon the theory of natural selection. The antiquity of some of these breeds is not the least interesting part of the subject, nor is the use to which one at least of them has long been applied. The dove from the earliest period in history has been associated with the idea of a messenger (Genesis viii. 8-12), and the employment of pigeons in that capacity, developed successively by Greeks, Romans, Mussulmans and Christians, has come down to modern times.

The various foreign species, if not truly belonging to the genus Columba, are barely separable therefrom. Of these examples may be found in the Indian, Ethiopian and Neotropical regions. Innumerable other forms entitled to the name of “dove” are to be found in almost every part of the world, and nowhere more abundantly than in the Australian Region. A. R. Wallace (Ibis, 1865, pp. 365-400) considers that they attain their maximum development in the Papuan Subregion, where, though the land area is less than one-sixth that of Europe, more than a quarter of all the species (some 300 in number) known to exist are found—owing, he suggests, to the absence of forest-haunting and fruit-eating mammals, which are in most cases destructive to eggs also.

To a small group of birds the name dove is, however, especially applicable in common parlance. This is the group containing the turtle-doves—the time-honoured emblem of tenderness and conjugal love. The common turtle-dove of Europe (Turtur auritus) is one of those species which are gradually extending their area. In England, in the 18th century, it seems to have been chiefly, if not solely, known in the southern and western counties. Though in the character of a straggler only, it now reaches the extreme north of Scotland, and is perhaps nowhere more abundant than in many of the midland and eastern counties of England. On the continent of Europe the same thing has been observed, though indeed not so definitely; and this species has appeared as a casual visitor within the Arctic Circle. Its graceful form and the delicate harmony of its modest colouring are proverbial. The species is migratory, reaching Europe late in April and retiring in September. Another species, and one perhaps better known from being commonly kept in confinement, is that called by many the collared or Barbary dove (T. risorius)—the second English name probably indicating that it was by way of the Barbary coast that it was brought to England. This is distinguished by its cream-coloured plumage and black necklace.

(A. N.)

1 The Variation of Animals and Plants under Domestication (London, 1868), vol. i. pp. 131-224.


DOVER, GEORGE JAMES WELBORE AGAR-ELLIS, Baron (1797-1833), English man of letters, born on the 14th of January 1797, was the only son of the 2nd Viscount Clifden. He was educated at Westminster school and at Christ Church, Oxford. In 1818 he was returned to parliament as member for Heytesbury. He afterwards represented Seaford (1820), Ludgershall (1826) and Okehampton (1830). He seconded Canning’s motion in 1822 for a bill to relieve the disabilities of Roman Catholic peers, and consistently supported liberal principles. In party politics, however, he took little interest, but he zealously advocated in parliament and elsewhere that state encouragement should be given to the cause of literature and the fine arts. In 1824 he was the leading promoter of the grant of £57,000 for the purchase of John Julius Angerstein’s collection of pictures, which formed the foundation of the National Gallery. On the formation of Lord Grey’s administration, in November 1830, he was appointed chief commissioner of woods and forests, but was compelled by delicate health to resign it after two months’ occupancy. In June 1831, during the lifetime of his father, he was raised to the House of Lords, receiving an English peerage with the title of Baron Dover. He was president (1832) of the Royal Society of Literature, a trustee of the British Museum and of the National Gallery, and a commissioner of public records. He died on the 10th of July 453 1833. Lord Dover’s works are chiefly historical, and include The True History of the Iron Mask, extracted from Documents in The French Archives (1826), Inquiries respecting the Character of Clarendon (1827), and a Life of Frederick II. (1831). He also edited the Ellis Correspondence (1829) and Walpole’s Letters to Sir Horace Mann (1833).


DOVER, HENRY JERMYN, Earl of (c. 1636-1708), was the second son of Sir Thomas Jermyn, of Rushbroke, Suffolk, elder brother of Henry Jermyn, earl of St Albans (q.v.). Jermyn surpassed his uncle, St Albans, in reputation for profligacy, figuring frequently as “the little Jermyn” in the Grammont Memoirs, as the lover of Lady Castlemaine, Lady Shrewsbury, Miss Jennings and other beauties of the court of Charles II. He was also a noted duellist and a lifelong gambler. While the court was in exile, he obtained a post in the household of the duke of York, to whom he became master of the horse at the Restoration. Being a Roman Catholic he enjoyed a position of influence with James II., who on his accession raised Jermyn to the peerage as Baron Dover in 1685, and appointed him lieutenant-general of the royal guard in 1686. At the Revolution, Dover adhered to James, whom he followed abroad, and in July 1689 the deposed sovereign created him Baron Jermyn of Royston, Baron Ipswich, Viscount Cheveley and earl of Dover; these honours being among the “Jacobite peerages” which were not recognized by the English government, though Jermyn became generally known as the earl of Dover. He commanded a troop at the battle of the Boyne; but shortly afterwards made his submission to William III. He succeeded his brother Thomas as 3rd Baron Jermyn of St Edmundsbury in 1703, and died in 1708. As he left no children by his wife, Judith, daughter of Sir Edmund Poley, of Badley, Suffolk, his titles became extinct at his death.

See Samuel Pepys, Diary, edited by H. B. Wheatley, 9 vols. (London, 1893); Anthony Hamilton, Memoirs of Grammont (Bohn edition, London, 1846); J. S. Clarke, Life of James II., 2 vols. (London, 1816); Narcissus Luttrell, Brief Relation of State Affairs 1678-1714, 6 vols. (Oxford, 1857).


DOVER, ROBERT (1575-1641), English captain and attorney, is known as the founder and director for many years of the “Cotswold Games,” which he originated as a protest against the growing Puritanism of the day. These sports, which were referred to by contemporary writers as “Mr Robert Dover’s Olimpick Games upon the Cotswold Hills,” consisted of cudgel-playing, wrestling, running at the quintain, jumping, casting the bar and hammer, hand-ball, gymnastics, rural dances and games and horse-racing, the winners in which received valuable prizes. They continued from about the year 1604 until three years after the death of Dover, which took place in 1641. They were revived for a brief period in the reign of Charles II.


DOVER, the capital of Delaware, U.S.A., and the county seat of Kent county, on the St Jones River, in the central part of the state, about 48 m. S. of Wilmington and about 9 m. from Delaware Bay. Pop. (1890) 3061; (1900) 3329 (772 negroes); (1910) 3720. Dover is served by the Philadelphia, Baltimore & Washington railway (Pennsylvania system). The state house, built about 1722 for a court house, was remodelled for its present purpose in 1791; it contains the state library, which in 1908 had about 50,000 bound volumes. Dover is the seat of the Wilmington Conference Academy (Methodist Episcopal); and about 2 m. N. is the state college for coloured students (co-educational; opened in 1892), an agricultural and manual training school. The surrounding country is largely devoted to the raising of small fruit. Among the manufactures are canned fruit and meat (especially poultry), timber, machine shop products, baskets and crates, and silk. The town was laid out in 1717; in 1777 it replaced New Castle as the capital of the state, and in 1829 it was incorporated as a town. Dover was the birthplace of the American patriot, Caesar Rodney (1728-1784), whose home near Dover is still standing.


DOVER, a seaport and municipal and parliamentary borough of Kent, England, one of the Cinque Ports, 76 m. E.S.E. of London by the South-Eastern & Chatham railway. Pop. (1891) 33,503; (1901) 41,794. It is situated at the mouth of a small stream, the Dour, whose valley here breaches the high chalk cliffs which fringe the coast on either hand. It is an exceptionally healthy locality, and the steep shore and open downs make it an agreeable summer resort. The better residential quarters lie along the seaboard and on the higher ground, notably on a western spur of the Castle Hill. The dominant object of the place is the castle, on the east height, 375 ft. above sea-level, between which and the batteries on the western heights lies the old town. The castle occupies a space of 35 acres. Within its precincts are a Roman pharos or lighthouse, still exhibiting the Roman masonry; the ancient fortress church (St Mary in Castro); some remains of the Saxon fort; and the massive keep and subsidiary defences (such as the Constable’s, Avranche’s, and other towers) of the Norman building. The church, substantially unaltered, forms an almost unique Christian relic. It has been called Roman, but is later. It is cruciform in shape, and the walls are built mainly of flint, but jambs and arches are formed of Roman bricks. At the end of the 12th century it was remodelled and given an Early English character. In the beginning of the 18th century it was dismantled and turned into a storehouse; and so continued until 1863, when, having been restored by Sir G. G. Scott, it was again opened for divine service, and is now the chapel of the castle garrison.

The view from the castle keep includes on a clear day the line of cliffs from Folkestone to Ramsgate on the one side, and from Boulogne to Gravelines on the other side of the strait. The cliffs are honeycombed in all directions with military works. They are covered by modern works on the north side known as Fort Burgoyne, and additional works extend eastwards towards St Margaret’s Bay. The western heights, where is the foundation of another Roman lighthouse, form a further circuit of fortifications. They are still more elevated than the castle. A military shaft, locally known as the Corkscrew Staircase, affords communication between the barracks and the town. Remains were discovered here in 1854 of a round church of the Templars (Holy Sepulchre), 32 ft. in diameter; the church, doubtless, in which King John made his submission to the Papal Nuncio in 1213. Archcliffe Fort lies to the south-west of old Dover. There may further be mentioned the remnant of the Saxon collegiate church of the canons of St Martin, and the parish church of St Mary the Virgin. This last was rebuilt and enlarged in 1843-1844, but preserves the three bays of the Saxon church, with its western narthex, on which was superimposed the Norman tower, which presents its rich front to the street. The rest of the church is mainly Norman and Early English. A later Norman church stands under the Castle Hill, but its parochial status was transferred to the modern church of St James.

The remains of the splendid foundation of St Martin’s priory, of the 12th century, include the great gate, the house refectory, with campanile, and the spacious strangers’ refectory, now incorporated in Dover College. The college of St Martin for twenty-two secular canons, which had been established in the castle in 696, was removed into the town in the beginning of the 8th century, and in 1139 became a Benedictine priory under the jurisdiction of that at Canterbury, to which see the lands are still attached. The interior of the refectory is very fine. In High Street may be seen the noble hall and truncated fabric of the Maison Dieu founded by Hubert de Burgh in the 13th century for the reception of pilgrims of all nations. From the time of Henry VIII. to 1830 it was used as a crown victualling office, but was subsequently purchased by the corporation and adapted as a town hall. The new town hall adjoining the old hall of the Maison Dieu was opened in 1883. The museum (1849) contains an interesting collection of local antiquities and a natural history collection.

Among various charitable institutions are the National Sailors’ Home and the Gordon Boys’ and Victoria Seaside Orphanages. Besides the church of St James, mentioned above, other modern churches are those of Holy Trinity and Christ church, and further up the valley there are the parish churches of Charlton (originally Norman) and Buckland (Early English). Among educational establishments is Dover College, occupying the site and remaining buildings of St Martin’s priory, with additional modern buildings. 454 It was instituted in 1871, and educates about 220 boys. There is a separate junior school.

Dover is the only one of the Cinque Ports which is still a great port. It is one of the principal ports for passenger communications across the Channel, steamers connecting it with Calais and Ostend. The Admiralty pier was begun in 1847 and practically completed to a length of about 2000 ft. in 1871. In 1888 the gates of Wellington dock were widened to admit a larger type of Channel steamers; new coal stores were erected on the Northampton quay; the slipway was lengthened 40 ft., and widened for the reception of vessels up to 800 tons. In 1891 it was resolved to construct a new commercial harbour at an estimated cost of about £700,000. Begun in 1893, the works included the construction of an east pier (“Prince of Wales’s Pier”), running parallel to the general direction of the Admiralty pier and in conjunction with it enclosing an area of sheltered water amounting to seventy-five acres. This pier was completed in 1902. A railway line connected with the South-Eastern and Chatham system runs to its head, and in July 1903 it was brought into use for the embarcation of passengers by transatlantic liners. In 1896 and subsequent years funds were voted by parliament for the construction of an artificial harbour for naval purposes, having an area of 610 acres, of which 322 acres were to have a depth of not less than 30 ft. at low water. The scheme comprised three enclosing breakwaters—on the west an extension of the Admiralty pier in a south-easterly direction for a length of 2000 ft.; on the south an isolated breakwater, 4200 ft. long, curving round shoreward at its eastern end to accord with the direction of the third breakwater; on the east, which runs out from the shore in a southerly direction for a length of 3320 ft. These three breakwaters, with a united length of rather more than 1¾ m., are each built of massive concrete blocks in the form of a practically vertical wall founded on the solid chalk and rising to a quay level of 10 ft. above high water. Two entrances, one 800 ft. and the other 600 ft. in width, with a depth of about seven fathoms at low water, are situated at either end of the detached breakwater. The plan also included the reclamation of the foreshore at the foot of the cliffs, between the castle jetty and the root of the eastern breakwater, by means of a massive sea-wall. The construction of three powerful forts was undertaken in defence of the harbour, which was opened in 1909.

Besides the mail service and harbour trade, Dover has a trade in shipbuilding, timber, rope and sail making, and ships’ stores. Dover is a suffragan bishopric in the diocese of Canterbury. The parliamentary borough returns one member. The town is governed by a mayor, six aldermen and eighteen councillors. Area, 2026 acres.

History.—Dover (Dubris) was one of the ports for continental traffic in Roman times. In the 4th century it was guarded by a fort lying down near the harbour, and forming part of the defences of the Saxon shore (Litus Saxonicum). As a Cinque Port, Dover (Dofra, Dovorra) had to contribute twenty of the quota of ships furnished by those ports; in return for this service a charter of liberties was granted to the ports by Edward the Confessor, making the townsmen quit of shires and hundreds, with the right to be impleaded only at Shepway, and other privileges, which were confirmed by subsequent kings, with additions, down to James II. During the middle ages Dover Castle was an object of contention both in civil wars and foreign invasions, and was considered the key to England; the constable of the castle, who from the reign of John was appointed by the crown, was also warden of the Cinque Ports. The castle was successfully defended in 1216 against the French under the dauphin Louis by Hubert de Burgh, who was also the founder of the Maison Dieu established for the accommodation of pilgrims. The title of mayor as chief municipal officer first occurs about the middle of the 13th century, when the town was governed by a mayor and twelve jurats. The Cinque Ports were first represented in the parliament of 1265; Dover returned two members until 1885 when the number was reduced to one. In 1685 Charles II. confirmed to the inhabitants of Dover a fair beginning on the 11th of November, which had been held of old in the town, and granted two others on the 23rd and 24th of April and the 25th and 26th of September.

After the decay of Richborough harbour the passage from Dover to Whitsand, and later to Calais, became the accustomed route to France, and by a statute of 1465 no one might ship for Calais except at Dover. The guardians of the harbour were incorporated by James I. in 1607.

See S. P. H. Statham, History of the Castle, Town and Port of Dover (London, 1899); and Dover Charters and other Documents (London, 1902).

Battle of Dover

This famous and important naval victory was won off the town of Dover by the ships of the Cinque Ports on the 21st of August 1217, during the minority of King Henry III. The barons, who were in arms against his father King John, had called Louis, son of Philip Augustus, king of the French, to their aid. Having been recently defeated in Lincoln, they were hard pressed, and reinforcements were sent to them from Calais in a fleet commanded by a pirate and mercenary soldier called Eustace the Monk. His real name is uncertain, but according to the chronicle of Lanercost it was Matthew. He passed the Straits of Dover with a numerous flotilla laden with military machines and stores, and also carrying many knights and soldiers. The Monk’s fleet was seen from Dover, where the regent, Hubert de Burgh, lay with a naval force of the Cinque Ports, said to have been very small. Sixteen vessels of large size for the time, and a number of smaller craft, is said to have been their total strength. But medieval estimates of numbers are never to be trusted, and the strength of the Cinque Port squadron was probably diminished to exalt the national glory. It put to sea, and by hugging the wind gained the weather gage of the French adventurer. Eustace is said to have been under the impression that they meant to attack Calais in his absence, and to have derided them because he had left the town well guarded. When they were to windward of his fleet the Cinque Port ships bore down on the enemy. As they approached they threw unslaked lime in the air and the wind blew it in the faces of the French. This form of attack, and the flights of arrows discharged by the English (which flew with the wind), produced confusion in the crowded benches of the French vessels, which in most cases must have been little more than open boats. It is further said that in some cases at least the English vessels were “bearded,” that is to say, strengthened by iron bands across the bows for ramming, and that they sank many of the French. The Monk was certainly defeated, and his fleet was entirely scattered, sunk or taken. His own vessel was captured. Eustace, who had concealed himself in the bilge, was dragged out. In answer to his appeals for quarter and promises to pay ransom, he was told by Richard, the bastard son of King John, that he was a traitor who would not be allowed to deceive more men. His head was struck off by Richard, and was sent round the ports on a pike. The Cinque Port seamen returned in triumph, towing their prizes, after throwing the common soldiers overboard, and taking the knights to ransom according to the custom of the age.

The political importance of the battle was very great, for it gave the death-blow to the cause of the barons who supported Louis, and it fixed Henry III. on the throne. But the defeat and death of the Monk was widely regarded as in a peculiar sense a victory over the powers of evil. The man became within a few years after his death the hero of many legends of piracy and necromancy. It was said that after leaving the cloister he studied the black art in Toledo, which had a great reputation in the middle ages as a school of witchcraft. A French poem written seemingly within a generation after his death represents him as a wizard. In a prose narrative discovered and printed by M. Francisque Michel, it is said that he made his ship invisible by magic spells. A brother wizard in the English fleet, by name Stephen Crabbe, detected him while he was invisible to others. The bold and patriotic Crabbe contrived to board the bewitched flagship, and was seen apparently laying about him with an axe on the water—which the spectators took to be a proof either that he was mad, or that this was the devil in his shape. At last he struck off the head of Eustace, upon which the spell was broken, and the ship 455 appeared. Crabbe was torn to pieces—presumably by the familiar spirits of the Monk—and the fragments were scattered over the water. Saint Bartholomew, whose feast is on the 21st of August, came to encourage the English by his presence and his voice.

Ascertainable fact concerning Eustace is less picturesque, but enough is known to show that he was an adventurous and unscrupulous scoundrel. In his youth he was a monk, and left the cloister to claim an inheritance from the count of Boulogne. Not having received satisfaction he became a freebooter on land and sea, and mercenary soldier. He is frequently mentioned in the Pipe, Patent and Close Rolls. For a time he served King John, but when the king made friends with the count of Boulogne, he fled abroad, and entered the service of the French prince Louis and his father Philip Augustus. Chroniclers lavish on him the titles of “archipirata,” “vir flagitiosissimus et nequissimus,” and poets made him an associate of the devil.

The evidence concerning Eustace is collected by Herren Wendelin Forster and Johann Trost, in their edition of the French poem “Wistasse le moine” (Halle, 1891). See for the battle Sir N. Harris Nicolas, History of the Royal Navy (London, 1847).


DOVER, a city and the county seat of Strafford county, New Hampshire, U.S.A., on the Cochecho river, at the head of navigation, 10 m. N.W. of Portsmouth. Pop. (1890) 12,790; (1900) 13,207, of whom 3298 were foreign-born; (1910 census) 13,247. Land area, 26.4 sq m. It is at the intersection of two branches of the Boston & Maine railway, and is served by several interurban electric lines. The street plan is irregular. Dover has a fine city hall of red brick and freestone; a public library containing (1907) 34,000 volumes, the Wentworth hospital; the Wentworth home for the aged, a children’s and an orphans’ home. The Strafford Savings Bank is said to be the largest and oldest savings institution in the state. Dover has long had a considerable commerce, both by rail and by water, that by water being chiefly in coal and building materials. The navigation of the Cochecho river has been greatly improved by the Federal government, at a cost between 1829 and 1907 of about $300,000, and in 1909 there was a navigable channel, 60-75 ft. wide and 7 ft. deep at mean low water, from Dover to the mouth of the river; the mean range of tides is 6.8 ft. The Cochecho river falls 31½ ft. within the city limits and furnishes water-power for factories; among the manufactures are textiles, boots and shoes, leather belting, sash, doors and blinds, carriages, machinery and bricks. In 1905 Dover ranked fourth among the manufacturing cities of the state, and first in manufactures of woollens; the value of the city’s total factory product in that year was $6,042,901. Dover is one of the two oldest cities in the state. In May 1623 a settlement was established by Edward Hilton on Dover Point, about 5 m. S.E. of the Cochecho Falls; the present name was adopted in 1639, and with the development of manufacturing and trading interests the population gradually removed nearer the falls; Hilton and his followers were Anglicans, but in 1633 they were joined by several Puritan families under Captain Thomas Wiggin, who settled on Dover Neck (1 m. above Dover Point), which for 100 years was the business centre of the town. As the settlement was outside the jurisdiction of any province, and as trouble arose between the two sects, a plantation covenant was drawn up and signed in 1640 by forty-one of the inhabitants. Dissensions, however, continued, and in 1641, by the will of the majority, Dover passed under the jurisdiction of Massachusetts and so remained for nearly half a century. The town, between 1675 and 1725, suffered greatly from Indian attacks, particularly from that of the 28th of June 1689 at Cochecho Falls. Dover was first chartered as a city in 1855. Within the original territory of the town were included Newington, set off in 1713, Somersworth (1729), Durham (1732), Medbury (1755), Lee, set off from Durham in 1766, and Rollinsford, set off from Somersworth in 1849.

456

See Jeremy Belknap, History of New Hampshire (Philadelphia, 1784-1792); and Rev. Dr A. H. Quint’s Historical Memoranda of Persons and Places in Old Dover, N.H., edited by John Scales (Dover, 1900).


DOVER, a town of Morris county, New Jersey, U.S.A., on the Rockaway river and the Morris canal, about 40 m. by rail W.N.W. of Hoboken. Pop. (1900) 5938, of whom 947 were foreign-born; (1905) 6353; (1910) 7468. The area of the town is 1.72 sq. m. Dover is at the junction of the main line and the Morris & Essex division of the Delaware, Lackawanna & Western railway (which has large repair shops here), and is also served by the High Bridge branch of the Central of New Jersey, and by an electric line connecting with neighbouring towns. The town is situated about 570 ft. above sea-level. Building stone, used extensively for railway bridges, and iron ore abound in the vicinity. The river furnishes good water-power, and the town has various manufactures, including stoves and ranges, boilers, bar iron, rivets, steel castings, rock drills, air compressors, silk hose and underwear, organzine or thrown silk, and overalls. The waterworks are owned by the town, water being obtained from wells varying in depth from 193 to 213 ft. Dover was settled as early as 1748, and was separated from Randolph township and incorporated as a town in 1869.


DOVERCOURT, a watering-place in the Harwich parliamentary division of Essex, England, immediately S.W. of Harwich, with a station between Parkeston Quay and Harwich town on the Great Eastern railway, 70 m. N.E. by E. from London. Pop. (1901) 3894. The esplanade and sea-wall front the North Sea, and there is a fine expanse of sand affording good bathing. There is also a chalybeate spa. The scenery of the neighbouring Orwell and Stour estuaries is pleasant. The church, which stands inland in the old village distinguished as Upper Dovercourt, is Early English and later; it formerly possessed a miraculous rood which became an object of pilgrimage of wide repute. It is said to have been stolen and burnt in 1532, three of the four thieves being subsequently taken and hanged.


DOW, LORENZO (1777-1834), American preacher, noted for his eccentricities of dress and manner, was born at Coventry, Connecticut, on the 16th of October 1777. He was much troubled in his youth by religious perplexities, but ultimately joined the Methodists, and in 1798 was appointed a preacher “on trial” in a New York circuit. In the following year, however, he crossed the Atlantic and preached as a missionary to the Catholics of Ireland, and thereafter was never connected officially with the ministry of the Methodist Church, though he remained essentially a Methodist in doctrine. Everywhere, in America and Great Britain, he attracted great crowds to hear and see him, and he was often persecuted as well as admired. In 1805 he visited England, introduced the system of camp meetings, and thus led the way to the formation of the Primitive Methodist Society. Dow’s enthusiasm sustained him through the incessant labours of more than thirty years, during which he preached in almost all parts of the United States. His later efforts were directed chiefly against the Jesuits; indeed he was in general a vigorous opponent of Roman Catholicism. He died in Georgetown, District of Columbia, on the 2nd of February 1834. Among his publications are: Polemical Works (1814); The Stranger in Charleston, or the Trial and Confession of Lorenzo Dow (1822); A Short Account of a Long Travel; with Beauties of Wesley (1823); and the History of a Cosmopolite; or the Four Volumes of the Rev. Lorenzo Dow’s Journal, concentrated in One, containing his Experience and Travels from Childhood to 1814 (1814; many later editions); this volume also contains “All the Polemical Works of Lorenzo.” The edition of 1854 was entitled The Dealings of God, Man, and the Devil as exemplified in the Life, Experience and Travels of Lorenzo Dow.


DOW, NEAL (1804-1897), American temperance reformer, was born at Portland, Maine, on the 20th of March 1804. His parents were Quakers and he was educated at the Friends’ School in New Bedford, Massachusetts. He subsequently became a merchant in his native city and rose to a position of importance in its business and political life. His chief interest, however, was in the temperance question, and he early attracted attention as an ardent champion of the prohibition of the sale of intoxicating drinks. He drafted the drastic Maine prohibitory law of 1851. He was mayor of Portland in 1851 and in 1855, and was a member of the Maine legislature in 1858-1859. Early in the Civil War he became colonel of the 13th Maine Volunteer Infantry. He served in General B. F. Butler’s New Orleans expedition, was commissioned brigadier-general of volunteers in April 1862, and subsequently commanded for a time the department of Florida. He was twice wounded in the attack on Port Hudson, on the 27th of May 1863, and was taken prisoner, remaining eight months in Libby and other prisons before he was exchanged. After the war he devoted a great part of his time and energy to the extension of the prohibition movement in America and England. Through his exertions the prohibitory amendment was added to the Maine constitution in 1884. In 1880 he was the candidate of the National Prohibition Party for president, polling 10,305 votes. He died at Portland on the 2nd of October 1897.

His Reminiscences were published at Portland in 1898.


DOWAGER (from the Old Fr. douagiere, mod. douairière), strictly, a widow in the enjoyment of dower. “Dowager” is also applied to widows of high rank to distinguish them from the wives of their sons, as queen-dowager, dowager-duchess, &c. The title was first used in England of Catherine of Aragon, widow of Arthur, prince of Wales, who was styled princess dowager till her marriage with Henry VIII. By transference the word is used of an elderly lady.


DOWDEN, EDWARD (1843-  ), Irish critic and poet, son of John Wheeler Dowden, merchant and landowner, was born at Cork on the 3rd of May 1843, being three years junior to his brother John, who became bishop of Edinburgh in 1886. His literary tastes were shown early, in a series of essays written at the age of twelve. His home education was continued at Queen’s College, Cork, and Trinity College, Dublin; at the latter university he had a distinguished career, becoming president of the Philosophical Society, and winning the vice-chancellor’s prize for English verse and prose, and the first senior moderatorship in ethics and logic. In 1867 he was elected professor of oratory and English literature in Dublin University. His first book, Shakespeare, his Mind and Art (1875), was a revision of a course of lectures, and made him widely known as a critic, being translated into German and Russian; and his Poems (1876) went into a second edition. His Shakespeare Primer (1877) was also translated into Italian and German. In 1878 he was awarded the Cunningham gold medal of the Royal Irish Academy “for his literary writings, especially in the field of Shakespearian criticism.” Later works by him in this field were his Shakespeare’s Sonnets (1881), Passionate Pilgrim (1883), Introduction to Shakespeare (1893), Hamlet (1899), Romeo and Juliet (1900), Cymbeline (1903), and his article (National Review, July 1902) on “Shakespeare as a Man of Science,” criticizing T. E. Webb’s Mystery of William Shakespeare. His critical essays “Studies in Literature” (1878), “Transcripts and Studies” (1888), “New Studies in Literature” (1895) showed a profound knowledge of the currents and tendencies of thought in various ages and countries; but it was his Life of Shelley (1886) that made him best known to the public at large. In 1900 he edited an edition of Shelley’s works. Other books by him which indicate his interests in literature are his Southey (in the “English Men of Letters” series, 1880), his edition of Southey’s Correspondence with Caroline Bowles (1881), and Select Poems of Southey (1895), his Correspondence of Sir Henry Taylor (1888), his edition of Wordsworth’s Poetical Works (1892) and of his Lyrical Ballads (1890), his French Revolution and English Literature (1897; lectures given at Princeton University in 1896), History of French Literature (1897), Puritan and Anglican (1900), Robert Browning (1904) and Michel de Montaigne (1905). His devotion to Goethe led to his succeeding Max Müller in 1888 as president of the English Goethe Society. In 1889 he became the first Taylorian lecturer at Oxford, and from 1892 to 1896 was Clark lecturer at Trinity College, Cambridge. To his sagacity in research are due, among other matters of literary interest, the first account of Carlyle’s 457 “Lectures on periods of European culture”; the identification of Shelley as the author of a review (in The Critical Review of December 1814) of a lost romance by Hogg; description of Shelley’s “Philosophical View of Reform”; a MS. diary of Fabre D’Eglantine; and a record by Dr Wilhelm Weissenborn of Goethe’s last days and death. He also discovered a “Narrative of a Prisoner of War under Napoleon” (published in Blackwood’s Magazine), an unknown pamphlet by Bishop Berkeley, some unpublished writings of Hayley relating to Cowper, and a unique copy of the Tales of Terror. His wide sympathies and scholarly methods made his influence on criticism both sound and stimulating, and his own ideals are well described in his essay on “The Interpretation of Literature” in his Transcripts and Studies. As commissioner of education in Ireland (1896-1901), trustee of the National Library of Ireland, secretary of the Irish Liberal Union and vice-president of the Irish Unionist Alliance, he enforced his view that literature should not be divorced from practical life. He married twice, first (1866) Mary Clerke, and secondly (1895) Elizabeth Dickinson West, daughter of the dean of St Patrick’s.


DOWDESWELL, WILLIAM (1721-1775), English politician, was a son of William Dowdeswell of Pull Court, Bushley, Worcestershire, and was educated at Westminster school, at Christ Church, Oxford, and at the university of Leiden. He became member of parliament for the family borough of Tewkesbury in 1747, retaining this seat until 1754, and from 1761 until his death he was one of the representatives of Worcestershire. Becoming prominent among the Whigs, Dowdeswell was made chancellor of the exchequer in 1765 under the marquess of Rockingham, and his short tenure of this position appears to have been a successful one, he being in Lecky’s words “a good financier, but nothing more.” To the general astonishment he refused to abandon his friends and to take office under Lord Chatham, who succeeded Rockingham in August 1766. Dowdeswell then led the Rockingham party in the House of Commons, taking an active part in debate until his death at Nice on the 6th of February 1775. The highly eulogistic epitaph on his monument at Bushley was written by Edmund Burke.


DOWER (through the Old Fr. douaire from late Lat. dotarium, classical Lat. dos, dowry), in law, the life interest of the widow in a third part of her husband’s lands. There were originally five kinds of dower: (1) at common law; (2) by custom; (3) ad ostium ecclesiae, or at the church porch; (4) ex assensu patris; (5) de la plus belle. The last was a conveyance of tenure by knight service, and was abolished in 1660, by the act which did away with old tenures. Dower ad ostium ecclesiae, by which the bride was dowered at the church porch (where all marriages used formerly to take place), and dower ex assensu patris, by the father of the bridegroom, though long obsolete, were formally abolished by the Dower Act 1834. Dower is governed in the United Kingdom, so far as women married after the 1st of January 1834 are concerned, by the Dower Act 1834, and under it only attaches on the husband’s death to the lands which he actually possessed for an estate of inheritance at the time of his death. It must be claimed within twelve years of the time of its accrual, but only six years’ arrears are recoverable. The wife is also entitled to dower out of equitable estates, but joint estates are exempt. By the act the wife’s dower is placed completely under her husband’s control. It does not attach to any land actually disposed of by him in his lifetime or by his will, nor to any land from which he has declared by deed his wife shall not be entitled to dower. He may also defeat her right, either as to any particular land or to all his lands, by a declaration in his will; while it is subject to all the deceased husband’s debts and contracts, and to any partial estates which he may have created during his life or by his will. A widow tenant in dower may make leases for twenty-one years under the Settled Estates Act 1878. Free-bench is an analogous right in regard to copyhold land; it does not fall within the Dower Act 1834, and varies with the custom of each manor. At common law, and prior to the act of 1834, dower was of a very different nature. The wife’s right attached, while the husband was still living, to any land whereof he was solely seised in possession (excluding equitable and joint estates) for an estate of inheritance at any time during the continuance of the marriage, provided that any child the wife might have had could have been heir to the same, even though no child was actually born. When once this right had attached it adhered to the lands, notwithstanding any sale or devise the husband might make; nor was it liable for his debts. In this way dower proved an obstacle to the free alienation of land, for it was necessary for a husband wishing to make a valid conveyance to obtain the consent of his wife releasing her right to dower. This release was only effected by a fine, the wife being separately examined. Often, by reason of the expense involved, the wife’s concurrence was not obtained, and thus the title of the purchaser was defective during the wife’s lifetime. The acceptance of a jointure by the wife before marriage was, however, destructive of dower, if after marriage she was put to her election between it and dower. By the ingenuity of the old conveyancers, devices, known as “uses to bar dower” (the effect of which was that the purchaser never had at any time an estate of inheritance in possession), were found to prevent dower attaching to newly purchased lands, and so to enable the owner to give a clear title, without the need of the wife’s concurrence, in the event of his wishing, in his turn, to convey the land. All this was, however, swept away by the Dower Act 1834, and a purchaser of land no longer need trouble himself to inquire whether the dower of the wife of the vendor has been barred, or to insist on her concurrence in a fine.

(H. S. S.)

DOWIE, JOHN ALEXANDER (1848-1907), founder of “Zionism,” was born in Edinburgh, and went as a boy to South Australia with his parents. He returned in 1868 to study for the Congregationalist ministry at Edinburgh University, and subsequently became pastor of a church near Sydney, Australia. He was a powerful preacher, and later, having become imbued with belief in his powers as a healer of disease by prayer, he obtained sufficient following to move to Melbourne, build a tabernacle, and found “The Divine Healing Association of Australia and New Zealand.” In 1888 he went to America, preaching and “healing,” and in spite of opposition and ridicule attracted a number of adherents. In 1896 he established “The Christian Catholic Apostolic Church in Zion,” with himself as “First Apostle”; and in 1901, with money liberally contributed by his followers, he founded Zion City, on a site covering about 10 sq. m. on the west shore of Lake Michigan, with a central temple for the Zionist church. In 1903 and 1904, in the course of a visit to the branches of the Zionist movement throughout the world, he appeared in London, but was mobbed. In April 1906 a revolt against his domination took place in Zion City. He was charged with peculation and with practising polygamy, and was deposed, with the assent of his own wife and son. A suit brought by him in the United States district court to recover possession of the Zion City property, valued at two millions sterling, was unsuccessful, and his defalcations were fully proved. Dowie was now broken in health and unmistakably insane; he was struck with paralysis and gradually becoming weaker died in Zion City in March 1907.


DOWLAS, the name given to a plain cloth, similar to sheeting, but usually coarser. It is made in several qualities, from line warp and weft to two warp and weft, and is used chiefly for aprons, pocketing, soldiers’ gaiters, linings and overalls. The finer makes are sometimes made into shirts for workmen, and occasionally used for heavy pillow-cases. The word is spelt in many different ways, but the above is the common way of spelling adopted in factories, and it appears in the same form in Shakespeare’s First Part of Henry IV., Act III. scene 3. The modern dowlas is a good, strong and closely woven linen fabric.


DOWN, a maritime county of Ireland, in the province of Ulster, occupying the most easterly part of the island, bounded N. by Co. Antrim and Belfast Lough, E. and S. by the Irish Sea, and W. by Co. Armagh. The area is 607,916 acres, or nearly 950 sq. m. The coast line is indented by several loughs and bays. The largest of these is Strangford Lough, a fine sheet of water studded with 260 islets, 54 of which have names. All are well wooded or 458 rich in pasturage. The lough runs for 10 m. northwards, and the ancient castles and ruined abbeys on some of the islets render the scene one of singular interest and beauty. Farther south Dundrum Bay forms a wider expanse of water. In the south-west Carlingford Lough separates the county from Louth. There are no lakes of importance. Between Strangford and Carlingford loughs the county is occupied by a range of hills known in its south-western portion as the Mourne Mountains, which give rise to the four principal rivers—the Bann, the Lagan, the Annacloy and the Newry. This mass includes, several striking peaks, of which the principal is Slieve Donard, rising finely direct from the sea to a height of 2796 ft., which is exceeded in Ireland only by one peak in the Wicklow range, and by the higher reeks in Killarney. Several other summits exceed 2000 ft.

Holy wells and mineral springs are numerous in Co. Down. These are both chalybeate and sulphurous, and occur at Ardmillan, Granshaw, Dundonnell, Magheralin, Dromore, Newry, Banbridge and Tierkelly. Those of Struell near Downpatrick were accredited with miraculous powers by the natives until recent times, and religious observances of an extravagant nature took place there.

Geology.—The foundation of this county is Silurian rock throughout, the slates and sandstones striking as a whole north-east, but giving rise to a country of abundant small hills. The granite that appears along the same axis in Armagh continues from Newry to Slieve Croob, furnishing an excellent building stone. South of it, the Eocene granite of the Mournes forms a group of rocky summits, set with scarps and tors, and divided by noble valleys, which are not yet choked by the detritus of these comparatively youthful mountains. Basalt dykes abound, being well seen along the coast south of Newcastle. At the head of Strangford Lough, the basalt, possibly as intrusive sheets, has protected Triassic sandstone, which is quarried at Scrabo Hill. A strip of marine Permian occurs on the shore at Holywood. The north-west of the county includes, at Moira, a part of the great basaltic plateaux, with Chalk and Trias protected by them. The haematite of dehomet near Banbridge is well spoken of. Topaz and aquamarine occur in hollows in the granite of the Mournes. The Mourne granite is quarried above Annalong, and an ornamental dolerite is worked at Rosstrevor.

Industries.—The predominating soil is a loam of little depth, in most places intermixed with considerable quantities of stones of various sizes, but differing materially in character according to the nature of the subsoil. Clay is mostly confined to the eastern coast, and to the northern parts of Castlereagh. Of sandy soil the quantity is small; it occurs chiefly near Dundrum. Moor grounds are mostly confined to the skirts of the mountains. Bogs, though frequent, are scarcely sufficient to furnish a supply of fuel to the population. Agriculture is in a fairly satisfactory condition. The bulk of the labouring population is orderly and industrious, and dwell in circumstances contrasting well with those of others of their class in some other parts of Ireland. Tillage land declines somewhat in favour of pasture land. Oats, potatoes and turnips are the principal crops; flax, formerly important, is almost neglected. The breed of horses is an object of much attention, and some of the best racers in Ireland have been bred in this county. The native breed of sheep, a small hardy race, is confined to the mountains. The various other kinds of sheep have been much improved by judicious crosses from the best breeds. Pigs are reared in great numbers, chiefly for the Belfast market, where the large exportation occasions a constant demand for them. Poultry farming is a growing industry. The fisheries, of less value than formerly, are centred at Donaghadee, Newcastle, Strangford and Ardglass, the headquarters of the herring fishery. The chief industries in the county generally are linen manufacture and bleaching, and brewing.

Communications.—The Great Northern railway has an alternative branch route to its main line by Portadown, from Lisburn through Banbridge to Scarva, with a branch from Banbridge to Ballyroney and Newcastle. Newry is on a branch from the Dublin-Belfast line to Warrenpoint on Carlingford Lough. The main line between Lisburn and Portadown touches the north-western extremity of the county. The eastern part of the county is served by the Belfast & County Down railway with its main line from Belfast to Newcastle to Dundrum Bay, and branches from Belfast to Bangor, Comber to Newtownards and Donaghadee, Ballynahinch Junction to Ballynahinch, and Downpatrick to Ardglass and Killough. The Newry Canal skirts the west of the county, and the Lagan Canal intersects the rich lands in the Lagan valley to the north.

Population and Administration.—The population (219,405 in 1891; 205,889 in 1901) decreases slightly. The population in 1891 on the area of the county before the Local Government (Ireland) Act 1898 was 224,008, for in this case the figures for part of the county borough of Belfast were included. This is worth notice from the comparative point of view, since, whereas emigration to foreign ports is considerable, a large portion of the moving population travels no farther than the metropolis of Belfast. About 39% of the population is of the Presbyterian faith, about 31% Roman Catholic, among whom, as usual, education is in the most backward condition; about 23% are Protestant Episcopalians.

The following are the principal towns:—Newry (pop. 12,405), Newtownards (9110), Banbridge (5006), Downpatrick (2993; the county town), Holywood (3840), Gilford (1199), Bangor (5903), Dromore (2307), Donaghadee (2073), Comber (2095) and Warrenpoint (1817). Other small towns are Portaferry, Rathfryland, Killyleagh, Kilkeel, Ballynahinch, Dundrum, a small port, and Hillsborough, near Dromore, where the castle is the seat of the marquesses of Downshire. There are several popular watering-places on the coast, notably Newcastle, Donaghadee, Ardglass and Rosstrevor. On the shore of Belfast Lough are many pleasant residential villages and seats of the wealthy class in Belfast. The county is divided into fourteen baronies, and contains sixty-four parishes. The assizes are held at Downpatrick, and quarter-sessions at the same town and at Banbridge, Newry and Newtownards. The county is in the Protestant diocese of Down, and the Roman Catholic dioceses of Down and Dromore. Down returns four members to parliament—for the north, south, east and west divisions. The borough of Newry returns a member. Previous to the act of Union the county returned fourteen members to the Irish parliament.

History and Antiquities.—The period at which Down was constituted a county is not certain. A district, however, appears to have borne this name before the beginning of the 14th century, but little is known of it even later than this. However, when in 1535 Sir John Perrot undertook the shiring of Ulster, Down and Antrim were excepted as already settled counties. That some such settlement would have been attempted at an early period is likely, as this coast was a place of Anglo-Norman colonization, and to this movement was due the settlement of the baronies of Lecale, the Ards and others.

The county is not wanting in interesting remains. At Slidderyford, near Dundrum, there is a group of ten or twelve pillar stones in a circle, about 10 ft. in height. A very curious cairn on the summit of Slieve Croob is 80 yds. in circumference at the base and 50 at the top, where is a platform on which cairns of various heights are found standing. The village of Anadorn is famed for a cairn covering a cave which contains ashes and human bones. Cromlechs, or altars, are numerous, the most remarkable being the Giant’s Ring, which stands on the summit of a hill near the borders of Antrim. This altar is formed of an unwrought stone 7 ft. long by 6½ broad, resting in an inclined position on rude pillars about 3 ft. high. This solitary landmark is in the centre of an enclosure about a third of a mile in circumference, formed of a rampart about 20 ft. high, and broad enough on the top to permit two persons to ride abreast. Near Downpatrick is a rath, or encampment, three-quarters of a mile in circumference. In its vicinity are the ruins of Saul Abbey, said to have been founded by St Patrick, and Inch Abbey, founded by Sir John de Courcy in 1180. The number of monastic ruins is also considerable. The most ancient and celebrated is the abbey or cathedral of Downpatrick. Dundrum Castle, attributed to the de Courcy family, stands finely above that town, and affords an unusual example (for Ireland) of a donjon keep. The castle of Hillsborough is of Carolean date. There are three round towers in the county, but all are fragmentary.


DOWN, a smooth rounded hill, or more particularly an expanse of high rolling ground bare of trees. The word comes from the 459 Old English dún, hill. This is usually taken to be a Celtic word. The Gaelic and Irish dun and Welsh din are specifically used of a hill-fortress, and thus frequently appear in place-names, e.g. Dumbarton, Dunkeld, and in the Latinized termination—dunum, e.g. Lugdunum, Lyons. The Old Dutch duna, which is the same word, was applied to the drifted sandhills which are a prevailing feature of the south-eastern coast of the North Sea (Denmark and the Low Countries), and the derivatives, Ger. Düne, modern Dutch duin, Fr. dune, have this particular meaning. The English “dune” is directly taken from the French. The low sandy tracts north and south of Yarmouth, Norfolk, are known as the “Dunes,” which may be a corruption of the Dutch or French words. From “down,” hill, comes the adverb “down,” from above, in the earlier form “adown,” i.e. off the hill. The word for the soft under plumage of birds is entirely different, and comes from the Old Norwegian dun, cf. ædar-dun, eider-down. For the system of chalk hills in England known as “The Downs” see Downs.


DOWNES [D(o)unaeus], ANDREW (c. 1549-1628), English classical scholar, was born in the county of Shropshire. He was educated at Shrewsbury and St John’s College, Cambridge, where he did much to revive the study of Greek, at that time at a very low ebb. In 1571 he was elected fellow of his college, and, in 1585, he was appointed to the regius professorship of Greek, which he held for nearly forty years. He died at Coton, near Cambridge, on the 2nd of February 1627/1628. According to Simonds d’Ewes (Autobiography, ed. J. O. Halliwell, i. pp. 139, 141), who attended his lectures on Demosthenes and gives a slight sketch of his personality, Downes was accounted “the ablest Grecian of Christendom.” He published little, but seems to have devoted his chief attention to the Greek orators. He edited Lysias Pro caede Eratosthenis (1593); Praelectiones in Philippicam de pace Demosthenis (1621), dedicated to King James I.; some letters (written in Greek) to Isaac Casaubon, printed in the Epistolae of the latter; and notes to St Chrysostom, in Sir Henry Savile’s edition. Downes was also one of the seven translators of the Apocrypha for the “authorized” version of the Bible, and one of the six learned men appointed to revise the new version after its completion.


DOWNING, SIR GEORGE, Bart. (c. 1624-1684), English soldier and diplomatist, son of Emmanuel Downing, barrister, and of Lucy, sister of Governor John Winthrop, was born in England about 1624.1 His family joined Winthrop in America in 1638, settling in Salem, Massachusetts, and Downing studied at Harvard College. In 1645 he sailed for the West Indies as a preacher and instructor of the seamen, and arrived in England some time afterwards, becoming chaplain to Colonel John Okey’s regiment. Subsequently he seems to have abandoned his religious vocation for a military career, and in 1650 he was scout-master-general of Cromwell’s forces in Scotland, and as such received in 1657 a salary of £365 and £500 as a teller of the exchequer. His marriage in 1654 with Frances, daughter of Sir William Howard of Naworth, and sister of the 1st earl of Carlisle, aided his advancement. In Cromwell’s parliament of 1654 he represented Edinburgh, and Carlisle in those of 1656 and 1659. He was one of the first to urge Cromwell to take the royal title and restore the old constitution. In 1655 he was sent to France to remonstrate on the massacre of the Protestant Vaudois. Later in 1657 he was appointed resident at The Hague, to effect a union of the Protestant European powers, to mediate between Portugal and Holland and between Sweden and Denmark, to defend the interests of the English traders against the Dutch, and to inform the government concerning the movements of the exiled royalists.

He showed himself in these negotiations an able diplomatist. He was maintained in his post during the interregnum subsequent to the fall of Richard Cromwell, and was thus enabled in April 1660 to make his peace with Charles II., to whom he communicated Thurloe’s despatches, and declared his abandonment of “principles sucked in” in New England, of which he now “saw the error.” At the Restoration, therefore, Downing was knighted (May 1660), was continued in his embassy in Holland, was confirmed in his tellership of the exchequer, and was further rewarded with a valuable piece of land adjoining St James’s Park for building purposes, now known as Downing Street.2 Considering his past, he showed a very indecent zeal in arresting in Holland and handing over for execution the regicides Barkstead, Corbet and Okey. Pepys, who characterized his conduct as odious though useful to the king, calls him a “perfidious rogue,” and remarks that “all the world took notice of him for a most ungrateful villain for his pains.”3 On the 1st of July 1663 he was created a baronet. Downing had from the first been hostile to the Dutch as the commercial rivals of England. He had strongly supported the Navigation Act of 1660, and he now deliberately drew on the fatal and disastrous war. During its continuance he took part at home in the management of the treasury, introduced the appropriation of supplies, opposed strongly by Clarendon as an encroachment on the prerogative, and in May 1667 was made secretary to the commissioners, his appointment being much welcomed by Pepys.4 He had been returned for Morpeth in the convention parliament of April 1660, a constituency which he represented in every ensuing parliament till his death, and he spoke with ability on financial and commercial questions. He was appointed a commissioner of the customs in 1671. The same year he was again sent to Holland to replace Sir William Temple, to break up the policy of the Triple alliance and incite another war between Holland and England in furtherance of the French policy. His unpopularity there was extreme, and after three months’ residence Downing fled to England, in fear of the fury of the mob. For this unauthorized step he was sent to the Tower on the 7th of February 1672, but released some few weeks afterwards. He defended the Declaration of Indulgence the same year, and made himself useful in supporting the court policy. He died in July 1684. Downing Street, London, is named after him, while Downing College, Cambridge, derived its name from his grandson, the 3rd baronet. The title became extinct when the 4th baronet, Sir Jacob G. Downing, died in 1764.

Downing was undoubtedly a man of great political and diplomatic ability, but his talents were rarely employed for the advantage of his country and his character was marked by all the mean vices, treachery, avarice, servility and ingratitude. “A George Downing” became a proverbial expression in New England to denote a false man who betrayed his trust.5 He published a large number of declarations and discourses, mostly in Dutch, enumerated in Sibley’s biography, and wrote also “A True Relation of the Progress of the Parliament’s Forces in Scotland” (1651), Thomason Tracts, Brit. Mus., E 640 (5).


1 The date of his birth is variously given as 1623, 1624 and 1625 (Sibley’s Harvard Graduates, 1883).

2 Cal. of St Pap.; Dom. (1661-1662) p. 408; Notes and Queries, ix. ser. vii. 92.

3 Diary, March 12, 17, 1662.

4 Ib. May 27, 1667.

5 Sibley, i. 46.


DOWNMAN, JOHN (1750-1824), English portrait painter, was the son of Francis Downman, attorney, of St Neots, by Charlotte Goodsend, eldest daughter of the private secretary to George I.; his grandfather, Hugh Downman (1672-1729), having been the master of the House of Ordnance at Sheerness. He is believed to have been born near Ruabon, educated first at Chester, then at Liverpool, and finally at the Royal Academy schools, and he was for a while in the studio of Benjamin West. His exquisite pencil portrait drawings, slightly tinted in colour, usually from the reverse, are well known, and many of them are of remarkable beauty. Several volumes of sketches for these drawings are still in existence. Downman is believed to have been “pressed” for the navy as a young man, and on his escape settled down for a while in Cambridge, eventually coming to London, and later (1804) going to reside in Kent in the village of West Malling. He afterwards spent some part of his life in the west of England, especially in Exeter, and then travelled all over the country painting his dainty portraits. In 1818 he settled down at Chester, finally removing to Wrexham, where his only daughter married and where he died and was buried. He was an associate of the Royal Academy. The Downman family is usually known as a Devonshire one, but the exact connexion between the artist 460 and the Devonshire branch has not been traced. Many of his portraits have attached to them remarks of considerable importance respecting the persons represented.

See John Downman, his Life and Works, by G. C. Williamson (London, 1907).

(G. C. W.)

DOWNPATRICK, a market town and the county town of Co. Down, Ireland, in the east parliamentary division, 28 m. S.S.E. of Belfast by the Belfast & County Down railway. Pop. (1901) 2993. It stands picturesquely on a sloping site near the south-west extremity of Strangford Lough. It is the seat of the Protestant and Roman Catholic dioceses of Down. St Patrick founded the see about 440, but the present Protestant cathedral dates from 1790, the old structure, after suffering many vicissitudes, having been in ruins for 250 years. The cathedral is said to contain the remains of its founder, together with those of St Columba and St Bridget. A round tower adjoining it was destroyed in 1790. A small trade is carried on at Strangford Lough by means of vessels up to 100 tons, which discharge at Quoile quay, about 1 m. from the town; but vessels of larger tonnage can discharge at a steamboat quay lower down the Quoile. The imports are principally iron, coal, salt and timber; the exports barley, oats, cattle, pigs and potatoes. Linen manufacture is also carried on, and brewing, tanning and soap-making give considerable employment. The Down corporation race-meeting is important and attracts visitors from far outside the county. The rath or dun from which the town is named remains as one of the finest in Ireland. It was called Rath-Keltair, or the rath of the hero Keltar, and covers an area of 10 acres. In the vicinity of the town are remnants of the monastery of Saul, a foundation ascribed to St Patrick, and of Inch Abbey (1180), founded by Sir John de Courcy. Three miles south is a fine stone circle, and to the south-east are the wells of Struell, famous as miraculous healers among the peasantry until modern times. The town is of extreme antiquity. It was called Dun-leth-glas, the fort of the broken fetters, from the miraculous deliverance from bondage of two sons of Dichu, prince of Lecale, and the first convert of St Patrick. It is the Dunum of Ptolemy, and was a residence of the kings of Ulster. It was already incorporated early in the 15th century. It returned two members to the Irish parliament until the Union in 1800, and thereafter one to the Imperial parliament until 1832.


DOWNS, the name of a system of chalk hills in the south-east of England. For the etymology of the word and its meaning see Down. It is most familiar in its application to the two ranges of the North and South Downs. Of these the North Downs are confined chiefly to the counties of Surrey and Kent, and the South to Sussex. Each forms a well-defined long range springing from the chalk area of Dorsetshire and Hampshire, to which, though broken up into a great number of short ranges and groups of hills, the general name of the Western Downs is given. The Downs enclose the rich district of the Weald (q.v.).

The North Downs, extending from a point near Farnham to the English Channel between Dover and Folkestone, have a length along the crest line, measured directly, of 95 m. The crest, however, is not continuous, as the hills are breached by a succession of valleys, forming gaps through which high-roads and railways converge upon London. The rivers flowing through these gaps run northward, and, except in the extreme east, are members of the Thames basin. These breaching valleys, which are characteristic of the South Downs also, “carry us back to a time when the greensand and chalk were continued across, or almost across, the Weald in a great dome.” The rivers “then ran down the slopes of the dome, and as the chalk and greensand gradually weathered back ... deepened and deepened their valleys, and thus were enabled to keep their original course.”1 The western termination of the North Downs is the Hog’s Back, a narrow ridge, little more than a quarter of a mile broad at the summit, sloping sharply north and south, and reaching 489 ft. in height. At the west end a depression occurs where the rivers Wey and Blackwater closely approach each other; and it is thought that the Wey has beheaded the Blackwater, which formerly flowed through the gap. In this depression lies Farnham, the first of a series of towns which have grown up at these natural gateways through the hills. The Wey, flowing south of the Hog’s Back, breaches the Downs at its eastern extremity, the town of Guildford standing at this point. The next gap is that of the Mole, in which Dorking lies. Between Guildford and Dorking the main line of the Downs reaches a height of 712 ft., but a lateral depression, followed by the railway between these towns, marks off on the south a loftier range of lower greensand, in which Leith Hill, famous as a view-point, is 965 ft. in height. East of the Mole the northward slope of the Downs is deeply cut by narrow valleys, and the depression above Redhill may have been traversed by a stream subsequently beheaded by the Mole. A height of 868 ft. is attained east of Caterham. The next river to break through the main line is the Darent, but here another lateral depression, watered by the headstreams of that river, marks off the Ragstone Ridge, south of Sevenoaks, reaching 800 ft. The lateral depression is continued along the valleys of streams tributary to the Medway, so that nearly as far as Ashford the Downs consist of two parallel ranges; but the Medway itself breaches both, Maidstone lying in the gap. The elevation now begins to decrease, and 682 ft. is the extreme height east of the Medway. The direction, hitherto E. by N., trends E.S.E. The final complete breach is made by the Great Stour, between Ashford and Canterbury, east of which a height of 600 ft. is rarely reached. The valley of the Little Stour, however, offers a well-marked pass followed by the Folkestone-Canterbury railway, and the North Downs finally fall to the sea in the grand white cliffs between Dover and Folkestone.

The South Downs present similar characteristics on a minor scale. Springing from the main mass of the chalk to the south of Petersfield they have their greatest elevation (889 ft. in Butser Hill) at that point, and extend E. by S. for 65 m. to the English Channel at the cliffs of Beachy Head. As in the case of the North Downs a succession of rivers breach the hills, and a succession of towns mark the gaps. These are, from east to west, the Arun, with the town of Arundel, the Adur, with Shoreham, the Ouse, with Lewes and Newhaven, and the Cuckmere, with no considerable town. The steep slope of the South Downs is northward towards the Weald. The southern slopes reach the coast east of Brighton, but west of this town a flat coastal belt intervenes, widening westward. Apart from the complete breaches mentioned, the South Downs, scored on the south with many deep vales, are generally more easily penetrable than the North Downs, and the coast is less continuous.

Smooth convex curves are characteristic of the Downs; their graceful and striking outline gives them an importance in the landscape in excess of their actual height; their flanks are well wooded, their summits covered with close springy turf.

The Downs” is also the name of a roadstead in the English Channel off Deal between the North and the South Foreland. It forms a favourite anchorage during heavy weather, protected on the east by the Goodwin Sands and on the north and west by the coast. It has depths down to 12 fathoms. Even during southerly gales some shelter is afforded, though under this condition wrecks are not infrequent.


1 Avebury, The Scenery of England, ch. xi.


DOWNSHIRE, WILLS HILL, 1st Marquess of (1718-1793), son of Trevor Hill, 1st Viscount Hillsborough, was born at Fairford in Gloucestershire on the 30th of May 1718. He became an English member of parliament in 1741, and an Irish viscount on his father’s death in the following year, thus sitting in both the English and Irish parliaments. In 1751 he was created earl of Hillsborough in the Irish peerage; in 1754 he was made comptroller of the royal household and an English privy councillor; and in 1756 he became a peer of Great Britain as baron of Harwich. For nearly two years he was president of the board of trade and plantations under George Grenville, and after a brief period of retirement he filled the same position, and then that of joint postmaster-general, under the earl of Chatham. From 1768 to 1772 Hillsborough was secretary of state for the colonies and also president of the board of trade, becoming an English earl on his retirement; in 1779 he was made secretary of state for the northern department, and he was created marquess of 461 Downshire seven years after his final retirement in 1782. Both in and out of office he opposed all concessions to the American colonists, but he favoured the project for a union between England and Ireland. Reversing an earlier opinion Horace Walpole says Downshire was “a pompous composition of ignorance and want of judgment.” He died on the 7th of October 1793 and was succeeded by his son Arthur (1753-1801), from whom the present marquess is descended.


DOWRY (in Anglo-Fr. dowarie, O. Fr. douaire, Med. Lat. dotaria, from Lat. dos, from root of dare, to give; in Fr. dot), the property which a woman brings with her at her marriage, a wife’s marriage portion (see Settlement).


DOWSER and DOWSING (from the Cornish “dowse,” M.E. duschen, to strike or fall), one who uses, or the art of using, the dowsing-rod (called “deusing-rod” by John Locke in 1691), or “striking-rod” or divining-rod, for discovering subterranean minerals or water. (See Divining-Rod.)


DOXOLOGY (Gr. δοξολογία, a praising, giving glory), an ascription of praise to the Deity. The early Christians continued the Jewish practice of making such an ascription at the close of public prayer (Origen, Περὶ εὐχῆς, 33) and introduced it after the sermon also. The name is often applied to the Trisagion (tersanctus), or “Holy, Holy, Holy,” the scriptural basis of which is found in Isaiah vi. 3, and which has had a place in the worship of the Christian church since the 2nd century; to the Hallelujah of several of the Psalms and of Rev. xix.; to such passages of glorification as Rom. ix. 5, xvi. 27, Eph. iii. 21; and to the last clause of the Lord’s Prayer as found in Matt. vi. 13 (A.V.), which critics are generally agreed in regarding as an interpolation, and which, while used in the Greek and the Protestant churches, is omitted in the Roman rite. It is used, however, more definitely as the designation of two hymns distinguished by liturgical writers as the Greater and Lesser Doxologies.

The origin and history of these it is impossible to trace fully. The germ of both is to be found in the Gospels; the first words of the Greater Doxology, or Gloria in Excelsis, being taken from Luke ii. 14, and the form of the Lesser Doxology, or Gloria Patri, having been in all probability first suggested by Matt. xxviii. 19. The Greater Doxology, in a form approximating to that of the English prayer-book, is given in the Apostolical Constitutions (vii. 47). At this time (c. 375) it ran thus: “Glory to God on high, and on earth peace to men of (his) goodwill. We praise thee, we bless thee, we worship thee, we glorify thee, we give thanks to thee for thy great glory. O Lord God, heavenly king, God the Father Almighty; O Lord, the only begotten Son, Jesus Christ; O Lord God, Lamb of God, Son of the Father, that takest away the sins of the world, have mercy upon us; Thou that takest away the sins of the world, receive our prayer; Thou that sittest at the right hand of the Father, have mercy upon us; For Thou alone art holy. Thou only, Jesus Christ, with the Holy Ghost, art most high in the glory of God the Father. Amen.” This is the earliest record of it, but it is also found in the Alexandrine Codex. Alcuin attributes the authorship of the Latin form—the Gloria in Excelsis—to St Hilary of Poitiers (died 367). The quotations from the hymn in the pseudo-Athanasian De Virginitate, and in Chrysostom (Hom. 69 in Matth.), include only the opening words (those from St Luke’s gospel), though the passage in Athanasius shows by an et caetera that only the beginning of the hymn is given. These references indicate that the hymn was used in private devotions; as it does not appear in any of the earliest liturgies, whether Eastern or Western, its introduction into the public services of the church was probably of a later date than has often been supposed. Its first introduction into the Roman liturgy is due to Pope Symmachus (498-514), who ordered it to be sung on Sundays and festival days. There was much opposition to the expansion, but it was suppressed by the fourth council of Toledo in 633. Until the end of the 11th century its use was confined to bishops, and to priests at Easter and on their installation. The Mozarabic liturgy provides for its eucharistic use on Sundays and festivals. In these and other early liturgies the Greater Doxology occurs immediately after the beginning of the service; in the English prayer-book it introduced at the close of the communion office, but it does not occur in either the morning or evening service. This doxology is also used in the Protestant Episcopal and Methodist Episcopal churches of America, as indeed in most Protestant churches at the eucharist.

The Lesser Doxology, or Gloria Patri, combines the character of a creed with that of a hymn. In its earliest form it ran simply—“Glory be to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Ghost, world without end, Amen,” or “Glory be to the Father, in (or through) the Son, and in (or through) the Holy Ghost.” Until the rise of the Arian heresy these forms were probably regarded as indifferent, both being equally capable of an orthodox interpretation. When the Arians, however, finding the second form more consistent with their views, adopted it persistently and exclusively, its use was naturally discountenanced by the Catholics, and the other form became the symbol of orthodoxy. To the influence of the Arian heresy is also due the Catholic addition—“as it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be,” the use of which was, according to some authorities, expressly enjoined by the council of Nicaea. There is no sufficient evidence of this, but there exists a decree of the second council of Vaison (529), asserting its use as already established in the East propter haereticorum astutiam, and ordering its adoption throughout the churches of the West. In the Western Church the Gloria Patri is repeated at the close of every psalm, in the Eastern Church at the close of the last psalm. This last is the optional rule of the American Episcopal Church.

Metrical doxologies are often sung at the end of hymns, and the term has become especially associated with the stanza beginning “Praise God from whom all blessings flow,” with which Thomas Ken, bishop of Winchester, concluded his morning and evening hymns.

See J. Bingham, Biog. eccles. xiv. 2; Siegel, Christl. Alterthümer, i. 515, &c.; F. Procter, Book of Common Prayer, p. 212; W. Palmer, Orig. Liturg. iv. § 23; art. “Liturgische Formeln” (by Drews) in Hauck-Herzog, Realencyk. für prot. Theol. xi. 547.


DOYEN, GABRIEL FRANÇOIS (1726-1806), French painter, was born at Paris in 1726. His passion for art prevailed over his father’s wish, and he became in his twelfth year a pupil of Vanloo. Making rapid progress, he obtained at twenty the Grand Prix, and in 1748 set out for Rome. He studied the works of Annibale Caracci, Cortona, Giulio Romano and Michelangelo, then visited Naples, Venice, Bologna and other Italian cities, and in 1755 returned to Paris. At first unappreciated and disparaged, he resolved by one grand effort to conquer a reputation, and in 1758 he exhibited his “Death of Virginia.” It was completely successful, and procured him admission to the Academy. Among his greatest works are reckoned the “Miracle des Ardents,” painted for the church of St Geneviève at St Roch (1773); the “Triumph of Thetis,” for the chapel of the Invalides; and the “Death of St Louis,” for the chapel of the Military School. In 1776 he was appointed professor at the Academy of Painting. Soon after the beginning of the Revolution he accepted the invitation of Catherine II. and settled at St Petersburg, where he was loaded with honours and rewards. He died there on the 5th of June 1806.


DOYLE, SIR ARTHUR CONAN (1859-  ), English novelist, eldest son of the artist Charles Doyle, was born on the 22nd of May 1859. He was sent to Stonyhurst College, and further pursued his education in Germany, and at Edinburgh University where he graduated M.B. in 1881 and M.D. in 1885. He had begun to practise as a doctor in Southsea when he published A Study in Scarlet in 1887. Micah Clarke (1888), a tale of Monmouth’s rebellion, The Sign of Four (1889), and The White Company (1891), a romance of Du Guesclin’s time, followed. In Rodney Stone (1896) he drew an admirable sketch of the prince regent; and he collected a popular series of stories of the Napoleonic wars in The Exploits of Brigadier Gerard (1896). In 1891 he attained immense popularity by The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, which first appeared in The Strand Magazine. These ingenious stories of the success of the imperturbable Sherlock Holmes, who had made his first appearance in A Study in Scarlet (1887), in detecting crime and disentangling mystery, found a host of imitators. The novelist himself returned to his 462 hero in The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes (1893), The Hound of the Baskervilles (1902), and The Return of Sherlock Holmes (1905). His later books include numerous novels; plays, The Story of Waterloo (1894), in which Sir Henry Irving played the leading part, The Fires of Fate (1909), and The House of Temperley (1909); and two books in defence of the British army in South Africa—The Great Boer War (1900) and The War in South Africa; its Causes and Conduct (1902). Dr Conan Doyle served as registrar of the Langman Field Hospital in South Africa, and was knighted in 1902.


DOYLE, SIR FRANCIS HASTINGS CHARLES, Bart. (1810-1888), English man of letters, was born at Nunappleton, Yorkshire, on the 21st of August 1810. He was the son of Major-General Sir Francis Hastings Doyle, 1st baronet (1783-1839), and was educated at Eton and at Christ Church, Oxford, where he took a first-class in classics in 1831. He read for the bar and was called in 1837. He had been elected to a fellowship of All Souls’ in 1835, and his interests were chiefly literary. Among his intimate friends was Mr Gladstone, at whose marriage he assisted as “best man”; but in later life their political opinions widely differed. In 1834 he published Miscellaneous Verses, reissued with additions in 1840. This was followed by Two Destinies (1844), The Duke’s Funeral (1852), Return of the Guards and other Poems (1866); and from 1867 to 1877 he was professor of poetry at Oxford. In 1869 some of the lectures he delivered were published in book form. One of the most interesting was his appreciation of William Barnes, and the essay on Newman’s Dream of Gerontius was translated into French. In 1886 he published his Reminiscences, full of records of the interesting people he had known. Sir Francis Doyle succeeded his father (chairman of the board of excise) as 2nd baronet in 1839, and in 1844 married Sidney, daughter of Charles Watkin Williams Wynn (1775-1850). From 1845 he held various important offices in the customs. He died on the 8th of June 1888. Doyle’s poetry is memorable for certain isolated and spirited pieces in praise of British fortitude. The best-known are his ballads on the “Birkenhead” disaster and on “The Private of the Buffs.”


DOYLE, JOHN ANDREW (1844-1907), English historian, the son of Andrew Doyle, editor of The Morning Chronicle, was born on the 14th of May 1844. He was educated at Eton and at Balliol College, Oxford, winning the Arnold prize in 1868 for his essay, The American Colonies. He was a fellow of All Souls’ from 1870 until his death, which occurred at Crickhowell, South Wales, on the 4th of August 1907. His principal work is The English Colonies in America, in five volumes, as follows: Virginia, Maryland and the Carolinas (1 vol., 1882), The Puritan Colonies (2 vols., 1886), The Middle Colonies (1 vol., 1907), and The Colonies under the House of Hanover (1 vol., 1907), the whole work dealing with the history of the colonies from 1607 to 1759. Doyle also wrote chapters i., ii., v. and vii. of vol. vii. of the Cambridge Modern History, and edited William Bradford’s History of the Plimouth Plantation (1896) and the Correspondence of Susan Ferrier (1898).


DOYLE, RICHARD (1824-1883), English artist, son of John Doyle, the caricaturist known as “H. B.” (1797-1868), was born in London in 1824. His father’s “Political Sketches” took the town by storm in the days of Lord Grey and Lord Melbourne. The son was an extremely precocious artist, and in his “Home for the Holidays,” done when he was twelve, and in his “Comic English Histories,” drawn four years later, he showed extraordinary gifts of humour and fancy. He had no art training outside his father’s studio. In 1843 he joined the staff of Punch, drawing cartoons and a vast number of illustrations, but he retired in 1850, in consequence of the attitude adopted by that paper towards what was known as “the papal aggression,” and especially towards the pope himself. In 1854 he published his “Continental Tour of Brown, Jones and Robinson.” His illustrations to three of the Christmas Books of Charles Dickens, and to The Newcomes by Thackeray, are reckoned among his principal achievements; and his fanciful pictures of elves and fairies have always been general favourites. He died on the 11th of December 1883. His most popular drawing is his cover of Punch.


DOZSA, GYÖRGY (d. 1514), Hungarian revolutionist, was a Szekler squire and soldier of fortune, who won such a reputation for valour in the Turkish wars that the Hungarian chancellor, Tamás Bákocz, on his return from Rome in 1514 with a papal bull preaching a holy war in Hungary against the Moslems, appointed him to organize and direct the movement. In a few weeks he collected thousands of so-called Kuruczok (a corruption of Cruciati), consisting for the most part of small yeomen, peasants, wandering students, friars and parish priests, the humblest and most oppressed portion of the community, to whom alone a crusade against the Turk could have the slightest attraction. They assembled in their counties, and by the time Dozsa had drilled them into some sort of discipline and self-confidence, they began to air the grievances of their class. No measures had been taken to supply these voluntary crusaders with food or clothing; as harvest-time approached, the landlords commanded them to return to reap the fields, and on their refusing to do so, proceeded to maltreat their wives and families and set their armed retainers upon the half-starved multitudes. Instantly the movement was diverted from its original object, and the peasants and their leaders began a war of extermination against the landlords. By this time Dozsa was losing control of the rabble, which had fallen under the influence of the socialist parson of Czegled, Lörincz Mészáros. The rebellion was the more dangerous as the town rabble was on the side of the peasants, and in Buda and other places the cavalry sent against the Kuruczok were unhorsed as they passed through the gates. The rebellion spread like lightning, principally in the central or purely Magyar provinces, where hundreds of manor-houses and castles were burnt and thousands of the gentry done to death by impalement, crucifixion and other unspeakable methods. Dozsa’s camp at Czegled was the centre of the jacquerie, and from thence he sent out his bands in every direction, pillaging and burning. In vain the papal bull was revoked, in vain the king issued a proclamation commanding the peasantry to return to their homes under pain of death. By this time the rising had attained the dimensions of a revolution; all the feudal levies of the kingdom were called out against it; and mercenaries were hired in haste from Venice, Bohemia and the emperor. Meanwhile Dozsa had captured the city and fortress of Csánad, and signalized his victory by impaling the bishop and the castellan. Subsequently, at Arad, the lord treasurer, István Telegdy, was seized and tortured to death with satanic ingenuity. It should, however, in fairness be added that only notorious bloodsuckers, or obstinately resisting noblemen, were destroyed in this way. Those who freely submitted were always released on parole, and Dozsa not only never broke his given word, but frequently assisted the escape of fugitives. But he could not always control his followers when their blood was up, and infinite damage was done before he could stop it. At first, too, it seemed as if the government were incapable of coping with him. In the course of the summer he took the fortresses of Arad, Lippá and Világos; provided himself with guns and trained gunners; and one of his bands advanced to within five leagues of the capital. But his half-naked, ill-armed ploughboys were at last overmatched by the mailclad chivalry of the nobles. Dozsa, too, had become demoralized by success. After Csánad, he issued proclamations which can only be described as nihilistic. His suppression had become a political necessity. He was finally routed at Temesvár by the combined forces of János Zápolya and István Báthory, was captured, and condemned to sit on a red-hot iron throne, with a red-hot iron crown on his head and a red-hot sceptre in his hand. This infernal sentence was actually carried out, and, life still lingering, the half-roasted carcass of the unhappy wretch, who endured everything with invincible heroism, was finally devoured by half-a-dozen of his fellow-rebels, who by way of preparation had been starved for a whole week beforehand.

See Sándor Marki, Dozsa György (Hung.), Budapest, 1884.

(R. N. B.)

DOZY, REINHART PIETER ANNE (1820-1883), Dutch Arabic scholar of French (Huguenot) origin, was born at Leiden in February 1820. The Dozys, like so many other contemporary 463 French families, emigrated to the Low Countries after the revocation of the edict of Nantes, but some of the former appear to have settled in Holland as early as 1647. Dozy studied at the university of Leiden, obtained the degree of doctor in 1844, was appointed an extraordinary professor of history in 1850, and professor in 1857. The first results of his extensive studies in Oriental literature, Arabic language and history, manifested themselves in 1847, when he published Al-Marrakushi’s History of the Almohades (Leiden, 2nd ed., 1881), which, together with his Scriptorum Arabum loci de Abbaditis (Leiden, 1846-1863, 3 vols.), his editions of Ibn-Adhari’s History of Africa and Spain (Leiden, 1848-1852, 3 vols.), of Ibn-Badrun’s Historical Commentary on the Poem of Ibn-Abdun (Leiden, 1848), and his Dictionnaire détaillé des noms des vêtements chez les Arabes (Amsterdam, 1845)—a work crowned by the Dutch Institute—stamped Dozy as one of the most learned and critical Arabic scholars of his day. But his real fame as a historian mainly rests on his great work, Histoire des Mussulmans d’Espagne, jusqu’à la conquête de l’Andalousie par les Almoravides, 711-1110 (Leiden, 1861; 2nd ed., ibid., 1881); a graphically written account of Moorish dominion in Spain, which shed new light on many obscure points, and has remained the standard work on the subject. Dozy’s Recherches sur l’histoire et la littérature de l’Espagne pendant le moyen âge (Leiden, 2 vols., 1849; 2nd and 3rd ed., completely recast, 1860 and 1881) form a needful and wonderfully trenchant supplement to his Histoire des Mussulmans, in which he mercilessly exposes the many tricks and falsehoods of the monks in their chronicles, and effectively demolishes a good part of the Cid legends. As an Arabic scholar Dozy stands well-nigh unsurpassed in his Supplément aux dictionnaires arabes (Leiden, 1877-1881, 2 vols.), a work full of research and learning, a storehouse of Arabic lore. To the same class belongs his Glossaire des mots espagnols et portugais, dérivés de l’Arabe, edited with Dr W. H. Engelmann of Leipzig (Leiden, 1866; 2nd ed., 1868), and a similar list of Dutch words derived from the Arabic. Dozy also edited Al Makkari’s Analectes sur l’histoire et la littérature des Arabes d’Espagne (Leiden, 1855-1861, 2 vols.), and, in conjunction with his friend and worthy successor, Professor De Goeje, at Leiden, Idrisi’s Description de l’Afrique et de l’Espagne (1866), also the Calendrier de Cordoue de l’année 961; texte arabe et ancienne traduction latine (Leiden, 1874). Het Islamisme (Islamism; Haarlem, 1863, 2nd ed., 1880; French translation) is a popular exposition of Mahommedanism, of a more controversial character; and De Israelieten te Mekka (“The Israelites at Mecca,” Haarlem, 1864) became the subject of a rather heated discussion in Jewish circles. Dozy died at Leiden in May 1883.

(H. Ti.)

DRACAENA, in botany, a genus of the natural order Liliaceae, containing about fifty species in the warmer parts of the Old World. They are trees or shrubs with long, generally narrow leaves, panicles of small whitish flowers, and berried fruit. The most remarkable species is Dracaena Draco, the dragon-tree of the Canary Isles, which reaches a great size and age. The famous specimen in Teneriffe, which was blown down by a hurricane in 1868, when measured by Alexander von Humboldt, was 70 ft. high, with a circumference of 45 ft. several feet above the ground. A resin exuding from the trunk is known as dragon’s blood (q.v.).

Many of the cultivated so-called Dracaenas belong to the closely-allied genus Cordyline. They are grown for the beauty of form, colour and variegation of their foliage and are extremely useful as decorative stove plants or summer greenhouse plants, or for room and table decoration. They are easy to grow and may be increased by cuttings planted in sandy soil in a temperature of from 65° to 70° by night, the spring being the best time for propagation. The old stems laid flat in a propagating frame will push young shoots, which may be taken off with a heel when 2 or 3 in. long, and planted in sandy peat in 3-in. pots; the tops can also be taken off and struck. The established plants do best in fibry peat made porous by sand. In summer they should have a day temperature of 75°, and in winter one of 65°. Shift as required, using coarser soil as the pots become larger. By the end of the summer the small cuttings will have made nice plants, and in the spring following they can be kept growing by the use of manure water twice a week. Those intended for the conservatory should be gradually inured to more air by midsummer, but kept out of cold draughts. When the plants get too large they can be headed down and the tops used for cuttings.

A large number of the garden species of Dracaena are varieties of Cordyline terminalis. D. Goldieana is a grandly variegated species from west tropical Africa, and requires more heat.


DRACHMANN, HOLGER HENRIK HERBOLDT (1846-1908), Danish poet and dramatist, son of Dr A. G. Drachmann, a physician of Copenhagen, whose family was of German extraction, was born in Copenhagen on the 9th of October 1846. Owing to the early death of his mother, who was a Dane, the child was left much to his own devices. He soon developed a fondness for semi-poetical performances, and loved to organize among his companions heroic games, in which he himself took such parts as those of Tordenskjold and Niels Juul. His studies were belated, and he did not enter the university until 1865, leaving it in 1866 to become a student in the Academy of Fine Arts. From 1866 to 1870 he was learning, under Professor Sörensen, to become a marine painter, and not without success. But about the latter date he came under the influence of Georg Brandes, and, without abandoning art, he began to give himself more and more to literature. At various periods he travelled very extensively in England, Scotland, France, Spain and Italy, and his literary career began by his sending letters about his journeys to the Danish newspapers. After returning home, he settled for some time in the island of Bornholm, painting seascapes. He now issued his earliest volume of poems, Digte (1872), and joined the group of young Radical writers who gathered under the banner of Brandes. Drachmann was unsettled, and still doubted whether his real strength lay in the pencil or in the pen. By this time he had enjoyed a surprising experience of life, especially among sailors, fishermen, students and artists, and the issues of the Franco-German War and the French Commune had persuaded him that a new and glorious era was at hand. His volume of lyrics, Daempede Melodier (“Muffled Melodies,” 1875), proved that Drachmann was a poet with a real vocation, and he began to produce books in prose and verse with great rapidity. Ungt Blod (“Young Blood,” 1876) contained three realistic stories of contemporary life. But he returned to his true field in his magnificent Sange ved Havet; Venezia (“Songs of the Sea; Venice,” 1877), and won the passionate admiration of his countrymen by his prose work, with interludes in verse, called Derovre fra Graensen (“Over the Frontier there,” 1877), a series of impressions made on Drachmann by a visit to the scenes of the war with Germany. During the succeeding years he was a great traveller, visiting most of the principal countries of the world, but particularly familiarizing himself, by protracted voyages, with the sea and with the life of man in maritime places. In 1879 he published Ranker og Roser (“Tendrils and Roses”), amatory lyrics of a very high order of melody, in which he showed a great advance in technical art. To the same period belongs Paa Sömands Tro og Love (“On the Faith and Honour of a Sailor,” 1878), a volume of short stories in prose. It was about this time that Drachmann broke with Brandes and the Radicals, and set himself at the head of a sort of “nationalist” or popular-Conservative party in Denmark. He continued to celebrate the life of the fishermen and sailors in books, whether in prose or verse, which were the most popular of their day. Paul og Virginie and Lars Kruse (both 1879); Östen for Sol og vesten for Maone (“East of the Sun and Moon,” 1880); Puppe og Sommerfugl (“Chrysalis and Butterfly,” 1882); and Strandby Folk (1883) were among these. In 1882 Drachmann published his fine translation, or paraphrase, of Byron’s Don Juan. In 1885 his romantic play called Der var en Gang (“Once upon a Time”) had a great success on the boards of the Royal theatre, Copenhagen; and his tragedies of Völund Smed (“Wayland the Smith”) and Brav-Karl (1897) made him the most popular playwright of Denmark. He published in 1894 a volume of exquisitely fantastic Melodramas in rhymed verse, a collection which contains some of Drachmann’s most perfect work. His 464 novel Med den brede Pensel (“With a Broad Brush,” 1887) was followed in 1890 by Forskrevet, the history of a young painter, Henrik Gerhard, and his revolt against his bourgeois surroundings. With this novel is closely connected Den hellige Ild (“The Sacred Fire,” 1899), in which Drachmann speaks in his own person. There is practically no story in this autobiographical volume, which abounds in lyrical passages. In 1899 he produced his romantic play called Gurre; in 1900 a brilliant lyrical drama, Hallfred Vandraadeskjald; and in 1903, Det grönne Haab. He died in Copenhagen on the 14th of January 1908.

See an article by K. Gjellerup in Dansk Biografisk Lexikon vol. iv. (Copenhagen, 1890).

(E. G.)

DRACO (7th century b.c.), Athenian statesman, was Archon Eponymus (but see J. E. Sandys, Constitution of Athens, p. 12, note) in 621 b.c. His name has become proverbial as an inexorable lawgiver. Up to his time the laws of Athens were unwritten, and were administered arbitrarily by the Eupatridae. As at Rome by the twelve Tables, so at Athens it was found necessary to allay the discontent of the people by publishing these unwritten laws in a codified form, and Draco, himself a Eupatrid, carried this out. According to Plutarch (Life of Solon): “For nearly all crimes there was the same penalty of death. The man who was convicted of idleness, or who stole a cabbage or an apple, was liable to death no less than the robber of temples or the murderer.” For the institution of the 51 Ephetae and their relation to the Areopagus in criminal jurisdiction see Greek Law, The orator Demades (d. c. 318 b.c.) said that Draco’s laws were written in blood. Whether this implies peculiar severity, or merely reflects the attitude of a more refined age to the barbarous enactments of a primitive people, among whom the penalty of death was almost universal for all crimes, cannot be decided. According to Suidas, however, in his Lexicon, the people were so overjoyed at the change he made, that they accidentally suffocated him in the theatre at Aegina with the rain of caps and cloaks which they flung at him in their enthusiasm.

The appearance in 1891 of Aristotle’s lost treatise on the constitution of Athens gave rise to a most important controversy on the subject of Draco’s work. From the statements contained in chapter iv. of this treatise, and inferences drawn from them, many scholars attributed to Draco the construction of an entirely new constitution for Athens, the main features of which were: (1) extension of franchise to all who could provide themselves with a suit of armour—or, as Gilbert (Constitutional Antiquities, Eng. trans. p. 121) says, to the Zeugite class, from which mainly the hoplites may be supposed to have come; (2) the institution of a property qualification for office (archon 10 minae, strategus 100 minae); (3) a council of 401 members (see Boulē); (4) magistrates and councillors to be chosen by lot; further, the four Solonian classes are said to be already in existence.

For some time, especially in Germany, this constitution was almost universally accepted; now, the majority of scholars reject it. The reasons against it, which are almost overwhelming, may be shortly summarized. (1) It is ignored by every other ancient authority, except an admittedly spurious passage in Plato1; whereas Aristotle says of his laws “they are laws, but he added the laws to an existing constitution” (Pol. ii. 9. 9). (2) It is inconsistent with other passages in the Constitution of Athens. According to c. vii., Solon repealed all laws of Draco except those relating to murder; yet some of the most modern features of Solon’s constitution are found in Draco’s constitution. (3) Its ideas are alien to the 7th century. It has been said that the qualification of the strategus was ten times that of the archon. This, reasonable in the 5th, is preposterous in the 7th century, when the archon was unquestionably the supreme executive official. Again, it is unlikely that Solon, a democratic reformer, would have reverted from a democratic wealth’ qualification such as is attributed to Draco, to an aristocratic birth qualification. Thirdly, if Draco had instituted a hoplite census, Solon would not have substituted citizenship by birth. (4) The terminology of Draco’s constitution is that of the 5th, not the 7th, century, whereas the chief difficulty of Solon’s laws is the obsolete 6th-century phraseology. (5) Lastly, a comparison between the ideals of the oligarchs under Theramenes (end of 5th century) and this alleged constitution shows a suspicious similarity (hoplite census, nobody to hold office a second time until all duly qualified persons had been exhausted, fine of one drachma for non-attendance in Boulē). It is reasonable, therefore, to conclude that the constitution of Draco was invented by the school of Theramenes, who wished to surround their revolutionary views with the halo of antiquity; hence the allusion to “the constitution of our father” (ἡ πάτριος πολιτεία).

This hypothesis is further corroborated by a criticism of the text. Not only is chapter iv. considered to be an interpolation in the text as originally written, but later chapters have been edited to accord with it. Thus chapter iv. breaks the connexion of thought between chapters iii. and v. Moreover, an interpolator has inserted phrases to remove what would otherwise have been obvious contradictions: thus (a) in chapter vii., where we are told that Solon divided the citizens into four classes (τιμήματα), the interpolator had added the words “according to the division formerly existing” (καθάπερ διῄρηται καὶ πρότερον), which were necessary in view of the statement that Draco gave the franchise to the Zeugites; (b) in chapter xli., where successive constitutional changes are recorded, the words “the Draconian” (ἡ ἐπὶ Δράκοντος) are inserted, though the subsequent figures are not accommodated to the change. Solon is also here spoken of as the founder of democracy, whereas the Draconian constitution of chap. iv. contains several democratic innovations. Two further points may be added, namely, that whereas Aristotle’s treatise credits Draco with establishing a money fine, Pollux definitely quotes a law of Draco in which fines are assessed at so many oxen; secondly, if chapter iv. did exist in the original text, it is more than curious that though the treatise was widely read in antiquity there is no other reference to Draco’s constitution except the two quoted above. In any case, whatever were Draco’s laws, we learn from Plutarch’s life of Solon that Solon abolished all of them, except those dealing with homicide.

Authorities.—Beside the works of J. E. Sandys and G. Gilbert quoted above, see those quoted in article Constitution of Athens; Grote, Hist. of Greece (ed. 1907), pp. 9-11, with references; and histories of Greece published after 1894.

(J. M. M.)

1 A passage (long overlooked) in Cicero, De republica, shows that, by the 1st century b.c. the interpolation had already been made; the quotation is evidently taken from the list in c. xli. of the Constitution, which it reproduces.


DRACO (“the Dragon”), in astronomy, a constellation of the northern hemisphere, mentioned by Eudoxus (4th century b.c.) and Aratus (3rd century b.c.); it was catalogued by Ptolemy, 31 stars, Tycho Brahe, 32, Hevelius, 40. The Greeks had many fables concerning this constellation; one is that when Heracles killed the dragon guarding the Hesperian fruit Hera transferred the creature to heaven as a reward for its services. The planetary nebula H. IV. 37 Draconis is of a decided pale blue colour, and one of the most conspicuous objects of its class.


DRACONTIUS, BLOSSIUS AEMILIUS, of Carthage (according to the early tradition, of Spanish origin), Christian poet, flourished in the latter part of the 5th century a.d. He belonged to a family of landed proprietors, and practised as an advocate in his native place. After the conquest of the country by the Vandals, Dracontius was at first allowed to retain possession of his estates, but was subsequently deprived of his property and thrown into prison by the Vandal king, whose triumphs he had omitted to celebrate, while he had written a panegyric on a foreign and hostile ruler. He subsequently addressed an elegiac poem to the king, asking pardon and pleading for release. The result is not known, but it is supposed that Dracontius obtained his liberty and migrated to northern Italy in search of peace and quietness. This is consistent with the discovery at Bobbio of a 15th-century MS., now in the Museo Borbonico at Naples, containing a number of poems by Dracontius (the Carmina minora). The most important of his works is the De laudibus Dei or De Deo in three books, wrongly attributed by MS. tradition to St Augustine. The account of the creation, 465 which occupies the greater part of the first book, was at an early date edited separately under the title of Hexaëmeron, and it was not till 1791 that the three books were edited by Cardinal Arevalo. The apology (Satisfactio) consists of 158 elegiac couplets; it is generally supposed that the king addressed is Gunthamund (484-496). The Carmina minora, nearly all in hexameter verse, consist of school exercises and rhetorical declamations, amongst others the fable of Hylas, with a preface to his tutor, the grammarian Felicianus; the rape of Helen; the story of Medea; two epithalamia. It is also probable that Dracontius was the author of the Orestis tragoedia, a poem of some 1000 hexameters, which in language, metre and general treatment of the subject exhibits a striking resemblance to the other works of Dracontius. Opinions differ as to his poetical merits, but, when due allowance is made for rhetorical exaggeration and consequent want of lucidity, his works show considerable vigour of expression, and a remarkable knowledge of the Bible and of Roman classical literature.

Editions.De Deo and Satisfactio, ed. Arevalo, reprinted in Migne’s Patrologiae cursus, lx.; Carmina minora, ed. F. de Duhn (1873). On Dracontius generally, see A. Ebert, Allgemeine Geschichte der Lit. des Mittelalters im Abendlande, i. (1874); C. Rossberg, In D. Carmina minora (1878); H. Mailfait, De Dracontii poëtae lingua (1902). On the Orestis tragoedia, see editions by R. Peiper (1875) and C. Giarratino (Milan, 1906); pamphlets by C. Rossberg (1880, on the authorship; 1888, materials for a commentary).


DRAFTED MASONRY, in architecture, the term given to large stones, on the face of which has been dressed round the edge a draft or sunken surface, leaving the centre portion as it came from the quarry. The dressing is worked with an adze of eight teeth to the inch, used in a vertical direction and to a width of 2 to 4 in. The earliest example of drafted masonry is found in the immense platform built by Cyrus 530 b.c. at Pasargadae in Persia. It occurs again in the palace of Hyrcanus, known as the Arak-el-Emir (176 b.c.), but is there inferior in execution. The finest drafted masonry is that dating from the time of Herod, in the tower of David and the walls of the Haram in Jerusalem, and at Hebron. In the castles built by the Crusaders, the adze has been worked in a diagonal direction instead of vertically. In all these examples the size of the stones employed is sometimes enormous, so that the traditional influence of the Phoenician masons seems to have lasted till the 12th century.


DRAG (from the Old Eng. dragan, to draw; the word preserves the g which phonetically developed into w), that which is drawn or pulled along a surface, or is used for drawing or pulling. The term is thus applied to a harrow for breaking up clods of earth, or for an apparatus, such as a grapnel, net or dredge, used for searching water for drowned bodies or other objects. As a name of a vehicle, “drag” is sometimes used as equivalent to “break,” a heavy carriage without a body used for training horses, and also a large kind of wagonette, but is more usually applied to a privately owned four-horse coach for four-in-hand driving. The word is also given to the “shoe” of wood or iron, placed under the wheel to act as a brake, and also to the “drift” or “sea-anchor,” usually made of spars and sails, employed for checking the lee-way of a ship when drifting. In fox-hunting, the “drag” is the line of scent left by the fox, but more particularly the term is given to a substitute for the hunting of a fox by hounds, an artificial line of scent being laid by the dragging of a bag of aniseed or other strong smelling substance which a pack will follow.


DRAGASHANI (Rumanian Dragaşani), a town of Rumania, near the right bank of the river Olt, and on the railway between Caracal and Râmnicu Vâlcea. Pop. (1900) 4398. The town is of little commercial importance, but the vineyards on the neighbouring hills produce some of the best Walachian wines. Dragashani stands on the site of the Roman Rusidava. In 1821 the Turks routed the troops of Ypsilanti near the town.


DRAGOMAN (from the Arabic terjuman, an interpreter or translator; the same root occurs in the Hebrew word targum signifying translation, the title of the Chaldaean translation of the Bible), a comprehensive designation applied to all who act as intermediaries between Europeans and Orientals, from the hotel tout or travellers’ guide, hired at a few shillings a day, to the chief dragoman of a foreign embassy whose functions include the carrying on of the most important political negotiations with the Ottoman government, or the dragoman of the imperial divan (the grand master of the ceremonies).

The original employment of dragomans by the Turkish government arose from its religious scruples to use any language save those of peoples which had adopted Islamism. The political relations between the Porte and the European states, more frequent in proportion as the Ottoman power declined, compelled the sultan’s ministers to make use of interpreters, who rapidly acquired considerable influence. It soon became necessary to create the important post of chief dragoman at the Porte, and there was no choice save to appoint a Greek, as no other race in Turkey combined the requisite knowledge of languages with the tact and adroitness essential for conducting diplomatic negotiations. The first chief dragoman of the Porte was Panayot Nikousia, who held his office from 1665 to 1673. His successor, Alexander Mavrocordato, surnamed Exaporritos, was charged by the Turkish government with the delicate and arduous negotiation of the treaty of Carlowitz, and by his dexterity succeeded, in spite of his questionable fidelity to the interests of his employers, in gaining their entire confidence, and in becoming the factotum of Ottoman policy. From that time until 1821 the Greeks monopolized the management of Turkey’s foreign relations, and soon established the regular system whereby the chief dragoman passed on as a matter of course to the dignity of hospodar of one of the Danubian principalities.

In the same way, the foreign representatives accredited to the Porte found it necessary, in the absence of duly qualified countrymen of their own, to engage the services of natives, Greek, Armenian, or Levantine, more or less thoroughly acquainted with the language, laws and administration of the country. Their duties were by no means confined to those of a mere translator, and they became the confidential and indispensable go-betweens of the foreign missions and the Porte. Though such dragomans enjoyed by treaty the protection of the country employing them, they were by local interests and family ties very intimately connected with the Turks, and the disadvantages of the system soon became apparent. Accordingly as early as 1669 the French government decided on the foundation of a school for French dragomans at Constantinople, for which in later years was substituted the École des langues orientales in Paris; most of the great powers eventually took some similar step, England also adopting in 1877 a system, since modified, for the selection and tuition of a corps of British-born dragomans.

The duties of an embassy dragoman are extensive and not easily defined. They have been described as partaking at once of those of a diplomatist, a magistrate, a legal adviser and an administrator. The functions of the first dragoman are mainly political; he accompanies the ambassador or minister at his audiences of the sultan and usually of the ministers, and it is he who is charged with the bulk of diplomatic negotiations at the palace or the Porte. The subordinate dragomans transact the less important business, comprising routine matters such as requests for the recognition of consuls, the settlement of claims or furthering of other demands of their nationals, and in general all the various matters in which the interests of foreign subjects may be concerned. An important part of the dragoman’s duties is to attend during any legal proceedings to which a subject of his nationality is a party, as failing his attendance and his concurrence in the judgment delivered such proceedings are null and void. Moreover, the dragoman is frequently enabled, through the close relations which he necessarily maintains with different classes of Turkish officials, to furnish valuable and confidential information not otherwise obtainable. The high estimation in which the dragomans are held by most foreign powers is shown by the fact that they are usually and in the regular course promoted to the most important diplomatic posts. This is the case in the Russian and Austrian services (where more than one ambassador began his career as a junior dragoman) 466 and generally in the German service; the French chief dragoman usually attains the rank of minister plenipotentiary. The value of a tactful and efficient intermediary can hardly be over-estimated, and in the East a personal interview of a few minutes often results in the conclusion of some important matter which would otherwise require the exchange of a long and laborious correspondence. The more important consulates in the provinces of Turkey are also provided with one or more dragomans, whose duties, mutatis mutandis, are of a similar though less important nature. In the same way banks, railway companies and financial institutions employ dragomans for facilitating their business relations with Turkish officials.


DRAGOMIROV, MICHAEL IVANOVICH (1830-1905), Russian general and military writer, was born on the 8th of November 1830. He entered the Guard infantry in 1849, becoming 2nd lieutenant in 1852 and lieutenant in 1854. In the latter year he was selected to study at the Nicholas Academy (staff college), and here he distinguished himself so much that he received a gold medal, an honour which, it is stated, was paid to a student of the academy only twice in the 19th century. In 1856 he was promoted staff-captain and in 1858 full captain, being sent in the latter year to study the military methods in vogue in other countries. He visited France, England and Belgium, and wrote voluminous reports on the instructional and manœuvre camps of these countries at Châlons, Aldershot and Beverloo. In 1859 he was attached to the headquarters of the king of Sardinia during the campaign of Magenta and Solferino, and immediately upon his return to Russia he was sent to the Nicholas Academy as professor of tactics. Dragomirov played a leading part in the reorganization of the educational system of the army, and acted also as instructor to several princes of the imperial family. This post he held until 1863, when, as a lieutenant-colonel, he took part in the suppression of the Polish insurrection of 1863-64, returning to St Petersburg in the latter year as colonel and chief of staff to one of the Guard divisions. During the Austro-Prussian War of 1866, Dragomirov was attached to the headquarters of the II. Prussian army. He was present at the battles on the upper Elbe and at Königgrätz, and his comments on the operations which he witnessed are of the greatest value to the student of tactics and of the war of 1866.

In 1868 he was made a major-general, and in the following year became chief of the staff in the Kiev military circumscription. In 1873 he was appointed to command the 14th division, and in this command he distinguished himself very greatly in the Russo-Turkish War of 1877-78. The 14th division led the way at the crossing of the Danube at Zimnitza, Dragomirov being in charge of the delicate and difficult operation of crossing and landing under fire, and fulfilling his mission with complete success. Later, after the reverses before Plevna, he, with the cesarevich and Generals Todleben and Milutine, strenuously opposed the suggestion of the Grand-duke Nicholas that the Russian army should retreat into Rumania, and the demoralization of the greater part of the army was not permitted to spread to Dragomirov’s division, which retained its discipline unimpaired and gave a splendid example to the rest.

He was wounded at the Shipka Pass, and, though promoted lieutenant-general soon after this, was not able to see further active service. He was also made adjutant-general to the tsar and chief of the 53rd Volhynia regiment of his old division. For eleven years thereafter General Dragomirov was chief of the Nicholas Academy, and it was during this period that he collated and introduced into the Russian army all the best military literature of Europe, and in many other ways was active in improving the moral and technical efficiency of the Russian officer-corps, especially of the staff officer. In 1889 Dragomirov became commander-in-chief of the Kiev military district, and governor-general of Kiev, Podolsk and Volhynia, retaining this post until 1903. He was promoted to the rank of general of infantry in 1891. His advanced age and failing health prevented his employment at the front during the Russo-Japanese war of 1904-5, but his advice was continually solicited by the general headquarters at St Petersburg, and while he disagreed with General Kuropatkin in many important questions of strategy and military policy, they both recommended a repetition of the strategy of 1812, even though the total abandonment of Port Arthur was involved therein. General Dragomirov died at Konotop on the 28th of October 1905. In addition to the orders which he already possessed, he received in 1901 the order of St Andrew.

His larger military works were mostly translated into French, and his occasional papers, extending over a period of nearly fifty years, appeared chiefly in the Voienni Svornik and the Razoiedschik; his later articles in the last-named paper were, like the general orders he issued to his own troops, attentively studied throughout the Russian army. His critique of Tolstoy’s War and Peace attracted even wider attention. Dragomirov was, in formal tactics, the head of the “orthodox” school. His conservatism was not, however, the result of habit and early training, but of deliberate reasoning and choice. His model was, as he admitted in the war of 1866, the British infantry of the Peninsular War, but he sought to reach the ideal, not through the methods of repression against which the “advanced” tacticians revolted, but by means of thorough efficiency in the individual soldier and in the smaller units. He inculcated the “offensive at all costs,” and the combination of crushing short-range fire and the bayonet charge. He carried out the ideas of Suvarov to the fullest extent, and many thought that he pressed them to a theoretical extreme unattainable in practice. His critics, however, did not always realize that Dragomirov depended, for the efficiency his unit required, on the capacity of the leader, and that an essential part of the self-sacrificing discipline he exacted from his officers was the power of assuming responsibility. The details of his brilliant achievement of Zimnitza suffice to give a clear idea of Dragomirov’s personality and of the way in which his methods of training conduced to success.


DRAGON (Fr. dragon, through Lat. draco, from the Greek; connected with δέρκομαι, “see,” and interpreted as “sharp-sighted”; O.H. Ger. tracho, dracho, M.H.G. trache, Mod. Ger. Drachen; A.S. draca, hence the equivalent English form “drake,” “fire-drake,” cf. Low Ger. and Swed. drake, Dan. drage), a fabulous monster, usually conceived as a huge winged fire-breathing lizard or snake. In Greece the word δράκων was used originally of any large serpent, and the dragon of mythology, whatever shape it may have assumed, remains essentially a snake. For the part it has played in the myths and cults of various peoples and ages see the article Serpent-Worship. Here it may be said, in general, that in the East, where snakes are large and deadly (Chaldea, Assyria, Phoenicia, to a less degree in Egypt), the serpent or dragon was symbolic of the principle of evil. Thus Apophis, in the Egyptian religion, was the great serpent of the world of darkness vanquished by Ra, while in Chaldaea the goddess Tiāmat, the female principle of primeval Chaos, took the form of a dragon. Thus, too, in the Hebrew sacred books the serpent or dragon is the source of death and sin, a conception which was adopted in the New Testament and so passed into Christian mythology. In Greece and Rome, on the other hand, while the oriental idea of the serpent as an evil power found an entrance and gave birth to a plentiful brood of terrors (the serpents of the Gorgons, Hydra, Chimaera and the like), the dracontes were also at times conceived as beneficent powers, sharp-eyed dwellers in the inner parts of the earth, wise to discover its secrets and utter them in oracles, or powerful to invoke as guardian genii. Such were the sacred snakes in the temples of Aesculapius and the sacri dracontes in that of the Bona Dea at Rome; or, as guardians, the Python at Delphi and the dragon of the Hesperides.

In general, however, the evil reputation of dragons was the stronger, and in Europe it outlived the other. Christianity, of course, confused the benevolent and malevolent serpent-deities of the ancient cults in a common condemnation. The very “wisdom of the serpent” made him suspect; the devil, said St Augustine, “leo et draco est; leo propter impetum, draco propter insidias.” The dragon myths of the pagan East took new shapes in the legends of the victories of St Michael and 467 St George; and the kindly snakes of the “good goddess” lived on in the immanissimus draco whose baneful activity in a cave of the Capitol was cut short by the intervention of the saintly pope Silvester I. (Duchesne, Liber pontificalis, i. 109 seq.). In this respect indeed Christian mythology found itself in harmony with that of the pagan North. The similarity of the Northern and Oriental snake myths seems to point to some common origin in an antiquity too remote to be explored. Whatever be the origin of the Northern dragon, the myths, when they first become articulate for us, show him to be in all essentials the same as that of the South and East. He is a power of evil, guardian of hoards, the greedy withholder of good things from men; and the slaying of a dragon is the crowning achievement of heroes—of Siegmund, of Beowulf, of Sigurd, of Arthur, of Tristram—even of Lancelot, the beau idéal of medieval chivalry. Nor were these dragons anything but very real terrors, even in the imaginations of the learned, until comparatively modern times. As the waste places were cleared, indeed, they withdrew farther from the haunts of men, and in Europe their last lurking-places were the inaccessible heights of the Alps, where they lingered till Jacques Balmain set the fashion which has finally relegated them to the realm of myth. In the works of the older naturalists, even in the great Historia animalium of so critical a spirit as Conrad Gesner (d. 1564), they still figure as part of the fauna known to science.

Dragon Lizard (Draco taeniopterus).

As to their form, this varied from the beginning. The Chaldaean dragon Tiāmat had four legs, a scaly body, and wings. The Egyptian Apophis was a monstrous snake, as were also, originally at least, the Greek dracontes. The dragon of the Apocalypse (Rev. xii. 3), “the old serpent,” is many-headed, like the Greek Hydra. The dragon slain by Beowulf is a snake (worm), for it “buckles like a bow “; but that done to death by Sigurd, though its motions are heavy and snake-like, has legs, for he wounds it “behind the shoulder.” On the other hand, the dragon seen by King Arthur in his dreams is, according to Malory, winged and active, for it “swoughs” down from the sky. The belief in dragons and the conceptions of their shape were undoubtedly often determined, in Europe as in China, by the discovery of the remains of the gigantic extinct saurians.

The qualities of dragons being protective and terror-inspiring, and their effigies highly decorative, it is natural that they should have been early used as warlike emblems. Thus, in Homer (Iliad xi. 36 seq.), Agamemnon has on his shield, besides the Gorgon’s head, a blue three-headed snake (δράκων), just as ages afterwards the Norse warriors painted dragons on their shields and carved dragons’ heads on the prows of their ships. From the conquered Dacians, too, the Romans in Trajan’s time borrowed the dragon ensign which became the standard of the cohort as the eagle was that of the legion; whence, by a long descent, the modern dragoon. Under the later East Roman emperors the purple dragon ensign became the ceremonial standard of the emperors, under the name of the δρακόντειον. The imperial fashion spread; or similar causes elsewhere produced similar results. In England before the Conquest the dragon was chief among the royal ensigns in war. Its origin, according to the legend preserved in the Flores historiarum, was as follows. Uther Pendragon, father of King Arthur, had a vision of a flaming dragon in the sky, which his seers interpreted as meaning that he should come to the kingdom. When this happened, after the death of his brother Aurelius, “he ordered two golden dragons to be fashioned, like to those he had seen in the circle of the star, one of which he dedicated in the cathedral of Winchester, the other he kept by him to be carried into battle.” From Uther Dragonhead, as the English called him, the Anglo-Saxon kings borrowed the ensign, their custom being, according to the Flores, to stand in battle inter draconem et standardum. The dragon ensign, which was borne before Richard I. in 1191 when on crusade “to the terror of the heathen beyond the sea,” was that of the dukes of Normandy; but even after the loss of Normandy the dragon was the battle standard of English kings (signum regium quod Draconem vocant), and was displayed, e.g. by Henry III. in 1245 when he went to war against the Welsh. Not till the 20th century, under King Edward VII., was the dragon officially restored as proper only to the British race of Uther Pendragon, by its incorporation in the armorial bearings of the prince of Wales. As a matter of fact, however, the dragon ensign was common to nearly all nations, the reason for its popularity being naïvely stated in the romance of Athis (quoted by Du Cange),

“Ce souloient Romains porter,

Ce nous fait moult à redouter:”

“This the Romans used to carry, This makes us very much to be feared.” Thus the dragon and wyvern (i.e. a two-legged snake, M.E. wivere, viper) took their place as heraldic symbols (see Heraldry).

As an ecclesiastical symbol it has remained consistent to the present day. Wherever it is represented it means the principle of evil, the devil and his works. In the middle ages the chief of these works was heresy, and the dragon of the medieval church legends and mystery plays was usually heresy. Thus the knightly order of the vanquished dragon, instituted by the emperor Sigismund in 1418, celebrated the victory of orthodoxy over John Huss. Hell, too, is represented in medieval art as a dragon with gaping jaws belching fire. Of the dragons carried in effigy in religious processions some have become famous, e.g. the Gargouille (gargoyle) at Rouen, the Graülly at Metz, and the Tarasque at Tarascon. Their popularity tended to disguise their evil significance and to restore to them something of the beneficent qualities of the ancient dracontes as local tutelary genii.

In the East, at the present day, the dragon is the national symbol of China and the badge of the imperial family, and as such it plays a large part in Chinese art. Chinese and Japanese dragons, though regarded as powers of the air, are wingless. They are among the deified forces of nature of the Taoist religion, and the shrines of the dragon-kings, who dwell partly in water and partly on land, are set along the banks of rivers.

The constellation Draco (anguis, serpens) was probably so 468 called from its fanciful likeness to a snake. Numerous myths, in various countries, are however connected with it. The general character of these may be illustrated by the Greek story which explains the constellation as being the dragon of the Hesperides slain by Heracles and translated by Hera or Zeus to the heavens.

See C. V. Daremberg and E. Saglio, Dictionnaire des antiquités grecques et romaines (Paris, 1886, &c.), s.v. “Draco”; Pauly-Wissowa, Realencyclopädie, s.v. “Drakon”; Du Cange, Glossarium, s.v. “Draco”; La Grande Encyclopédie s.v. “Dragon”; J. B. Panthot, Histoire des dragons et des escarboucles (Lyons, 1691). See also the articles Egypt: Religion, and Babylonian and Assyrian Religion.

(W. A. P.)

In zoology the name “dragon” is now applied to a highly interesting, but very harmless, group of small flying lizards forming the genus Draco, belonging to the Agamidae, a family of Saurian reptiles. About 20 species of “flying dragons” inhabit the various Indo-Malayan countries; one, D. dussumieri, occurs in Madras. They are small creatures, measuring about 10 in. long, including the tail, which in some cases is more than half of the entire length. The head is small, and the throat is provided with three pouches which are spread out when they lie on the trunks of trees. They are, however, chiefly remarkable for the wing-like cutaneous processes with which their sides are provided, and which are extended and supported by greatly elongated ribs. These form a sort of parachute by which the animals are enabled to glide from branch to branch of the trees on which they live, but, being altogether independent of the fore limbs, they cannot be regarded as true wings, nor do they enable the lizard to fly, but merely to make extensive leaps. But they have the habit of opening and folding these prettily coloured organs, when resting upon a branch, which gives them the appearance of butterflies. When not in use they are folded by the side after the manner of a fan, and the dragon can then walk or run with considerable agility. Its food consists of insects.


DRAGONETTI, DOMENICO (1763-1846), Italian double-bass player, was born in Venice on the 7th of April 1763. Having become famous as a performer on his instrument, he went to London in 1794, where his playing created a furore. He was the friend of Haydn and of Beethoven, and a well-known character in his day. He died in London on the 16th of April 1846.


DRAGON-FLY (Ger. Wasserjungfer; Swed. trollslända; Dan. guldsmed; Dutch, scherpstekendevlieg; Fr. demoiselle), the popular English name applied to the members of a remarkable group of insects which formed the genus Libellula of Linnaeus and the ancient authors. In some parts of the United States they appear to be known as “devil’s darning needles,” and in many parts of England are termed “horse-stingers.” It is almost needless to say that (excepting to other insects upon which they prey) they are perfectly innocuous, though some of the larger species can inflict a momentarily painful bite with their powerful jaws. Their true systematic position is still contested and somewhat uncertain. By most of the older systematists they were placed as forming part of the heterogeneous order Neuroptera. J. C. Fabricius, however, elevated them to the rank of a distinct order, which he termed Odonata; and whatever may be the difference of opinion amongst authors at the present day, that term is almost universally employed for the group. W. F. Erichson transferred all the groups of so-called Neuroptera with incomplete metamorphoses, hence including the dragon-flies, as a division of Orthoptera, which he termed Pseudo-Neuroptera. K. E. A. Gerstäcker more recently also retains them in the Orthoptera, terming those groups in which the earlier states are subaquatic Orthoptera amphibotica. All entomologists are agreed in maintaining the insects as forming a group marked by characters at once extraordinary and isolated in their nature, and in most modern classifications they are treated as a distinct order.

The group Odonata is divided into three families, and each of these again into two subfamilies. The families are the Agrionidae, Aeschnidae and Libellulidae—the first including the subfamilies Calopterygina and Agrionina, the second Gomphina and Aeschnina, and the third Cordulina and Libellulina.

Anatomy.—The structure of a dragon-fly being so very remarkable, it is necessary to enter somewhat extensively into details. The head is comparatively small, and excavated posteriorly, connected very slightly with the prothorax, on which it turns almost as on a pivot. The eyes are, as a rule, enormous, often contiguous, and occupying nearly the whole of the upper surface of the head, but sometimes (Agrionidae and Gomphina) widely distant; occupied by innumerable facets, which are often larger on the upper portion. The antennae, which are smaller in proportion than in almost any other insects, consist only of two short swollen basal joints and a 5 or 6-jointed bristle-like thread. The large labrum conceals the jaws and inner mouth parts. The lower lip, or labium (formed by the conjoined second maxillae), is attached to a very small chin piece (or mentum), and is generally very large, often (Agrionidae) divided almost to its base into two portions, or more frequently entire or nearly so; on each side of it are two usually enormous hypertrophied pieces, which form the “palpi,” and which are often furnished at the tips with an articulated spine (or terminal joint), the whole structure serving to retain the prey. Considerable diversity of opinion exists with respect to the composition of the mouth parts, and by some authors the “palpi” have been termed the side pieces of the lower lip. The prothorax is extremely small, consisting of only a narrow ring. The rest of the thorax is very large, and consolidated into a single piece with oblique sutures on the sides beneath the wings.

The abdomen varies excessively in form, the two extremes being the filiform structure observable in most Agrionidae, and the very broad and depressed formation seen in the familiar British Libellula depressa. It consists of ten distinct segments, whereof the basal two and those at the apex are short, the others elongate, the first being excessively short. In a slit on the under side of the second in the male, accompanied by external protuberances, are concealed the genital organs: on the under side of the eighth in the female is a scale-like formation, indicating the entrance to the oviduct. The tenth is always provided in both sexes with prominent appendages, differing greatly in form, and often furnishing the best specific (and even generic) characters.

The legs vary in length and stoutness, but may, as a rule, be termed long and slender. The anterior pair probably assist in capturing and holding insect prey, but the greatest service all the legs render is possibly in enabling the creature to rest lightly, so that it can quit a position of repose in chase of passing prey in the quickest possible manner. The coxa is short and stout, followed by a still shorter trochanter; the femora and tibiae long and slender, almost invariably furnished on their under surface with two series of strong spines, as also are the tarsi, which consist of three slender joints, the last having two long and slender claws.

The wings are always elongate, and furnished with strong longitudinal neuration and dense transverse nervules strengthening the already strong (although typically transparent) membrane. In the Agrionidae both pairs are nearly equal, and are carried vertically and longitudinally in repose, and the neuration and membrane are less strong; hence the species of this family are not so powerful on the wing as are those of the other groups in which the wings are horizontally extended in a position ready for instant service. The neuration is peculiar, and in many respects without precise analogy in other groups of insects, but it is not necessary here to enter into more than some special points. The arrangement of the nervures at the base of the wing is very singular, and slight differences in it form useful aids to classification. In the Aeschnidae and Libellulidae this arrangement results in the formation of a triangular space (known as the “triangle”), which is either open or traversed by nervules; but in many Agrionidae this space, instead of being triangular, is oblong or elongately quadrate, or with its upper edge partly straight and partly oblique. This fixitude of type in neuration is not one of the least important of the many peculiarities exhibited in these insects.

The internal structure is comparatively simple. The existence of salivary glands, denied by L. Duprix, has been asserted by O. Poletajewa. The rest of the digestive apparatus consists of an elongate canal extending from mouth to anus, comprising the oesophagus, stomach and intestine, with certain dilatations and constrictions; the characteristic Malpighian vessels are stated to number about forty, placed round the posterior extremity of the stomach. Dragon-flies eat their prey completely, and do not content themselves by merely sucking its juices; the harder portions are rejected as elongate, nearly dry, pellets of excrement.

Fig. 1—The anterior portion of the body of Aeschna cynea freed from the nymph-cuticle. Fig. 2.—The tail being extricated.
Fig. 3.—The whole body extricated.

Pairing.—But the most extraordinary feature in the economy—one which has attracted the attention of naturalists from remote times—is the position of the genital organs, and the corresponding anomalous manner in which the pairing of the sexes and impregnation is effected. In the male the intromittent organ is situated in a slit on the under surface of the second abdominal segment; it is usually very crooked or sinuous in form, and is accompanied by sheaths, and by external hooks or secondary appendages, and also by seminal vessels. But the ducts of the vessels connected with the testes unite and open on the under surface of the ninth segment; hence, before copulation can take place, it is necessary that the vessels in the second 469 segment be charged from this opening, and in the majority of cases this is done by the male previously to seeking the female. In the latter sex the entrance to the oviduct and genital organs is on the under surface of the eighth abdominal segment. The act of pairing may be briefly stated as follows. The male, when flying, seizes the prothorax of the female with the strong appendages at the extremity of the abdomen, and the abdomen of this latter sex is then curved upward so as to bring the under side of the eighth segment into contact with the organs of the second segment of the male. In the more powerful Libellulidae, &c., the act is of short duration, and it is probable that polygamy and polyandry exist, for it possibly requires more than one almost momentary act to fertilize all the eggs in the ovaries of a female. But in many Agrionidae, and in some others, the male keeps his hold of the prothorax of the female for a lengthened period, retaining himself in flight in an almost perpendicular manner, and it may be that the deposition of eggs and pairing goes on alternately. There is, however, much yet to be learned on these points. The gravid female usually lays her eggs in masses (but perhaps sometimes singly), and the operation may be witnessed by any one in localities frequented by these insects. She hovers for a considerable time over nearly the same spot, rapidly dipping the apex of her abdomen into the water, or at any rate touching it, and often in places where there are no water-weeds, so that in all probability the eggs fall at once to the bottom. But in some of the Agrionidae the female has been often noticed by trustworthy observers to creep down the stems of aquatic plants several inches below the surface, emerging after the act of oviposition has been effected; and in the case of Lestes sponsa, K. T. E. von Siebold saw the male descend with the female. The same exact observer noticed also in this species that the female makes slight incisions in the stems or leaves of water plants with the double serrated apparatus (vulva) forming a prolongation of the ninth segment beneath, depositing an egg in each incision. He has seen two pairs thus occupied beneath the surface on one and the same stem.

Fig. 4.—The perfect insect (the wings having acquired their full dimensions) resting to dry itself, preparatory to the wings being horizontally extended.

Larva and Nymph.—The duration of the subaquatic life of a dragon-fly is no doubt variable, according to the species. In the smaller forms it is probably less than a year, but precise evidence is wanting as to the occurrence of two broods in one year. On the other hand, it is certain that often a longer period is requisite to enable the creature to attain its full growth, and three years have been stated to be necessary for this in the large and powerful Anax formosus. Like all insects with incomplete metamorphoses, there is no quiescent pupal condition, no sharp line of demarcation between the larval and so-called “nymph” or penultimate stage. The creature goes on eating and increasing in size from the moment it emerges from the egg to the time when it leaves the water to be transformed into the aerial perfect insect. The number of moults is uncertain, but they are without doubt numerous. At probably about the antepenultimate of these operations, the rudimentary wings begin to appear as thoracic buddings, and in the full-grown nymph these wings overlap about one-half of the dorsal surface of the abdomen. In structure there is a certain amount of resemblance to the perfect insect, but the body is always much stouter and shorter, in some cases most disproportionately so, and the eyes are always separated; even in those genera (e.g. Aeschna) in which the eyes of the imago are absolutely contiguous, the most that can be seen in the larva is a prolongation towards each other, and there are no ocelli. The legs are shorter and more fitted for crawling about water plants and on the bottom. In the mouth parts the mandibles and maxillae are similar in form to those of the adult, but there is an extraordinary and unique modification of the lower lip. This is attached to an elongate and slender mentum articulated to the posterior portion of the lower surface of the head, slightly widened at its extremity, to which is again articulated the labium proper, which is very large, flattened, and gradually dilated to its extremity; but its form differs according to group as in the perfect insect. Thus in the Agrionidae it is deeply cleft, and with comparatively slender side-pieces (or palpi), and strongly developed articulated spines; in the Aeschnidae it is at the most notched, with narrow side-pieces and very strong spines; in the Libellulidae it is entire, often triangular at its apex, and with enormously developed palpi without spines, but having the opposing inner edges furnished with interlocking serrations. The whole of this apparatus is commonly termed the mask. In a state of repose it is applied closely against the face, the elongated mentum directed backward and lying between the anterior pair of legs; but when an approaching victim is seen the whole apparatus is suddenly projected, and the prey caught by the raptorial palpi; in some large species it is capable of being projected fully half an inch in front of the head. The prey, once caught and held by this apparatus, is devoured in the usual manner. There are two pairs of thoracic spiracles, through which the nymph breathes during its later life by thrusting the anterior end of the body into the air; but respiration is mostly effected by a peculiar apparatus at the tail end, and there are two different methods. In the Agrionidae there are three elongate flattened plates, or false gills, full of tracheal ramifications, which extract the air from the water, and convey it to the internal tracheae (in Calopteryx these plates are excessively long, nearly equalling the abdomen), the plates also serving as means of locomotion. But in the other groups these external false gills are absent, and in 470 their place are five valves, which by their sudden opening and closing force in the water to the rectum, the walls of which are furnished with branchial lamellae. The alternate opening and closing of these valves enables the creature to make quick jerks or rushes (incorrectly termed “leaps”) through the water,1 and, in conjunction with its mouth parts, to make sudden attacks upon prey from a considerable distance. Well-developed Aeschnid larvae have been observed to take atmospheric air into the rectum. The lateral angles of the terminal abdominal segments are sometimes produced into long curved spines. In colour these larvae are generally muddy, and they frequently have a coating of muddy particles, and hence are less likely to be observed by their victims. If among insects the perfect dragon-fly may be termed the tyrant of the air, so may its larva be styled that of the water. Aquatic insects and larvae form the principal food, but there can be no doubt that worms, the fry of fish, and even younger larvae of their own species, form part of the bill of fare. The “nymph” when arrived at its full growth sallies forth from the water, and often crawls a considerable distance (frequently many feet up the trunks of trees) before it fixes itself for the final change, which is effected by the thorax splitting longitudinally down the back, through which fissure the perfect insect gradually drags itself. The figures indicate this process as observed in Aeschna cyanea.

The Complete Insect.-For a considerable time after its emergence a dragon-fly is without any of its characteristic colours, and is flaccid and weak, the wings (even in those groups in which they are afterwards horizontally extended) being held vertically in a line with the abdomen. By degrees the parts harden, and the insect essays its first flight, but even then the wings have little power and are semi-opaque in appearance, as if dipped in mucilage. In most species of Calopterygina, and in some others, the prevailing colour of the body is a brilliant bronzy green, blue or black, but the colours in the other groups vary much, and often differ in the sexes. Thus in Libellula depressa the abdomen of the fully adult male is covered with a bluish bloom, whereas that of the female is yellow; but several days elapse before this pulverulent appearance is attained, and a comparatively young male is yellow like the female. The wings are typically hyaline and colourless, but in many species (especially Calopterygina and Libellulina) they may be wholly or in part opaque and often black, due apparently to gradual oxydization of a pigment between the two membranes of which the wings are composed; the brilliant iridescence, or metallic lustre, so frequently found is no doubt due to interference—the effect of minute irregularities of the surface—and not produced by a pigment. A beautiful little genus (Chalcopteryx) of Calopterygina from the Amazon is a gem in the world of insects, the posterior wings being of the most brilliant fiery metallic colour, whereas the anterior remain hyaline.

These insects are pre-eminently lovers of the hottest sunshine (a few are somewhat crepuscular), and the most powerful and daring on the wing in fine weather become inert and comparatively lifeless when at rest in dull weather, allowing themselves to be captured by the fingers without making any effort to escape. Many of the larger species (Aeschna, &c.) have a habit of affecting a particular twig or other resting place like a fly-catcher among birds, darting off after prey and making long excursions, but returning to the chosen spot. A. R. Wallace, in his Malay Archipelago, states that the inhabitants of Lombok use the large species for food, and catch them by means of limed twigs.

They are distributed over the whole world excepting the polar regions, but are especially insects of the tropics. At the present day about 2200 species are known, dispersed unequally among the several subfamilies as follows: Agrionina, 700 species; Calopterygina, 280; Gomphina, 320; Aeschnina, 170; Corduliina, 130; Libellulina, 600. In Europe proper only 100 species have been observed, and about 46 of these occur in the British islands. New Zealand is excessively poor, and can only number 8 species, whereas they are very numerous in Australia. Some species are often seen at sea, far from land, in calm weather, in troops which are no doubt migratory; the common Libellula quadrimaculata, which inhabits the cold and temperate regions of the northern hemisphere, has been frequently seen in immense migratory swarms. One species (Pantala flavescens) has about the widest range of any insect, occurring in the Old World from Kamtchatka to Australia, and in the New from the Southern States to Chili, also all over Africa and the Pacific islands, but is not found in Europe. The largest species occur in the Aeschnina and Agrionina; a member of the former subfamily from Borneo expands to nearly 6½ in., and with a moderately strong body and powerful form; in the latter the Central American and Brazilian Megaloprepus caerulatus and species of Mecistogaster are very large, the former expanding to nearly 7 in., and the latter to nearly as much, but the abdomen is not thicker than an ordinary grass-stem and of extreme length (fully 5 in. in Mecistogaster).

Fossils.—Among fossil insects dragon-flies hold a conspicuous position. Not only do they belong to what appears to have been a very ancient type, but in addition, the large wings and strong dense reticulation are extremely favourable for preservation in a fossil condition, and in many cases all the intricate details can be as readily followed as in a recent example. From the Carboniferous strata of Commentry, France, C. Brongniart has described several genera of gigantic insects allied to dragon-flies, but with less specialized thoracic segments and simpler wing-neuration. These form a special group—the Protodonata. True Odonata referable to the existing families are plentiful in Mesozoic formations; in England they have been found more especially in the Purbeck beds of Swanage, and the vales of Wardour and Aylesbury, in the Stonesfield Slate series, and in the Lias and Rhaetic series of the west of England. But the richest strata appear to be those of the Upper Miocene at Oeningen, near Schaffhausen in the Rhine valley; the Middle Miocene at Radaboj, near Krapina in Croatia; the Eocene of Aix, in Provence; and more especially the celebrated Secondary rocks furnishing the lithographic stone of Solenhofen, in Bavaria. This latter deposit would appear to have been of marine origin, and it is significant that, although the remains of gigantic dragon-flies discovered in it are very numerous and perfect, no traces of their subaquatic conditions have been found, although these as a rule are numerous in most of the other strata, hence the insects may be regarded as having been drowned in the sea and washed on shore. Many of these Solenhofen species differ considerably in form from those now existing, so that Dr H. A. L. Hagen, who has especially studied them, says that for nearly all it is necessary to make new genera. It is of great interest, however, to find that a living Malayan genus (Euphaea) and another living genus Uropetala, now confined to New Zealand, are represented in the Solenhofen deposits, while a species of Megapodagrion now entirely Neotropical, occurs in the Eocene beds of Wyoming.

A notice of fossil forms should not be concluded without the remark that indications of at least two species have been found in amber, a number disproportionately small if compared with other insects entombed therein; but it must be remembered that a dragon-fly is, as a rule, an insect of great power, and in all probability those then existing were able to extricate themselves if accidentally entangled in the resin.

See E. de Selys-Longchamps, Monographie des Libellulidées d’Europe (Brussels, 1840); Synopses des Agrionines, Caloptérygines, Gomphines, et Cordulines, with Supplements (Brussels, from 1853 to 1877); E. de Selys-Longchamps and H. A. L. Hagen, Revue des Odonates d’Europe (Brussels, 1850); Monographie des Caloptérygines et des Gomphines (Brussels, 1854 and 1858); Charpentier, Libellulinae europeae (Leipzig, 1840). For modern systematic work see various papers by R. M’Lachlan, P. P. Calvert, J. G. Needham, R. Martin, E. B. Williamson, F. Karsch, &c.; also H. Tumpel, Die Geradflugler Mitteleuropas (Eisenach, 1900); and W. F. Kirby, Catalogue of Neuroptera Odonata (London, 1890). For habits and details of transformation and larval life, see L. C. Miall, Natural History of Aquatic Insects (London, 1895); H. Dewitz, Zool. Anz. xiii. (1891); and J. G. Needham, Bull. New York Museum, lxviii. (1903). For geographical distribution, G. H. Carpenter, Sci. Proc. R. Dublin Soc. viii. (1897). For British species, W. J. Lucas, Handbook of British 471 Dragonflies (London, 1899). For wings and mechanism of flight, R. von Lendenfeld, S.B. Akad. Wien, lxxxiii. (1881), and J. G. Needham, Proc. U.S. Nat. Mus. xxvi. (1903). For general morphology, R. Heymons, Abhandl. k. preuss. Akad. (1896), and Ann. Hofmus. Wein, xix. (1904).

(R. M‘L.; G. H. C.)

1 A similar contrivance was suggested and (if the writer mistakes not) actually tried as a means of propelling steamships.


DRAGON’S BLOOD, a red-coloured resin obtained from several species of plants. Calamus draco (Willd.), one of the rotang or rattan palms, which produces much of the dragon’s blood of commerce, is a native of Further India and the Eastern Archipelago. The fruit is round, pointed, scaly, and the size of a large cherry, and when ripe is coated with the resinous exudation known as dragon’s blood. The finest dragon’s blood, called jernang or djernang in the East Indies, is obtained by beating or shaking the gathered fruits, sifting out impurities, and melting by exposure to the heat of the sun or by placing in boiling water; the resin thus purified is then usually moulded into sticks or quills, and after being wrapped in reeds or palm-leaves, is ready for market. An impurer and inferior kind, sold in lumps of considerable size, is extracted from the fruits by boiling. Dragon’s blood is dark red-brown, nearly opaque and brittle, contains small shell-like flakes, and gives when ground a fine red powder; it is soluble in alcohol, ether, and fixed and volatile oils. If heated it gives off benzoic acid. In Europe it was once valued as a medicine on account of its astringent properties, and is now used for colouring varnishes and lacquers; in China, where it is mostly consumed, it is employed to give a red facing to writing paper. The drop dragon’s blood of commerce, called cinnabar by Pliny (N.H. xxxiii. 39), and sangre de dragon by Barbosa was formerly and is still one of the products of Socotra, and is obtained from Dracaena cinnabari. The dragon’s blood of the Canary Islands is a resin procured from the surface of the leaves and from cracks in the trunk of Dracaena draco. The hardened juice of a euphorbiaceous tree, Croton draco, a resin resembling kino, is the sangre del drago or dragon’s blood of the Mexicans, used by them as a vulnerary and astringent.


DRAGOON (Fr. dragon, Ger. Dragoner), originally a mounted soldier trained to fight on foot only (see Cavalry). This mounted infantryman of the late 16th and 17th centuries, like his comrades of the infantry who were styled “pike” and “shot,” took his name from his weapon, a species of carbine or short musket called the “dragon.” Dragoons were organized not in squadrons but in companies, like the foot, and their officers and non-commissioned officers bore infantry titles. The invariable tendency of the old-fashioned dragoon, who was always at a disadvantage when engaged against true cavalry, was to improve his horsemanship and armament to the cavalry standard. Thus “dragoon” came to mean medium cavalry, and this significance the word has retained since the early wars of Frederick the Great, save for a few local and temporary returns to the original meaning. The phrases “to dragoon” and “dragonnade” bear witness to the mounted infantry period, this arm being the most efficient and economical form of cavalry for police work and guerrilla warfare. The “Dragonnades,” properly so called, were the operations of the troops (chiefly mounted) engaged in enforcing Louis XIV.’s decrees against Protestants after the revocation of the edict of Nantes. In the British service the dragoons (1st Royals, 2nd Scots Greys, 6th Inniskillings) are heavy cavalry, the Dragoon Guards (seven regiments) are medium, as are the dragoons of other countries. The light cavalry of the British army in the 18th and early 19th century was for the most part called light dragoons.


DRAGUIGNAN, the chief town of the department of the Var in S.E. France; 51 m. N.E. of Toulon, and 28½ m. N.W. of Fréjus by rail; situated at a height of 679 ft. above the level of the sea, at the southern foot of the wooded heights of Malmont, and on the left bank of the Nartuby river; pop. (1906) 7766. It possesses no notable buildings, save a modern parish church, a prefecture, also modern, and a building wherein are housed the town library and a picture gallery, with some fair works of art. In modern times the ramparts have been demolished, and new wide streets pierced through the town.


DRAINAGE OF LAND. The verb “to drain,” with its substantives “drain” and “drainage,” represents the O. Eng. dreahnian, from the same root found in “dry,” and signifies generally the act of drawing off moisture or liquid from somewhere, and so drinking dry, and (figuratively) exhausting; the substantive “drain” being thus used not only in the direct sense of a channel for carrying off liquid, but also figuratively for a very small amount such as would be left as dregs. The term “drainage” is applied generally to all operations involving the drawing off of water or other liquid, but more particularly to those connected with the treatment of the soil in agriculture, or with the removal of water and refuse from streets and houses. For the last, see Sewerage; the following article being devoted to the agricultural aspects of this subject. See also the articles Reclamation of Land, Canal, Irrigation, River Engineering, Water Supply and (law) Water Rights.

Agricultural or field drainage consists in the freeing of the soil from stagnant and superfluous water by means of surface or underground channels. It may be distinguished from the draining of land on a large scale which is exemplified in the reclamation of the English Fens (see Fens). Surface drainage is usually effected by ploughing the land into convex ridges off which the water runs into intervening furrows and is conveyed into ditches. For several reasons this method is ineffective, and, where possible, is now superseded by underground drainage by means of pipe-tiles. Land is not in a satisfactory condition with respect to drainage unless the rain that falls upon it can sink down to the minimum depth required for the healthy development of the roots of crops and thence find vent either through a naturally porous subsoil or by artificial channels.

A few of the evils inseparable from the presence of overmuch water in the soil may be enumerated. Wet land, if in grass, produces only the coarser grasses, and many subaquatic plants and mosses, which are of little or no value for pasturage; its herbage is late in spring, and fails early in autumn; the animals grazed upon it are unduly liable to disease, and sheep, especially, to foot-rot and liver-rot. In the case of arable land the crops are poor and moisture-loving weeds flourish. Tillage operations on such land are easily interrupted by rain, and the period always much limited in which they can be prosecuted at all; the compactness and toughness of the soil renders each operation more arduous, and its repetition more necessary than in the case of dry land. The surface must necessarily be thrown into ridges, and the furrows and cross-cuts cleared out after each process of tillage, and upon this surface-drainage as much labour is expended in twenty years as would suffice to make under-drains enough to lay it permanently dry. With all these precautions the best seed time is often missed, and this usually proves the prelude to a scanty crop, or to a late and disastrous harvest. The cultivation of the turnip and other root crops, which require the soil to be wrought to a deep and free tilth, either becomes altogether impracticable and must be abandoned for the safe but costly bare fallow, or is carried out with great labour and hazard; and the crop, when grown, can neither be removed from the ground, nor consumed upon it by sheep without damage by “poaching.”

The roots of plants require both air and warmth. A deep stratum through which water can percolate, but in which it can never stagnate, is therefore necessary. A waterlogged soil is impenetrable by air, and owing to the continuous process of evaporation and radiation, its temperature is much below that of drained soil. The surface of the water in the supersaturated soil is known as the “water-table” and is exemplified in water standing in a well. Water will rise in clay by capillarity to a height of 50 in., in sand to 22 in. Above the “water-table” the water is held by capillarity, and the percentage of water held decreases as we approach the surface where there may be perfect dryness. Draining reduces the “surface tension” of the capillary water by removal of the excess, but the “water-table” may be many feet below. Drains ordinarily remove only excess of capillary water, an excess of percolating water in wet weather.

In setting about the draining of a field, or farm, or estate, the first point is to secure a proper outfall. The lines of the receiving drains must next be determined, and then the direction of the 472 parallel drains. The former must occupy the lowest part of the natural hollows, and the latter must run in the line of the greatest slope of the ground. In the case of flat land, where a fall is obtained chiefly by increasing the depth of the drains at their lower ends, these lines may be disposed in any direction that is found convenient; but in undulating ground a single field may require several distinct sets of drains lying at different angles, so as to suit its several slopes. When a field is ridged in the line of the greatest ascent of the ground, there is an obvious convenience in adopting the furrows as the site of the drains; but wherever this is not the case the drains must be laid off to suit the contour of the ground, irrespective of the furrows altogether. When parts of a field are flat, and other parts have a considerable acclivity, it is expedient to cut a receiving drain near to the bottom of the slopes, and to give the flat ground an independent set of drains. In laying off receiving drains it is essential to give hedgerows and trees a good offing, lest the conduit be obstructed by the roots.

When a main drain is so placed that parallel ones empty into it from both sides, care should be taken that the inlets of the latter are not made exactly opposite to each other. Much of the success of draining depends on the skilful planning of these main drains, and in making them large enough to discharge the greatest flow of water to which they may be exposed. Very long main drains are to be avoided. Numerous outlets are also objectionable, from their liability to obstruction. An outlet to an area of from 10 to 15 acres is a good arrangement. These outlets should be faced with mason work, and guarded with iron gratings.

The distance and depth apart of the parallel drains is determined chiefly by reference to the texture of the soil. In an impervious clay the flow of the water is much impeded and the water-table can be controlled only by frequent lines of pipes. On such land it is customary to lay them about 3 ft. from the surface and from 15 to 21 ft. apart. In lighter soils the depth, and proportionately the distance apart, is increased, but the drains are rarely more than 4 ft. 6 in. below the surface, though they may be 75 or 100 apart. A fall of at least 1 in 200 is desirable.

There are various forms of under-drainage, some of them alluded to in the historical section below, but by far the commonest is by means of cylindrical or oval pipes of burnt clay about 1 ft. in length, sometimes supplemented by collars, though nowadays the use of these is being abandoned. Pipes vary in bore from 2 in. for the parallel to 6 in. for the main drains.

In constructing a drain, it is of importance that the bottom be cut out just wide enough to admit the pipes and no more. Pipes, when accurately fitted in, are much less liable to derangement than when laid in the bottom of a trench several times their width, into which a mass of loose earth must necessarily be returned. This is easily effected in the case of soils tolerably free from stones by the use of draining spades and the tile-hook which are represented in the accompanying cut. The tile-hook is an implement by means of which the pipes may be lowered from the edge of the trench and laid at the bottom. An implement, sometimes propelled by steam, known as the draining plough, can be used for opening the trenches. Draining can be carried on at all seasons, but is usually best done in autumn or summer. A thoroughly trustworthy and experienced workman should be selected to lay the pipes, with instructions to set no pipes until he is satisfied that the depth of the drains and level of the bottoms are correct. The expense of tile-drainage may vary from about £2:10s. per acre on loose soils to £10 an acre on the most tenacious soils, the rate of wages and the cost of the pipes, the depth of the trenches and the ease with which they can be dug, all influencing the cost of the process.

Drainage is not a modern discovery. The Romans were careful to keep their arable lands dry by means of open trenches or covered drains filled with stones or twigs. It is at least several centuries since covered channels of various kinds were used by British husbandmen for drying their land. Walter Blith (see Agriculture) about the middle of the 17th century wrote of the improvement which might be effected in barren land by freeing it from the excess of stagnant water on or near the surface by means of channels filled with faggots or stones, but his principles, never generally adopted, were ultimately forgotten. In the latter half of the 18th century, Joseph Elkington, a Warwickshire farmer, discovered a plan of laying dry sloping ground that is drowned by the outbursting of springs. When the higher-lying portion of such land is porous, rain falling upon it sinks down until it is arrested by clay or other impervious matter, which causes it again to issue at the surface and wet the lower-lying ground. Elkington showed that by cutting a deep drain through the clay, aided when necessary by wells or auger holes, the subjacent bed of sand or gravel in which a body of water is pent up by the clay, as in a vessel, might be tapped and the water conveyed harmlessly in the covered drain to the nearest ditch or stream. In the circumstances to which it is applicable, and in the hands of skilful drainers, Elkington’s plan, known as “sink-hole drainage,” by bringing into play the natural drainage furnished by porous strata, is often eminently successful.

Draining Implements.

During the subsequent thirty or forty years most of the draining that took place was on this system, and an immense capital was expended in such works with varying results. Things continued in this position until about 1823, when James Smith of Deanston, having discovered anew those principles of draining so long before indicated by Blith, proceeded to exemplify them in his own practice, and to expound them to the public in a way that speedily effected a complete revolution in the art of draining, and marked an era in agricultural progress. Instead of persisting in fruitless attempts to dry extensive areas by a few dexterous cuts, he insisted on the necessity of providing every field that needed draining at all with a complete system of parallel underground channels, running in the line of the greatest slope of the ground, and so near to each other that the whole rain falling at any time upon the surface should sink down and be carried off by the drains. A main receiving drain was to be carried along the lowest part of the ground, with sub-drains in every subordinate hollow that the ground presented. The distances between drains he showed must be regulated by the greater or less retentiveness of the ground operated upon, and gave 10 to 40 ft. as the limits of their distance apart. The depth which he prescribed for his parallel drains was 30 in., and these were to be filled with 12 in. of stones small enough to pass through a 3-in. ring—in short a new edition of Blith’s drain. Josiah Parkes, engineer 473 to the Royal Agricultural Society, advocated a greater distance apart for the drains, and, in order that the subterranean water might be reached, a depth of at least 4 ft.

The cultivated lands of Britain being disposed in ridges which usually lie in the line of greatest ascent, it became customary to form the drains in each furrow, or in each alternate, or third or fourth one, as the case might require, or views of economy dictate and hence the system soon came to be popularly called “furrow draining.” From the number and arrangement of the drains, the terms “frequent” and “parallel” were also applied to it. Smith himself more appropriately named it, from its effects, “thorough draining.” The sound principles thus promulgated by him were speedily adopted and extensively carried into practice. The great labour and cost incurred in procuring stones in adequate quantities, and the difficulty of carting them in wet seasons, soon led to the substitution of “tiles,” and soles of burnt earthenware. The limited supply and high price of these tiles for a time impeded the progress of the new system of draining; but the invention of tile-making machines removed this impediment, and gave a stimulus to this fundamental agricultural improvement. The substitution of cylindrical pipes for the original horse-shoe tiles has still further lowered the cost and increased the efficiency and permanency of drainage works.

The system introduced by Smith of Deanston has now been virtually adopted by all drainers. Variations in matters of detail (having respect chiefly to the depth and distance apart of the parallel drains) have indeed been introduced; but the distinctive features of his system are recognized and acted upon.

A great stimulus was given to the improvement of land by the passing in England of a series of acts of parliament, which removed certain obstacles that effectually hindered tenants with limited interests from investing capital in works of drainage and kindred amelioration. The Public Money Drainage Acts 1846-1856 authorized the advance of public money to landowners to enable them to make improvements in their lands, not only by draining, but by irrigation, the making of permanent roads, clearing, erecting buildings, planting for shelter, &c. The rapid absorption of the funds provided by these acts led to further legislative measures by which private capital was rendered available for the improvement of land. A series of special improvement acts were passed, authorizing companies to execute or advance money for executing improvements in land. Finally, the Land Improvement Act 1864, amended and extended by the act of 1899, gave facilities for borrowing money by charging the cost of draining, &c., as a rent-charge upon the inheritance of the land. The instalments must be repaid with interest in equal amounts extending over a fixed term of years by the tenant for life during his lifetime, the tenant being bound to maintain the improvements.

See C. G. Elliott, Engineering for Land Drainage (New York, 1903); F. H. King, Irrigation and Drainage (New York, 1899); G. S. Mitchell, Handbook of Land Drainage (London, 1898), with a good bibliography.


DRAKE, SIR FRANCIS (c. 1545-1595), English admiral, was born near Tavistock, Devonshire, about 1545 according to most early authorities, but possibly as early as 1539 (see Corbett, vol. i., Appendix A). His father, a yeoman and a zealous Protestant, was obliged to take refuge in Kent during the persecutions in the reign of Queen Mary. He obtained a naval chaplaincy from Queen Elizabeth, and is said to have been afterwards vicar of Upnor Church (evidently a misprint or slip of the pen for Upchurch) on the Medway. Young Drake was educated at the expense and under the care of Sir John Hawkins, who was his kinsman; and, after passing an apprenticeship on a coasting vessel, at the age of eighteen he had risen to be purser of a ship trading to Biscay. At twenty he made a voyage to Guinea; and at twenty-two he was made captain of the “Judith.” In that capacity he was in the harbour of San Juan de Ulloa, in the Gulf of Mexico, where he behaved most gallantly in the actions under Sir John Hawkins, and returned with him to England, having acquired great reputation, though with the loss of all the money which he had embarked in the expedition. In 1570 he obtained a regular privateering commission from Queen Elizabeth, the powers of which he immediately exercised in a cruise in the Spanish Main. Having next projected an attack against the Spaniards in the West Indies to indemnify himself for his former losses, he set sail in 1572, with two small ships named the “Pasha” and the “Swan.” He was afterwards joined by another vessel; and with this small squadron he took and plundered the Spanish town of Nombre de Dios. With his men he penetrated across the isthmus of Panama, and committed great havoc among the Spanish shipping. From the top of a tree which he climbed while on the isthmus he obtained his first view of the Pacific, and resolved “to sail an English ship in these seas.” In these expeditions he was much assisted by the Maroons, descendants of escaped negro slaves, who were then engaged in a desultory warfare with the Spaniards. Having embarked his men and filled his ships with plunder, he bore away for England, and arrived at Plymouth on the 9th of August 1573.

His success and honourable demeanour in this expedition gained him high reputation; and the use which he made of his riches served to raise him still higher in popular esteem. Having fitted out three frigates at his own expense, he sailed with them to Ireland, and rendered effective service as a volunteer, under Walter, earl of Essex, the father of the famous but unfortunate earl. After his patron’s death he returned to England, where he was introduced to Queen Elizabeth (whether by Sir Christopher Hatton is doubtful), and obtained a favourable reception. In this way he acquired the means of undertaking the expedition which has immortalized his name. The first proposal he made was to undertake a voyage into the South Seas through the Straits of Magellan, which no Englishman had hitherto ever attempted. This project having been well received at court, the queen furnished him with means; and his own fame quickly drew together a sufficient force. The fleet with which he sailed on this enterprise consisted of only five small vessels, and their united crews mustered only 166 men. Starting on the 13th of December 1577, his course lay by the west coast of Morocco and the Cape Verde Islands. He reached the coast of Brazil on the 6th of April, and entered the Rio de la Plata, where he parted company with two of his ships; but having met them again, and taken out their provisions, he turned them adrift. On the 19th of June he entered the port of St Julian’s, where he remained two months, partly to lay in provisions, and partly delayed by the trial and execution of Thomas Doughty, who had plotted against him. On the 21st of August he entered the Straits of Magellan. The passage of the straits took sixteen days, but then a storm carried the ships to the west; on the 7th of October, having made back for the mouth of the strait, Drake’s ship and the two vessels under his vice-admiral Captain Wynter were separated, and the latter, missing the rendezvous arranged, returned to England. Drake went on, and came to Mocha Island, off the coast of Chile, on the 25th of November. He thence continued his voyage along the coast of Chile and Peru, taking all opportunities of seizing Spanish ships, and attacking them on shore, till his men were satiated with plunder; and then coasted along the shores of America, as far as 48° N. lat., in an unsuccessful endeavour to discover a passage into the Atlantic. Having landed, however, he named the country New Albion, and took possession of it in the name of Queen Elizabeth. Having careened his ship, he sailed thence on the 26th of July 1579 for the Moluccas. On the 4th of November he got sight of those islands, and, arriving at Ternate, was extremely well received by the sultan. On the 10th of December he made the Celebes, where his ship unfortunately struck upon a rock, but was taken off without much damage. On the 11th of March he arrived at Java, whence he intended to have directed his course to Malacca; but he found himself obliged to alter his purpose, and to think of returning home. On the 26th of March 1580 he again set sail; and on the 15th of June he doubled the Cape of Good Hope, having then on board only fifty-seven men and three casks of water. He passed the line on the 12th of July, and on the 16th reached the coast of Guinea, where he watered. On the 11th of September he made the Island of Terceira, and on the 26th of September(?) he entered the harbour of Plymouth. This voyage round the world, the first accomplished by an Englishman, was thus performed in two years and about ten 474 months. The queen hesitated for some time whether to recognize his achievements or not, on the ground that such recognition might lead to complications with Spain, but she finally decided in his favour. Accordingly, soon after his arrival she paid a visit to Deptford, went on board his ship, and there, after partaking of a banquet, conferred upon him the honour of knighthood, at the same time declaring her entire approbation of all that he had done. She likewise gave directions for the preservation of his ship, the “Golden Hind,” that it might remain a monument of his own and his country’s glory. After the lapse of a century it decayed and had to be broken up. Of the sound timber a chair was made, which was presented by Charles II. to the university of Oxford. In 1581 Drake became mayor of Plymouth; and in 1585 he married a second time, his first wife having died in 1583. In 1585, hostilities having commenced with Spain, he again went to sea, sailing with a fleet to the West Indies, and taking the cities of Santiago (in the Cape Verde Islands), San Domingo, Cartagena and St Augustine. In 1587 he went to Lisbon with a fleet of thirty sail; and having received intelligence of a great fleet being assembled in the bay of Cadiz, and destined to form part of the Armada, he with great courage entered the port on the 19th of April, and there burnt upwards of 10,000 tons of shipping—a feat which he afterwards jocosely called “singeing the king of Spain’s beard.” In 1588, when the Spanish Armada was approaching England, Sir Francis Drake was appointed vice-admiral under Lord Howard, and made prize of a very large galleon, commanded by Don Pedro de Valdez, who was reputed the projector of the invasion, and who struck at once on learning his adversary’s name.

It deserves to be noticed that Drake’s name is mentioned in the singular diplomatic communication from the king of Spain which preceded the Armada:—

“Te veto ne pergas bello defendere Belgas;

Quae Dracus eripuit nunc restituantur oportet;

Quas pater evertit jubeo te condere cellas:

Religio Papae fac restituatur ad unguem.”

To these lines the queen made this extempore response:—

“Ad Graecas, bone rex, fiant mandata kalendas.”

In 1589 Drake commanded the fleet sent to restore Dom Antonio, king of Portugal, the land forces being under the orders of Sir John Norreys; but they had hardly put to sea when the commanders differed, and thus the attempt proved abortive. But as the war with Spain continued, a more formidable expedition was fitted out, under Sir John Hawkins and Sir Francis Drake, against their settlements in the West Indies, than had hitherto been undertaken during the whole course of it. Here, however, the commanders again disagreed about the plan; and the result in like manner disappointed public expectation. These disasters were keenly felt by Drake, and were the principal cause of his death, which took place on board his own ship, near the town of Nombre de Dios, in the West Indies, on the 28th of January 1595.

The older Lives by Samuel Clarke (1671) and John Barrow, junr. (1843), have been superseded by Julian Corbett’s two admirable volumes on Drake and the Tudor Navy (1898), the best source of information on the subject, which were preceded by the same author’s Sir Francis Drake in the “English Men of Action” series (1890). See also E. J. Payne’s edition of Voyages of the Elizabethan Seamen to America: Thirteen original narratives from the collection of Hakluyt (new ed., 1893).


DRAKE, NATHAN (1766-1836), English essayist and physician, son of Nathan Drake, an artist, was born at York in 1766. He was apprenticed to a doctor in York in 1779, and in 1786 proceeded to Edinburgh University, where he took his degree as M.D. in 1789. In 1790 he set up as a general practitioner at Sudbury, Suffolk, where he found an intimate friend in Dr Mason Good (d. 1827). In 1792 he removed to Hadleigh, Suffolk, where he died in 1836. His works include several volumes of literary essays, and some papers contributed to medical periodicals; but his most important production was Shakespeare and his Times, including the Biography of the Poet, Criticisms on his Genius and Writings; a new Chronology of his Plays; a Disquisition on the Object of his Sonnets; and a History of the Manners, Customs and Amusements, Superstitions, Poetry and Elegant Literature of his Age (2 vols., 1817). The title sufficiently indicates the scope of this ample work, which has the merit, says G. G. Gervinus (Shakespeare Commentaries, Eng. trans., 1877) “of having brought together for the first time into a whole the tedious and scattered material of the editions and of the many other valuable labours of Tyrwhitt, Heath, Ritson, &c.”


DRAKENBORCH, ARNOLD (1684-1748), Dutch classical scholar, was born at Utrecht on the 1st of January 1684. Having studied philology under Graevius and Burmann the elder, and law under Cornelius Van Eck, in 1716 he succeeded Burmann in his professorship (conjointly with C. A. Duker), which he continued to hold till his death on the 16th of January 1748. Although he obtained the degree of doctor of laws, and was intended for the legal profession, he determined to devote himself to philological studies. His edition of Livy (1738-1746, and subsequent editions) is the work on which his fame chiefly rests. The preface gives a particular account of all the literary men who have at different periods commented on the works of Livy. The edition itself is based on that of Gronovius; but Drakenborch made many important alterations on the authority of manuscripts which it is probable Gronovius had never seen. He also published Dissertatio de praefectis urbi (1704; reprinted at Frankfort in 1752 with a life of Drakenborch); Dissertatio de officio praefectorum praetorio (1707); and an edition of Silius Italicus (1717).


DRAKENSBERG (Quathlamba or Kahlamba, i.e. “heaped up and jagged,” of the natives), a mountain chain of S.E. Africa, running parallel to the coast from Basutoland to the Limpopo river—a distance of some 600 m. The Drakensberg are the eastern part of the rampart which forms the edge of the inner tableland of South Africa. The sides of the mountains facing the sea are in general precipitous; on their inner face they slope more or less gently to the plateau. The culminating points of the range, and the highest lands in South Africa, are found in a sharp bend from S.E. to N.W. in about 29° S. 29° E., where “the Berg” (as the range is called locally) forms the frontier between Natal and Basutoland. Within 60 m. of one another are three mountains, Giant’s Castle, Champagne Castle or Cathkin Peak, and Mont aux Sources, 10,000 to 11,000 or more ft. above the sea. From Mont aux Sources the normal N.E. direction of the range is resumed. Conspicuous among the heights along the Orange Free State, Transvaal and Natal frontiers are Tintwa, Malani, Inkwelo and Amajuba or Majuba (q.v.), all between 7000 and 8000 ft. The Draken’s Berg—the particular hill from which the range is named—is 5682 ft. high and lies between Malani and Inkwelo heights. It was so named by the voortrekkers about 1840. North of Majuba the range enters the Transvaal. Here the elevation is generally lower than in the south, but the Mauch Berg is about 8500 ft. high. At its northernmost point the range joins the Zoutpansberg. In their southern part the Drakensberg form the parting between the rivers draining west to the Atlantic and those flowing south and east to the Indian Ocean. At Mont aux Sources rise the chief headwaters of the Orange, Tugela and other rivers. In the north, however, several streams rising in the interior plateau, e.g. the Komati, the Crocodile and the Olifants, pierce the Drakensberg and reach the Indian Ocean. The range has numerous passes, many available for wheeled traffic. Van Reenen’s Pass, between Tintwa and Malani, is crossed by a railway which connects the Orange Free State and Natal: Laing’s Nek, the main pass leading from Natal to the Transvaal, which lies under the shadow of Majuba, is pierced by a railway tunnel. The railway from Delagoa Bay to Pretoria crosses the Drakensberg by a very steep gradient. Several subsidiary ranges branch off from the main chain of the Berg. This is especially the case in Natal, where one range is known as the Little Drakensberg. (See further Basutoland; Natal And Transvaal.)

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DRAMA (literally “action,” from Gr. δρᾶν, act or do), the term applied to those productions of Art which imitate or, to use a more modern term, “represent” action by introducing the personages taking part in them as real, and as employed in the action itself. There are numerous varieties of the drama, differing more or less widely from one another, both as to the objects imitated and as to the means used in the process. But they all agree in the method or manner which is essential to the drama and to dramatic art, namely, imitation in the way of action. The function of all Art being to give pleasure by representation (see Fine Arts), it is clear that what is distinctive of any one branch or form must be the manner in which this function is performed by it. In the epos, for instance, the method or manner is narrative, and even when Odysseus tells of his action, he is not acting.

1. Theory of the Drama, and Dramatic Art

The first step towards the drama is the assumption of character, whether real or fictitious. It is caused by the desire, inseparable from human nature, to give expression to feelings and ideas. These man expresses not only by sound and Origin of the drama. gesture, like other animals, and by speech significant by its delivery as well as by its purport, but also by imitation superadded to these. To imitate, says Aristotle, is instinctive in man from his infancy, and no pleasure is more universal than that which is given by imitation. Inasmuch as the aid of some sort of dress or decoration is usually at hand, while the accompaniment of dance or song, or other music, naturally suggests itself, especially on joyous or solemn occasions, we find that this preliminary step is taken among all peoples, however primitive or remote. But it does not follow, as is often assumed, that they possess a drama in germ. Boys playing at soldiers, or men walking in a pageant—a shoemaker’s holiday in ribbons and flowers, or a Shetland sword-dance—none of these is in itself a drama. This is not reached till the imitation or representation extends to action.

An action which is to present itself as such to human minds must enable them to recognize in it a procedure from cause to effect. This of course means, neither that the cause suggested must be the final cause, nor that the result Dramatic action. shown forth need pretend to be the ultimate result. We look upon an action as ended when the purpose with which it began is shown to have been gained or frustrated; and we trace the beginning of an action back to the human will that set it on foot—though this will may be in bondage to a higher or stronger will, or to fate, in any or all of its purposes. Without an action in the sense stated—without a plot, in a word—there can be no drama. But the very simplest action will satisfy the dramatic test; a mystery representing the story of Cain and Abel without a deviation from the simple biblical narrative, a farce exhibiting the stalest trick played by designing sobriety upon oblivious drunkenness, may each of them be a complete drama. But even to this point, the imitation of action by action in however crude a form, not all peoples have advanced.

But after this second step has been taken, it only remains for the drama to assume a form regulated by certain literary laws, in order that it may become a branch of dramatic literature. Such a literature, needless to say, only a Dramatic literature. limited number of nations has come to possess; and, while some are to be found that have, or have had, a drama without a dramatic literature, it is quite conceivable that a nation should continue in possession of the former after having ceased to cultivate the latter. It is self-evident that no drama which forms part of a dramatic literature can ignore the use of speech; and however closely music, dancing and decoration may associate themselves with particular forms or phases of the drama, their aid cannot be more than adventitious. As a matter of fact, the beginnings of dramatic composition are, in the history of such literatures as are well known to us, preceded by the earlier stages in the growth of the lyric and epic forms of poetry, or by one of these at all events; and it is in the continuation of both that the drama in its literary form takes its origin in those instances which lie open to our study.

While the aid of all other arts—even, strictly speaking, the aid of the literary art—is merely an accident, the co-operation of the art of acting is indispensable to that of the drama. The dramatic writer may have reasons for preferring to The dramatic and the histrionic arts. leave the imagination of his reader to supply the absence of this co-operation; but, though the term “literary drama” is freely used of works kept away from the stage, it is in truth either a misnomer or a self-condemnation. It is true that the actor only temporarily interprets, and sometimes misinterprets, the dramatist, while occasionally he reveals dramatic possibilities in a character or situation which remained hidden from their literary inventor. But this only shows that the courses of the dramatic and the histrionic arts do not run parallel; it does not contradict the fact that their conjunction is, on the one side as well as on the other, indispensable. No drama is more than potentially such till it is acted.

To essay, whether in a brief summary or in more or less elaborate detail, a statement of the main laws of the drama, has often been regarded as a superfluous, not to say, futile effort. But the laws of which it is proposed to give Laws and rules of the drama. some indication here are not so much those which any particular literature or period has chosen to set up and follow, as those abstracted by criticism, in pursuit of its own free comparative method, from the process that repeats itself in every drama adequately meeting the demands upon it. Aristotle, whom we still justly revere as the originator of the theory of the drama, and thus its great νομοθέτης, was, no doubt, in his practical knowledge of it, confined to its Greek examples, yet his object was not to produce another generation of great Attic tragedians, but rather to show how it was by following the necessary laws of their art that the great masters, true to themselves and to their artistic ends, had achieved what they had achieved. Still more distinctly was such the aim of the greatest modern critical writer on the drama, Lessing, whose chief design was to combat false dramatic theories and to overthrow laws demonstrated by him to be artificial inventions, unreal figments. He proved, what before him had only been suspected, that Shakespeare, though in hopeless conflict with certain rules dating from the siècle de Louis XIV, was not in conflict with those laws of the drama which are of its very essence, and that, accordingly, if Shakespeare and the rules in question could not be harmonized, it was only so much the worse for the rules. To illustrate from great works, and expound with their aid, the organic processes of the art to which they belong, is not only among the highest, it is also one of the most useful functions of literary and artistic criticism. Nor is there, in one sense at least, any finality about it. Neither the great authorities on dramatic theory nor the resolute and acute apologists of more or less transitory phases of the drama—Corneille, Dryden and many later successors—have exhausted the statement of the means which the drama has proved, or may prove, capable of employing. The multitude of technical terms and formulae which has gathered round the practice of the most living and the most Protean of arts has at no time seriously interfered with the operation of creative power. On the other hand, no dramaturgic theory has (though the attempt has been often enough made) ever succeeded in giving rise to a single dramatic work of enduring value, unless the creative force was there to animate the form.

It is therefore the operation of this creative force which we are chiefly interested in noting; and its task begins with the beginning of the dramatist’s labours. He must of course start with the choice of a subject; yet it is Choice of subject. obvious that the subject is merely the dead material out of which is formed that living something, the action of a play; and it is only in rare instances—far rarer than might at first sight appear—that the subject is as it were self-moulded as a dramatic action. The less experienced a playwright, the more readily will he, as the phrase is, rush at his subject, more especially if it seems to him to possess prima facie dramatic capabilities; and the consequence will be that which usually attends upon a precipitate start. On the other hand, while the quickness of a great dramatist’s apprehension is apt to suggest 476 to him an infinite number of subjects, and insight and experience may lead him half instinctively in the direction of suitable themes, it will often be long before in his mind the subject converts itself into the initial conception of the action of a play. To mould a subject—be it a Greek legend, or a portion of a Tudor chronicle, or one out of a hundred Italian tales, or a true story of modern life—into the action or fable of a play, is the primary task of the dramatist, and with this all-important process the creative part of his work really begins. Although his conception may expand or modify itself as he executes it, yet upon the conception the execution must largely depend. The range of subjects open to a dramatist may be as wide as the world itself, or it may be restricted by an endless variety of causes, conventions and considerations; and it is quite true that even the greatest dramatists have not always found time for contemplating each subject that occurs to them till the ray is caught which proclaims it a dramatic diamond. What they had time for, and what only the playwright who entirely misunderstands his art ignores the necessity of finding time for, is the transformation of the dead material of the subject into the living action of a drama.

What is it, then, that makes an action dramatic, and without which no action, whatever may be its nature—serious or ludicrous, stately or trivial, impetuous as a flame of fire, or light as a western breeze—can be so described? The answer Unity of action. to this question can only suggest itself from an attempt to ascertain the laws which determine the nature of all actions corresponding to this description. The first of the laws in question is in so far the most noteworthy among them that it has been the most amply discussed and the most pertinaciously misunderstood. This is the law which requires that a dramatic action should be one—that it should possess unity. What in the subject of a drama is merely an approximate or supposititious, must in its action be an actual unity; and it is indeed this requirement which constitutes the most arduous part of the task of transforming subject into action. There is of course no actual unity in any group of events in human life which we may choose to call by a single collective name—a war, a revolution, a conspiracy, an intrigue, an imbroglio. The events of real life, the facts of history, even the imitative incidents of narrative fiction, are like the waves of a ceaseless flood; that which binds a group or body of them into a single action is the bond of the dramatic idea; and this it is incumbent upon the dramatist to supply. Within the limits of a dramatic action all its parts should (as in real life or in history they so persistently refuse to do) flow into its current like tributaries to a single stream; or, to vary the figure, everything in a drama should form a link in a single chain of cause and effect. This law is incumbent upon every kind of drama—alike upon the tragedy which sets itself to solve one of the problems of a life, and upon the farce which sums up the follies of an afternoon.

Such is not, however, the case with certain more or less arbitrary rules which have at different times been set up for this or that kind of drama. The supposed necessity that an action should consist of one event is an erroneous interpretation of the law that it should be, as an action, one. For an event is but an element in an action, though it may be an element of decisive moment. The assassination of Caesar is not the action of a Caesar tragedy; the loss of his treasure is not the action of The Miser. Again, unity of action, while excluding those unconnected episodes which Aristotle so severely condemns, does not prohibit the introduction of one or even more subsidiary actions as contributing to the progress of the main action. The sole indispensable law is that these should always be treated as what they are—subsidiary only; and herein lies the difficulty, which Shakespeare so successfully overcame, of fusing a combination of subjects taken from various sources into the idea of a single action; herein also lies the danger in the use of that favourite device of the Spanish and other modern dramas—“by-plots” or “under-plots.” On the other hand, the modern French drama has largely employed another device—quite legitimate in itself—for increasing the interest of an action without destroying its unity. This may be called the dramatic use of backgrounds, the depiction of surroundings on which the action or its chief characters seem sympathetically to reflect themselves, backbiting “good villagers” or academicians who inspire one another—with tedium. But a really double or multiple action, logically carried out as such, is inconceivable in a single drama, though many a play is palpably only two plays knotted into one. It was therefore not all pedantry which protested against the multiplicity of action which had itself formed part of the revolt against the too narrow interpretation of unity adopted by the French classical drama. Thirdly, unity of action need not imply unity of hero—for hero (or heroine) is merely a conventional term signifying the principal personage of the action. It is only when the change in the degree of interest excited by different characters in a play results from a change in the conception of the action itself, that the consequent duality (or multiplicity) of heroes recalls a faulty uncertainty in the conception of the action they carry on. Such an objection, while it may hold in the case of Schiller’s Don Carlos, would therefore be erroneously urged against Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar. Lastly, as to the theory which made the so-called unities of time and place constitute, together with that of action, the Three Unities indispensable to the (tragic) drama, the following note must suffice. Aristotle’s supposed exaction of all the Three Unities, having been expanded by Chapelain and approved by Richelieu, was stereotyped by Corneille, though he had (as one might say) got on very well without them, and was finally set forth in Horatian verse by Boileau. Thus it came to be overlooked that there is nothing in Aristotle’s statement to show that in his judgment unity of time and place are, like unity of action, absolute dramatic laws. Their object is by representing an action as visibly continuous to render its unity more distinctly or easily perceptible. But the imagination is capable of constructing for itself the bridges required for preserving to an action, conceived of as such, its character of continuousness. In another sense these rules were convenient usages conducing to a concise and clear treatment of a limited kind of themes; for they were a Greek invention, and the repeated resort to the same group of myths made it expedient for a Greek poet to seek the subject of a single tragedy in a part only of one of the myths at his disposal. The observance of unity of place, moreover, was suggested to the Greeks by certain outward conditions of their stage—as assuredly as it was adopted by the French in accordance with the construction and usages of theirs, and as the neglect of it by the Elizabethans was in their case encouraged by the established form of the English scene. The palpable artificiality of these laws needs no demonstration, so long as the true meaning of the term “action” be kept in view. Of the action of Othello part takes place at Venice and part at Cyprus, and yet the whole is one in itself; while the limits of time over which an action—Hamlet’s progress to resolve, for instance—extends cannot be restricted by a revolution of the earth round the sun or of the moon round the earth.

In a drama which presents its action as one, this action must be complete in itself. This Aristotelian law, like the other, distinguishes the dramatic action from its subject. The former may be said to have a real artistic, while the Completeness of action. latter has only an imaginary real, completeness. The historian, for instance, is aware that the complete exposition of a body of events and transactions at which he aims can never be more than partially accomplished, since he may present only what he knows, and all human knowledge is imperfect. But Art is limited by no such uncertainty. The dramatist, in treating an action as one, comprehends the whole of it in the form of his work, since, to him who has conceived it, all its parts, from cause to effect, are equally clear. It is his fault if in the action of his drama anything is left unaccounted for—not motivé; though a dramatic motif might not always prove to be a sufficient explanation in real life. Accordingly, every drama should represent in organic sequence the several stages of which a complete action consists, and which are essential to it. This law of completeness, therefore, lies at the foundation of all systems of dramatic “construction.”

477

Every action, if conceived of as complete, has its causes, growth, height, consequences and close. There is no binding law to prescribe the relative length or proportion at which these several stages in the action should be Systems of construction based on this law of completeness. treated in a drama; or to regulate the treatment of such subsidiary actions as may be introduced in aid of the main plot, or of such more or less directly connected “episodes” as may at the same time advance and relieve its progress. But experience has necessarily from time to time established certain rules of practice, and from the adoption of particular systems of division for particular species of the drama—such as that into five acts for a regular tragedy or comedy, which Roman example has caused to be so largely followed—has naturally resulted a certain uniformity of relation between the conduct of an action and the outward sections of a play. Essentially, however, there is no difference between the laws regulating the construction of a Sophoclean or Shakespearian tragedy, a comedy of Molière or Congreve, and a well-built modern farce, because all exhibit an action complete in itself.

The “introduction” or “exposition” forms an integral part of the action, and is therefore to be distinguished from the “prologue” in the more ordinary sense of the term, which like the “epilogue” (and the Greek παράβασις) Prologues and epilogues outside the action. stands outside the action, and is a mere address to the public from author, presenter or actor occasioned by the play. Prologue and epilogue are mere external, though at times effective, adjuncts, and have, properly speaking, as little to do with the construction of a play as the bill which announces it or the musical prelude which disposes the mind for its reception. A special kind of preface or argument is the “dumb-show,” which in some old plays briefly rehearses in pantomime the action that is to follow. The introduction or Parts of the action. Introduction or exposition. exposition belongs to the action itself; it is, as the Hindu critics called it, the seed or circumstance from which the business arises. Clearness being its primary requisite, many expedients have been at various times adopted to secure this feature. Thus the Euripidean prologue, though spoken by one of the characters of the play, took a narrative form, more acceptable to the audience than to the critics, and placed itself half without, half within, the action. The same purpose is served by the separate “inductions” in many of the old English plays, and by the preludes or prologues, or whatever name they may assume, in numberless modern dramas of all kinds—from Faust down to the favourites of the Ambigu and the Adelphi. More facile is the orientation supplied in French tragedy by the opening scenes between hero and confidant, and in French comedy and its derivatives by those between observant valet and knowing lady’s-maid. But all such expedients may be rendered unnecessary by the art of the dramatist, who is able outwardly also to present the introduction of his action as an organic part of that action itself; who seems to take the spectators in medias res, while he is really building the foundations of his plot; who touches in the opening of his action the chord which is to vibrate throughout its course—“Down with the Capulets! down with the Montagues!”—“With the Moor, sayest thou?”

The exposition, which may be short or long, but which should always prepare and may even seem to necessitate the action, ends when the movement of the action itself begins. This Opening of movement. transition may occasionally be marked with the utmost distinctness (as in the actual meeting between the hero and the Ghost in Hamlet), while in other instances subsidiary action or episode may judiciously intervene (as in King Lear, where the subsidiary action of Gloster and his sons opportunely prevents too abrupt a sequence of cause and effect). Growth. From this point the second stage of the action—its “growth”—progresses to that third stage which is called its “height” or “climax.” All that has preceded the attainment of this constitutes that half of the drama—usually its much larger half—which Aristotle terms the δεσις, or tying of the knot. The varieties in the treatment of the growth or second stage of the action are infinite; it is here that the greatest freedom is manifestly permissible; that in the Indian drama the personages make long journeys across the stage; and that, with the help of their under-plots, the masters of the modern tragic and the comic drama—notably those unequalled weavers of intrigues, the Spaniards—are able most fully to exercise their inventive faculties. If the growth is too rapid, the climax will fail of its effect; if it is too slow, the interest will be exhausted before the greatest demand upon it has been made—a fault to which comedy is specially liable; if it is involved or inverted, a vague uncertainty will take the place of an eager or agreeable suspense, the action will seem to halt, or a fall will begin prematurely. In the contrivance of the “climax” itself lies one Height or climax. of the chief tests of the dramatist’s art; for while the transactions of real life often fail to reach any climax at all, that of a dramatic action should present itself as self-evident. In the middle of everything, says the Greek poet, lies the strength; and this strongest or highest point it is the task of the dramatist to make manifest. Much here depends upon the niceties of constructive instinct; much (as in all parts of the action) upon a thorough dramatic transformation of the subject. The historical drama at this point presents peculiar difficulties, of which the example of Henry VIII. may be cited as an illustration.

From the climax, or height, the action proceeds through its “fall” to its “close,” which in a drama with an unhappy ending we still call its “catastrophe,” while to terminations in general we apply the term dénouement. This Fall. latter name would, however, more properly be applied in the sense in which Aristotle employs its Greek equivalent λύσις—the untying of the knot—to the whole of the second part of the action, from the climax downwards. In the management of the climax, everything depends upon producing the effect; in the fall, everything depends upon not marring it. This may be ensured by a rapid advance to the close; but neither does every action admit of such treatment, nor is it in accordance with the character of those which are of a more subtle or complicated kind. With the latter, therefore, the “fall” is often a revolution or “return,” i.e. in Aristotle’s phrase a change into Return. the reverse of what is expected from the circumstances of the action (περιπέτεια)—as in Coriolanus, where the Roman story lends itself so admirably to dramatic demands. In any case, the art of the dramatist is in this part of his work called upon for the surest exercise of its tact and skill. The effect of the climax was to concentrate the interest; the fall must therefore, above all, avoid dissipating it. The use of episodes is not even now excluded; but, even where serving the purpose of relief, they must now be such as help to keep alive the interest, previously raised to its highest pitch. This may be effected by the raising of obstacles between the height of the action and its expected consequences; in tragedy by the suggestion of a seemingly possible recovery or escape from them (as in the wonderfully powerful construction of the latter part of Macbeth); in comedy, or wherever the interest of the action is less intense, by the gradual removal of incidental difficulties. In all kinds of the drama “discovery” will remain, as it was in the judgment of Aristotle, a most effective expedient; but it should be a discovery prepared by that method of treatment which in its consummate master, Sophocles, has been termed his “irony.” Nowhere should the close or catastrophe be other than a consequence of the action itself. Sudden Close or catastrophe. revulsions from the conditions of the action—such as are supplied with the aid of the deus ex machina, or the revising officer of the emperor of China, or the nabob returned from India, or a virulent malaria—condemn themselves as unsatisfactory makeshifts. However sudden, and even in manner of accomplishment surprising, may be the catastrophe, it should, like every other part of the action, be in organic connexion with the whole preceding action. The sudden suicides which terminate so many tragedies, and the unmerited paternal blessings which close an equal number of comedies, should be something more than a “way out of it,” or a signal for the fall of the curtain. A catastrophe may conveniently, and even (as in 478 Faust) with powerful effect, be left to the imagination; but to substitute for it a deliberate blank is to leave the action incomplete, and the drama a fragment ending with a—possibly interesting—confession of incompetence.

The action of a drama, besides being one and complete in itself, ought likewise to be probable. The probability or necessity (in the Aristotelian sense of the terms) required of a drama is not that of actual or historical experience—it is a Probability of action. conditional probability, or in other words an internal consistency between the course of the action and the conditions under which the dramatist has chosen to carry it on. As to the former, he is fettered by no restrictions save those which he imposes upon himself, whether or not in deference to the usages of certain accepted species of dramatic composition. Ghosts seldom appear in real life or in dramas of real life; but the introduction of supernatural agency is neither enjoined nor prohibited by any general dramatic law. The use of such expedients is as open to the dramatic as to any other poet; the judiciousness of his use of them depends upon the effect which, consistently with the general conduct of his action, they will exercise upon the spectator, whom other circumstances may or may not predispose to their acceptance. The Ghost in Hamlet belongs to the action of the play; the Ghost in the Persae is not intrinsically less probable, but seems a less immediate product of the surrounding atmosphere. Dramatic probability has, however, a far deeper meaning than this. The Eumenides is probable, with all its mysterious commingling of cults, and so is Macbeth, with all its barbarous witchcraft. The proceedings of the feathered builders of Cloudcuckootown in the Birds of Aristophanes are as true to dramatic probability as are the pranks of Oberon’s fairies in Midsummer Night’s Dream. In other words, it is in the harmony between the action and the characters, and in the consistency of the characters with themselves, in the appropriateness of both to the atmosphere in which they have their being, that this dramatic probability lies. The dramatist has to represent characters affected by the progress of an action in a particular way, and contributing to it in a particular way, because, if consistent with themselves, they must be so affected, and must so act.

Upon the invention and conduct of his characters the dramatist must therefore expend a great proportion—even a preponderance—of his labour. His treatment of them will, in at least as high Characterization. a degree as his choice of subject, conception of action, and method of construction, determine the effect which his work produces. And while there are aspects of the dramatic art under which its earlier phases already exhibit an unsurpassed degree of perfection, there is none under which its advance is more notable than this. Many causes have Advance of the drama in this respect. contributed to this result; the chief is to be sought in the multiplication of the opportunities for mankind’s study of man. The theories of the Indian critics on the subject of dramatic character are little more than an elaborate scaffolding. Aristotle’s remarks on the subject are scanty; nor indeed is the strength of the dramatic literature from whose examples he abstracted his maxims to be sought in the fulness or variety of its characterization. This relative deficiency was beyond doubt largely caused by the outward conditions of the Greek theatre—the remoteness of actor from spectator, and the consequent necessity for the use of masks, and for the raising, and consequent conventionalizing, of the tones of the voice. Later Greek and Roman comedy, unable or unwilling to resist the force of habit, limited their range of characters to an accepted gallery of types. Nor is it easy to ignore the fact that the influence of these classical examples, combined with that of national tendencies of mind and temperament, have all along inclined the dramatists of the Romance nations to attach less importance to characterization of a closer and more varied kind than to interest of action and effectiveness of construction. The Italian and the Spanish drama more especially, and the French during a great part of its history, have in general shown a disposition to present their characters, as it were, ready made—whether in the case of tragic heroes and heroines, or in that of comic types, often moulded, as in the commedia dell’ arte “and beyond,” according to a long-lived system of local or national selection. These types, expanded, heightened and modified, are recognizable in some of the triumphs of comic characterization achieved by the Germanic drama, and by its master, Shakespeare, above all; but this fact must not obscure one of more importance than itself. In the matter of comic as well as of serious characterization—in the individualizing of characters and in evolving them as it were out of the progress of the action—the modern drama has not only advanced, but in a sense revolutionized, the dramatic art, as inherited from its ancient masters.

Yet, however the method and scope of characterization may vary under the influence of different historical epochs and different tendencies or tastes of races or nations, the laws of this branch of the dramatic art remain based on Requisites of character. the same essential requirements. What interests us in a man or woman in real life, or in the impressions we form of historical personages, is that which seems to us to give them individuality. A dramatic character must therefore, whatever its part in the action, be sufficiently marked by features of its own to interest the imagination; with these features its subsequent conduct must be consistent, and to them its participation in the action must correspond. In order to achieve such a result, the dramatist must have, in the first instance, distinctly conceived the character, however it may have been suggested to him. His task is, not to paint a copy of some contemporary or “historical” personage, but to conceive a particular kind of man, acting under the operation of particular circumstances. This conception, growing and modifying itself with the progress of the action, also invented by the dramatist, will determine the totality of the character which he creates. The likeness which the result bears to an actual or historical personage may very probably, from secondary points of view, affect the immediate stage success of the creation; upon its dramatic result this likeness can have no influence whatever. In a wider sense than that in which Shakespeare denied the charge that Falstaff was Oldcastle, it should be possible to say of every dramatic character which it is sought to identify with an actual personage, “This is not the man.” The mirror of the drama is not a photographic apparatus; and not even the most conscientious combination of science and art can bring back even a “phase” of the real Napoleon.

Distinctiveness, as the primary requisite in dramatic characterization, is to be demanded in the case of all personages introduced into a dramatic action, but not in all cases in an equal degree. Schiller, in adding to the Distinctiveness.dramatis personae of his Fiesco superscriptions of their chief characteristics, labels Sacco as “an ordinary person,” and this, no doubt, suffices for Sacco. But with the great masters of characterization a few touches, of which the true actor’s art knows how to avail itself, distinguish even their lesser characters from one another; and every man is in his humour down to the “third citizen.” Elaboration is necessarily reserved for characters who are the more important contributors to the action, and the fulness of elaboration for its heroes. Many expedients may lend their aid to the higher degrees of distinctiveness. Much is gained by a significant introduction of hero or heroine—thus Antigone is dragged in by the watchman, Gloucester enters alone upon the scene, Volpone is discovered in adoration of his golden saint. Nothing marks character more clearly than the use of contrast—as of Othello with Iago, of Ottavio with Max Piccolomini, of Joseph with Charles Surface. Nor is direct antithesis the only effective kind of contrast; Cassius is a foil to Brutus, and Leonora to her namesake the Princess. But, besides impressing the imagination as a conception distinct in itself, each character Self-consistency. must maintain a consistency between its conduct in the action and the features it has established as its own. This consistency does not imply uniformity; for, as Aristotle observes, there are characters which, to be represented with uniformity, must be presented as uniformly un-uniform. Of such consistently complex characters the great critic cites no instances, nor indeed are they of frequent occurrence in Greek tragedy; in the modern drama Hamlet is their unrivalled 479 exemplar; and Weislingen in Goethe’s Götz, and Alceste in the Misanthrope, may be mentioned as other illustrations in dramas differing widely from one another. The list might be enlarged almost indefinitely from the gallery of female characters, in view of the greater pliability and more habitual dependence of the nature of women. It should be added that those dramatic literatures which freely admit of a mixture of the serious with the comic element thereby enormously increase the opportunities of varied characterization. The difficulty of the task at the same time enhances the effect resulting from its satisfactory accomplishment; and, if the conception of a character is found to meet a variety of tests resembling that which life has at hand for every man, its naturalness, as we term it, becomes more obvious to the imagination. “Naturalness” is only another word for what Aristotle terms “propriety”; the artificial rules by which usage has at times sought to define particular species of character are in their origin only a convenience of the theatre, though they have largely helped to conventionalize dramatic characterization. Lastly, a character should be directly effective with regard Effectiveness. to the dramatic action in which it takes part—that is to say, the influence it exerts upon the progress of the action should correspond to its distinctive features; the conduct of the play should seem to spring from the nature of its characters. In other words, no characterization can be effective which is not what may be called economical, i.e. which does not strictly limit itself to suiting the purposes of the action. Even the minor characters should not idly intervene; while the chief characters should predominate over, or determine, the course of the action, its entire conception should harmonize with their distinctive features. It is only a Prometheus whom the gods bind fast to a rock, only a Juliet who will venture into a living death for her Romeo. Thus, in a sense, chance is excluded from dramatic action, or rather, like every other element in it, bends to the dramatic idea.

In view of this predominance of character over action, we may appropriately use such expressions as a tragedy of love or jealousy or ambition, or a comedy of character. For such collocations merely indicate that plays so described have proved (or were intended to prove) specially impressive by the conception or execution of their chief character or characters.

The term “manners” (as employed in a narrower sense than the Aristotelian ἤθη) applies to that which colours both action and characters, but does not determine the essence of either. As exhibiting human agents under certain conditions Manners. of time and place, and of the various relations of life, the action of a drama, together with the characters engaged in it, and the incidents and circumstances belonging to it, must more or less adapt itself to the external conditions assumed. From the assumption of some such conditions not even those dramatic species which indulge in the most sovereign licence, such as Old Attic comedy, or burlesque in general, can wholly emancipate themselves; and even supernatural or fantastic characters and actions must suit themselves to some sort of antecedents. But it depends altogether on the measure in which the nature of an action and the development of its characters are effected by considerations of time and place, or of temporary social systems and the transitory distinctions incidental to them, whether the imitation of a particular kind of manners becomes a significant Their relative significance. element in a particular play. The Hindu caste-system is an antecedent of every Hindu drama, and the peculiar organization of Chinese society of nearly every Chinese play with which we are acquainted. Greek tragedy itself, though treating subjects derived from no historic age, had established a standard of manners from which in its decline it did not depart with impunity. Again, the imitation of manners of a particular age or country may or may not be of moment in a play. In some dramas, and in some species of drama, time and place are so purely imaginary and so much a matter of indifference that the adoption of a purely conventional standard of manners, or at least the exclusion of any definitely fixed standard, is here desirable. The ducal reign of Theseus at Athens (if its period be ascertainable) does not date A Midsummer Night’s Dream; nor do the coasts of Bohemia in The Winter’s Tale localize the manners of the customers of Autolycus. Where, on the other hand, as more especially in the historic drama, or in that kind of comedy which directs its shafts against the ridiculous vices of a particular age or country, significance attaches to the degree in which the manners represented resemble what is more or less known, the dramatist will do well to be careful in his colouring. How admirably is the French court specialized in Henry V.; how completely are we transplanted among the burghers of Brussels in the opening scenes of Egmont; what a portraiture of a clique we have in the Précieuses ridicules of Molière; what a reproduction of a class in the pot-house politicians of Holberg! And how minutely have modern dramatists found it necessary to study the more fascinating aspects of la vie parisienne, in order to convey to the curious at home and abroad a conviction of the verisimilitude of their pictures! Yet, even in such instances, the dramatist will only use what suits his dramatic purpose; he will select, not transfer in mass, historic features, and discriminate in his use of modern instances. The details of historic fidelity, and the lesser shades distinguishing the varieties of social usage, will be introduced by him at his choice, or left to be supplied by the actor. Where the reproduction of manners becomes the primary purpose of a play, its effect can only be of an inferior kind; and a drama purely of manners is a contradiction in terms.

No complete system of dramatic species can be abstracted from any one dramatic literature. They are often the result of particular antecedents, and their growth is often affected by peculiar conditions. Different nations or Species of the drama. ages use the same names and may preserve some of the same rules for species which in other respects their usage may have materially modified from that of their neighbours or predecessors. The very question of the use of measured or pedestrian speech as fit for different kinds of drama, and therefore distinctive of them, cannot be profitably discussed except in reference to particular literatures. In the Chinese drama the most solemn themes are treated in the same form—an admixture of verse and prose—which not so very long since was characteristic of that airiest of Western dramatic species, the French vaudeville. Who would undertake to define, except in the applications which have been given to the words in successive generations, such terms as “tragi-comedy,” or indeed as “drama” (drame) itself? Yet this uncertainty does not imply that all is confusion in the terminology as to the species of the drama. In so far as they are distinguishable according to the effects which their actions, or those which the preponderating parts of their actions, produce, these species may primarily be ranged in accordance with the broad difference established by Aristotle between tragedy and comedy. “Tragic” and “comic” effects differ in regard to the emotions of the mind which they excite; and a drama is tragic or comic according as such effects Tragic and comic. are produced by it. The strong or serious emotions are alone capable of exercising upon us that influence which, employing a bold but marvellously happy figure, Aristotle termed purification, and which a Greek comedian, after a more matter-of-fact fashion, thus expressed:

“For whensoe’er a man observes his fellow

Bear wrongs more grievous than himself has known,

More easily he bears his own misfortunes.”

That is to say, the petty troubles of self which disturb without elevating the mind are driven out by the sympathetic participation in greater griefs, which raises while it excites the mind employed upon contemplating them. It is to these emotions—which are and can be no others than pity and terror—that actions which we call tragic appeal. Naïf as we may think Aristotle in desiderating for such actions a complicated rather than a simple plot, he obviously means that in form as well as in design they should reveal their relative importance. Those actions which we term comic address themselves to the sense of the ridiculous, and their themes are those vices and moral infirmities the representation of which is capable of touching the springs of laughter. Where, accordingly, a drama confines itself to effects of the 480 former class, it may be called a pure “tragedy”; when to those of the latter, a pure “comedy.” In dramas where the effects are mixed the nature of the main action and of the main characters (as determined by their distinctive features) alone enables us to classify such plays as serious or humorous dramas—or as “tragic” or “comic,” if we choose to preserve the terms. But the classification admits of a variety of transitions, from “pure” tragedy to “mixed,” from “mixed tragedy” to “mixed comedy,” and thence to “pure comedy,” with the more freely licensed “farce” and “burlesque,” the time-honoured inversion of the relations of dramatic method and purpose. This system of distinction has no concern with the mere question of the termination of the play, according to which Philostratus and other authorities have sought to distinguish tragic from comic dramas. The serious drama which ends happily (the German Schauspiel) is not a species co-ordinate with tragedy and comedy, but at the most a subordinate variety of the former. Other distinctions may be almost infinitely multiplied, according to the point of view adopted for the classification.

The historical sketch of the drama attempted in the following pages will best serve to indicate the successive growth of national dramatic species, many of which, by asserting their influence in other countries and ages than those which gave birth to them, have acquired a more than national vitality.

The art of acting, whose history forms an organic though a distinct part of that of the drama, necessarily possesses a theory and a technical system of its own. But into these it is impossible here to enter. One claim, however, should The art of acting. be vindicated for the art of acting, viz. that, though it is a dependent art, and most signally so in its highest forms, yet its true exercise implies (however much the term may have been abused) a creative process. The conception of a character is determined by antecedents not of the actor’s own making; and the term originality can be applied to it only in a relative sense. Study and reflection enable him, with the aid of experience and of the intuition which genius bestows, but which experience may in a high degree supply, to interpret, to combine, and to supplement given materials. But in the transformation of the conception into the represented character the actor’s functions are really creative; for here he becomes the character by means which belong to his art alone. The distinctiveness which he gives to the character by making the principal features recognized by him in it its groundwork—the consistency which he maintains in it between groundwork and details—the appropriateness which he preserves in it to the course of the action and the part borne in it by the character—all these are of his own making, though Its means. suggested by the conception derived by him from his materials. As to the means at his disposal, they are essentially of two kinds only; but not all forms of the drama have admitted of the use of both, or of both in the same completeness. All acting includes the use of gesture, or, as it has been Gesture. more comprehensively termed, of bodily eloquence. From various points of view its laws regulate the actor’s bearing, walk and movements of face and limbs. They teach what is aesthetically permitted and what is aesthetically pleasing. They deduce from observation what is appropriate to the expression of particular affections of the mind and of their combinations, of emotions and passions, of physical and mental conditions—joy and grief, health and sickness, waking, sleeping and dreaming, madness, collapse and death—of particular ages of life and temperaments, as well as of the distinctive characteristics of Speech. race, nationality or class. While under certain conditions—as in the masked drama—the use of bodily movement as one of the means of expression has at times been partially restricted, there have been, or are, forms of the drama which have altogether excluded the use of speech (such as pantomime), or have restricted the manner of its employment (such as opera). In the spoken drama the laws of rhetoric regulate the actor’s use of speech, but under conditions of a special nature. Like the orator, he has to follow the laws of pronunciation, modulation, accent and rhythm (the last in certain kinds of prose as well as in such forms of verse as he may be called upon to reproduce). But he has also to give his attention to the special laws of dramatic delivery, which vary in soliloquy and dialogue, and in such narrative or lyrical passages as may occur in his part.

The totality of the effect produced by the actor will in some degree depend upon other aids, among which those of a purely external kind are unlikely to be lost sight of. But the significance of costume (q.v.) in the actor, like that of Costume. decoration and scenery (see Theatre) in an action, is a wholly relative one, and is to a large measure determined by the claims which custom enables the theatre to make, or forbids its making, upon the imagination of the spectators. The actor’s real achievement lies in the transformation which the artist himself effects; nor is there any art more sovereign in the use it can make of its means, or so happy in the directness of the results it can accomplish by them.

2. Indian Drama

The origin of the Indian drama may unhesitatingly be described as purely native. The Mahommedans, when they overran India, brought no drama with them; the Persians, the Arabs and the Egyptians were without a national theatre. It would be absurd to suppose the Indian drama to have owed anything to the Chinese or its offshoots. On the other hand, there is no real evidence for assuming any influence of Greek examples upon the Indian drama at any stage of its progress. Finally, it had passed into its decline before the dramatic literature of modern Europe had sprung into being.

The Hindu writers ascribe the invention of dramatic entertainments to an inspired sage Bharata, or to the communications made to him by the god Brahma himself concerning an art gathered from the Vedas. As the word Bharata Origin. signifies an actor, we have clearly here a mere personification of the invention of the drama. Three kinds of entertainments, of which the nātya (defined as a dance combined with gesticulation and speech) comes nearest to the drama, were said to have been exhibited before the gods by the spirits and nymphs of Indra’s heaven, and to these the god Śiva added two new styles of dancing.

The origin of the Indian drama was thus unmistakably religious. Dramatic elements first showed themselves in certain of the hymns of the Rig Veda, which took the form of dialogues between divine personages, and in one of which is to be found the germ of Kālidāsa’s famous Vikrama and Urvāsī. These hymns were combined with the dances in the festivals of the gods, which soon assumed a more or less conventional form. Thus, from the union of dance and song, to which were afterwards added narrative recitation, and first sung, then spoken, dialogue, was gradually evolved the acted drama. Such scenes and stories from the mythology of Vishnu are still occasionally enacted by pantomime or spoken dialogue in India (jātras of the Bengalis; rāsas of the Western Provinces); and the most ancient Indian play was said to have treated an episode from the history of that deity—the choice of him as a consort by Laxmi—a favourite kind of subject in the Indian drama. The tradition connecting its earliest themes with the native mythology of Vishnu agrees with that ascribing the origin of a particular kind of dramatic performance—the sangīta—to Krishna and the shepherdesses. The author’s later poem, the Gītagovinda, has been conjectured to be suggestive of the earliest species of Hindu dramas. But, while the epic poetry of the Hindus gradually approached the dramatic in the way of dialogue, their drama developed itself independently out of the union of the lyric and the epic forms. Their dramatic poetry arose later than their epos, whose great works, the Mahābhārata and the Ramayana, had themselves been long preceded by the hymnody of the Vedas—just as the Greek drama followed upon the Homeric poems and these had been preceded by the early hymns.

There seems, indeed, no reason for dating the beginnings of the regular Indian drama farther back than the 5th century a.d., though it is probable that the earliest extant Sanskrit play, the delightful, and in some respects incomparable, Mrichchhakatīkā 481 (The Toy Cart), was considerably earlier in date than the works of Kālidāsa. Indeed, of his predecessors in dramatic composition very little is known, and even the contemporaries who competed with him as dramatists are mere names. Thus, by the time the Indian drama produced almost the earliest specimens with which we are acquainted, it had already reached its zenith; and it was therefore looked upon as having sprung into being as a perfect art. We know it only in its glory, in its decline, and in its decay.

The history of Indian dramatic literature may be roughly divided into the following periods.

I. To the 11th Century a.d.—This period virtually belongs to the pre-Mahommedan age of Indian history; but already to that second division of it in which Buddhism had become a powerful factor in the social as well as in the moral First period (classical). and intellectual life of the land. It is the classical period of the Hindu drama, and includes the works of its two indisputably greatest masters. The earliest extant Sanskrit play is the pathetic Mrichchhakatīkā (The Toy Cart), which has been dated back as far as the close of the 2nd century a.d. It is attributed (as is not uncommon with Indian plays) to a royal author, named Sūdraka; but it was more probably written by his court poet, whose name has been concluded to have been Dandin. It may be described as a comedy of middle-class life, treating of the courtship and marriage of a ruined Brahman and a wealthy and large-hearted courtesan.

Kālidāsa, the brightest of the “nine gems” of genius in whom the Indian drama gloried, lived at the court of Ujjain, though whether in the earlier half of the 6th century a.d., or in the 3rd century, or at a yet earlier date, remains an unsettled question. He is the author of Sākuntalā—the work which, in the translation by Sir William Jones (1789), first revealed to the Western world of letters the existence of an Indian drama, since reproduced in innumerable versions in many tongues. This heroic comedy, in seven acts, takes its plot from the first book of the Mahābhārata. It is a dramatic love-idyll of surpassing beauty, and one of the masterpieces of the poetic literature of the world. Another drama by Kālidāsa, Vikrama and Urvāsī (The Hero and the Nymph), though unequal as a whole to Sākuntalā, contains one act of incomparable loveliness; and its enduring effect upon Indian dramatic literature is shown by the imitations of it in later plays. (It was translated into English in 1827 by H. H. Wilson.) To Kālidāsa has likewise been attributed a third play, Mālavika and Agnimitra; but it is possible that this conventional comedy, though held to be of ancient date, was composed by a different poet of the same name.

To Harsadeva, king of northern India, are ascribed three extant plays, which were more probably composed by some poet in his pay. One of these, Nagananda (Joy of the Serpents), which begins as an erotic play, but passes into a most impressive exemplification of the supreme virtue of self-sacrifice, is notable as the only Buddhist drama which has been preserved, though others are known to have existed and to have been represented.

The palm of pre-eminence is disputed with Kālidāsa by the great dramatic poet Babhavūti (called Crikańťha, or he in whose throat is fortune), who flourished in the earlier part of the 8th century. While he is considered more artificial in language than his rival, and in general more bound by rules, he can hardly be deemed his inferior in dramatic genius. Of his three extant plays, Mahāvāra-Charitra and Uttara-Rāma-Charitra are heroic dramas concerned with the adventures of Rāma (the seventh incarnation of Vishnu); the third, the powerful melodrama, in ten acts, of Mālatī and Mādhava, has love for its theme, and has been called (perhaps with more aptitude than usually belongs to such comparisons) the Romeo and Juliet of the Hindus. It is considered by their critical authorities the best example of the prakarańa, or drama of domestic life. Babhavūti’s plays, as is indicated by the fact that no jester appears in them, are devoid of the element of humour.

The plays of Rājasekhara, who lived about the end of the 9th century, deal, like those of Harsadeva, with harem and court life. One of them, Karpura Manjuri (Camphor Cluster), is stated to be the only example of the saltaka or minor heroic comedy, written entirely in Prakrit.

In this period may probably also be included Viśākhadatta’s interesting drama of political intrigue, Mudrā-Rakshasa (The Signet of the Minister), in which Chandragupta (Sandracottus) appears as the founder of a dynasty. In subject, therefore, this production, which is one of the few known Indian historical dramas, goes back to the period following on the invasion of India by Alexander the Great; but the date of composition is probably at least as late as a.d. 1000. The plot of the play turns on the gaining-over of the prime minister of the ancien régime.

Among the remaining chief works of this period is the Veni-Samhara (Binding of the Braid) by Nārāyana Bhatta. Though described as a play in which both pathos and horror are exaggerated—its subject is an outrage resembling that which Dunstan is said to have inflicted on Elgiva—it is stated to have been always a favourite, as written in exact accordance with dramatic rules. Perhaps the Candakanśika by Ksemīśvara should also be included, which deals with the working of a curse pronounced by an aged priest upon a king who had innocently offended him.

II. The Period of Decline.—This may be reckoned from about the 11th to about the 14th century of the Christian era, the beginning roughly coinciding with that of a continuous series of Mahommedan invasions of India. Hanūman-Naťaka, Second period (decline). or “the great Nataka” (for this irregular play, the work of several hands, surpasses all other Indian dramas in length, extending over no fewer than fourteen acts), dates from the 10th or 11th century. Its story is taken from the Rāma-cycle, and a prominent character in it is the mythical monkey-chief King Hanūman, to whom, indeed, tradition ascribed the original authorship of the play. Kŕishńamicra’s “theosophic mystery,” as it has been called,—though it rather resembles some of the moralities,—Prabodha-Chandrodaya (The Rise of the Moon of Insight, i.e. the victory of true doctrine over error), is ascribed by one authority to the middle of the 11th century, by another to about the end of the 12th. The famous Ratnavali (The Necklace), a court-comedy of love and intrigue, with a half-Terentian plot, seems also to date from the earlier half of the period.

The remaining plays of which it has been possible to conjecture the dates range in the time of their composition from the end of the 11th to the 14th century. Of this period, as compared with the first, the general characteristics seem to be an undue preponderance of narrative and description, and an affected and over-elaborated style. As a striking instance of this class is mentioned a play on the adventures of Rāma, the Anargha-Rāghava, which in spite, or by reason, of the commonplace character of its sentiments, the extravagance of its diction, and the obscurity of its mythology, is stated to enjoy a higher reputation with the pundits of the present age than the masterpieces of Kālidāsa and Babhavūti. To the close of this period, the 14th century, has likewise (but without any pretension to certainty) been ascribed the only Tamil drama of which we possess an English version. Arichandra (The Martyr of Truth) exemplifies—with a strange likeness in the contrivance of its plot to the Book of Job and Faust—by the trials of a heroically enduring king the force of the maxim “Better die than lie.”

III. Period of Decay.—Isolated plays remain from centuries later than the 14th; but these, which chiefly turn on the legends of Kŕishńa (the last incarnation of Vishnu), may be regarded as a mere aftergrowth, and exhibit the Indian Third period (decay). drama in its decay. Indeed, the latest of them, Chitra-Yajna, which was composed about the beginning of the 19th century, and still serves as a model for Bengali dramatic performances, is imperfect in its dialogue, which (after the fashion of Italian improvised comedy) it is left to the actors to supplement. Besides these there are farces or farcical entertainments, more or less indelicate, of uncertain dates.

The number of plays which have descended to us from so vast an expanse of time is still comparatively small. But though, in 1827, Wilson doubted whether all the plays to be found, and 482 those mentioned by Hindu writers on the drama, amounted to many more than sixty, M. Schuyler’s bibliography (1906) enumerates over five hundred Sanskrit plays. To these have to be added the plays in Tamil, stated to be about a hundred in number, and to have been composed by poets who enjoyed the patronage of the Pandian kings of Madura, and some in other vernaculars.

There certainly is among the Hindus no dearth of dramatic theory. The sage Bharata, the reputed inventor of dramatic entertainments, was likewise revered as the father of dramatic criticism—a combination of functions to Critical literature. which the latter days of the English theatre might perhaps furnish an occasional parallel. The commentators (possibly under the influence of inspiration rather than as a strict matter of memory) constantly cite his sūtras, or aphorisms. (From sūtra, thread, was named the sūtra-dhāra, thread-holder, carpenter, a term applied to the architect and general manager of sacrificial solemnities, then to the director of theatrical performances.) By the 11th century, when the drama was already approaching its decline, dramatic criticism had reached an advanced point; and the Dasa-Rupaka (of which the text belongs to that age) distinctly defines the ten several kinds of dramatic composition. Other critical works followed at later dates, exhibiting a rage for subdivision unsurpassed by the efforts of Western theorists, ancient or modern; the misfortune is that there should not be examples remaining (if they ever existed) to illustrate all the branches of so elaborate a dramatic system.

“What,” inquires the manager of an actor in the induction to one of the most famous of Indian plays, “are those qualities which the virtuous, the wise, the venerable, the learned and the Brahmans require in a drama?” “Profound Exclusiveness of the Indian drama. exposition of the various passions,” is the reply, “pleasing interchange of mutual affection, loftiness of character, delicate expression of desire, a surprising story and elegant language.” “Then,” says the manager (for the Indian dramatists, though not, like Ben Jonson, wont to “rail” the public “into approbation,” are unaffected by mauvaise honte), “I recollect one.” And he proceeds to state that “Babhavūti has given us a drama composed by him, replete with all qualities, to which indeed this sentence is applicable: ‘How little do they know who speak of us with censure! This entertainment is not for them. Possibly some one exists, or will exist, of similar tastes with myself; for time is boundless, and the world is wide!’” This disregard of popularity, springing from a consciousness of lofty aims, accounts for much that is characteristic of the higher class of Indian plays. It explains both their relative paucity and their extraordinary length, renders intelligible the chief peculiarity in their diction, and furnishes the key to their most striking ethical as well as literary qualities. Connected in their origin with religious worship, they were only performed on solemn occasions, chiefly of a public nature, and more especially at seasons sacred to some divinity. Thus, though they might in some instances be reproduced, they were always written with a view to one particular solemn representation. Again, the greater part of every one of the plays of Northern India is written in Sanskrit, which ceased to be a popular language by 300 b.c., but continued the classical and learned, and at the same time the sacred and court form of speech of the Brahmans. Sanskrit is spoken by the heroes and principal personages of the plays, while the female and inferior characters use varieties, more or less refined, of the Prakrit languages (as a rule not more than three, that which is employed in the songs of the women being the poetic dialect of the most common Prakrit language, the Saurasēnī). Hence, part at least of each play cannot have been understood by the large majority of the audience, except in so far as their general acquaintance with the legends or stories treated enabled them to follow the course of the action. Every audience thus contained an inner audience, which could alone feel the full effect of the drama. It is, then, easy to see why the Hindu critics should make demands upon the art, into which only highly-trained and refined intellects were capable of entering, or called upon to enter. The general public could not be expected to appreciate the sentiments expressed in a drama, and thus (according to the process prescribed by Hindu theory) to receive instruction by means of amusement. These sentiments are termed rāsas (tastes or flavours), and said to spring from the bhāvas (conditions of mind and body). A variety of subdivisions is added; but the sańta rāsa is logically enough excluded from dramatic composition, inasmuch as it implies absolute quiescence.

The Hindu critics know of no distinction directly corresponding to that between tragedy and comedy, still less of any determined by the nature of the close of a play. For, in accordance with the child-like element of their character, the Species of dramas. Hindus dislike an unhappy ending to any story, and a positive rule accordingly prohibits a fatal conclusion in their dramas. The general term for all dramatic compositions is rūpaka (from rūpa, form), those of an inferior class being distinguished as uparūpakas. Of the various subdivisions of the rūpaka, in a more limited sense, the nātāka, or play proper, represents the most perfect kind. Its subject should always be celebrated and important—it is virtually either heroism or love, and most frequently the latter—and the hero should be a demigod or divinity (such as Rāma in Babhavūti’s heroic plays) or a king (such as the hero of Sākuntalā). But although the earlier dramatists took their plots from the sacred writings or Purānās, they held themselves at liberty to vary the incidents—a licence from which the later poets abstained. Thus, in accordance, perhaps, with the respective developments in the religious life of the two peoples, the Hindu drama in this respect reversed the progressive practice of the Greek. The prakarańas agree in all essentials with the nātākas except that they are less elevated; their stories are mere fictions, taken from actual life in a respectable class of society.1 Among the species of the uparūpaka may be mentioned the troťaka, in which the personages are partly human, partly divine, and of which a famous example remains.2 Of the bhańa, a monologue in one act, one literary example is extant—a curious picture of manners in which the speaker describes the different persons he meets at a spring festival in the streets of Kolahalapur.3 The satire of the farcical prahasanas is usually directed against the hypocrisy of ascetics and Brahmans, and the sensuality of the wealthy and powerful. These trifles represent the lower extreme of the dramatic scale, to which, of course, the principles that follow only partially apply.

Unity of action is strictly enjoined by Hindu theory, though not invariably observed in practice. Episodical or prolix interruptions are forbidden; but, in order to facilitate the connexion, the story of the play is sometimes The “unities.” carried on by narratives spoken by actors or “interpreters,” something after the fashion of the Chorus in Henry V., or of Gower in Pericles. “Unity of time” is liberally, if rather arbitrarily, understood by the later critical authorities as limiting the duration of the action to a single year; but even this is exceeded in more than one classical play.4 The single acts are to confine the events occurring in them to “one course of the sun,” and usually do so. “Unity of place” is unknown to the Hindu drama, by reason of the absence of scenery; for the plays were performed in the open courts of palaces, perhaps at times in large halls set apart for public entertainments, or in the open air. Hence change of scene is usually indicated in the texts; and we find5 the characters making long journeys on the stage, under the eyes of spectators not trained to demand “real” mileage.

With the solemn character of the higher kind of dramatic performances accord the rules and prohibitions defining what may be called the proprieties of the Indian drama. It has been already seen that all plays must have a happy Proprieties. ending. Furthermore, not only should death never be inflicted coram populo, but the various operations of biting, scratching, kissing, eating, sleeping, the bath, and the marriage ceremony should never take place on the stage. Yet such rules are made to be occasionally broken. It is true that the mild humour of the vidūshaka is restricted to his “gesticulating 483 eating” instead of perpetrating the obnoxious act.6 The charming love-scene in the Sākuntalā (at least in the earlier recension of the play) breaks off just as the hero is about to act the part of the bee to the honey of the heroine’s lips.7 But later writers are less squeamish, or less refined. In two dramas8 the heroine is dragged on the stage by her braid of hair; and this outrage is in both instances the motive of the action. In a third,9 sleeping and the marriage ceremony occur in the course of the representation.

The dramatic construction of the Indian plays presents no very striking peculiarities. They open with a benediction (nāndī), spoken by the manager (supposed to be a highly accomplished person), and followed by “some Construction. account” of the author, and an introductory scene between the manager and one of the actors, which is more or less skilfully connected by the introduction of one of the characters with the opening of the play itself. This is divided into acts (ankas) and scenes; of the former a nātāka should have not fewer than 5, or more than 10; 7 appears a common number; “the great nātāka” reaches 14. Thus the length of the higher class of Indian plays is considerable—about that of an Aeschylean trilogy; but not more than a single play was ever performed on the same occasion. Comic plays are restricted to two acts (here called sandhis). In theory the scheme of an Indian drama corresponds very closely to the general outline of dramatic construction given above; it is a characteristic merit that the Scenes and situations. business is rarely concluded before the last act. The piece closes, as it began, with a benediction or prayer. Within this framework room is found for situations as ingeniously devised and highly wrought as those in any modern Western play. What could be more pitiful than the scene in Sākuntalā, where the true wife appears before her husband, whose remembrance of her is fatally overclouded by a charm; what more terrific than that in Mālatī and Mādhava, where the lover rescues his beloved from the horrors of the charnel field? Recognition—especially between parents and children—frequently gives rise to scenes of a pathos which Euripides has not surpassed.10 The ingenious device of a “play within the play” (so familiar to the English drama) is employed with the utmost success by Babhavūti.11 On the other hand, miraculous metamorphosis12 and, in a later play,13 vulgar magic lend their aid to the progress of the action. With scenes of strong effectiveness contrast others of the most delicate poetic grace—such as the indescribably lovely little episode of the two damsels of the god of love helping one another to pluck the red and green bud from the mango tree; or of gentle domestic pathos—such as that of the courtesan listening to the prattle of her lover’s child, one of the prettiest scenes of a kind rarely kept free from affectation in the modern drama. For the dénouement in the narrower sense of the term the Indian dramatists largely resort to the expedient of the deus ex machina, often in a sufficiently literal sense.14

Every species of drama having its appropriate kind of hero or heroine, theory here again amuses itself with an infinitude of subdivisions. Among the heroines, of whom not less than three hundred and eighty-four types are said Characters. to be distinguished, are to be noticed the courtesans, whose social position to some extent resembles that of the Greek hetaerae, and association with whom does not seem in practice, however it may be in theory, to be regarded as a disgrace even to Brahmans.15 In general, the Indian drama indicates relations between the sexes subject to peculiar restraints of usage, but freer than those which Mahommedan example seems to have introduced into higher Indian society. The male characters are frequently drawn with skill, and sometimes with genuine force. Prince Samsthanaka16 is a type of selfishness born in the purple worthy to rank beside figures of the modern drama, of which this has at times naturally been a favourite class of character; elsewhere,17 the intrigues of ministers are not more fully exposed than their characters and principles of action are judiciously discriminated. Among the lesser personages common in the Indian drama, two are worth noticing, as corresponding, though by no means precisely, to familiar types of other dramatic literatures. These are the vitā, the accomplished but dependent companion (both of men and women), and the vidūshaka, the humble associate (not servant) of the prince, and the buffoon of the action.18 Strangely enough, he is always a Brahman, or the pupil of a Brahman—perhaps a survival from a purely popular phase of the drama. His humour is to be ever intent on the pleasures of a quiet life, and on that of eating in particular; his jokes are generally devoid of both harm and point.

Thus, clothing itself in a diction always ornate and tropical, in which (as Rückert has happily expressed it) the prose is the warp and the verse the weft, where (as Goethe says) words become allusions, allusions similes, and similes Diction. metaphors, the Indian drama essentially depended upon its literary qualities, and upon the familiar sanctity of its favourite themes for such effects as it was able to produce. Of scenic apparatus it knew but little. The plays were usually performed in the hall of a palace; the simple devices by which exits and entrances were facilitated it is unnecessary to describe, Scenery and costume. and on the contrivances employed for securing such “properties” as were required (above all, the cars of the gods and of their emissaries),19 it is useless to speculate. Propriety of costume, on the other hand, seems always to have been observed, agreeably both to the peculiarities of the Indian drama and to the habits of the Indian people.

The ministers of an art practised under such conditions could not but be regarded with respect, and spared the contempt or worse, which, except among one other great civilized people, the Greeks, has everywhere, at one period or Actors. another, been the actor’s lot. Companies of actors seem to have been common in India at an early date, and the inductions show the players to have been regarded as respectable members of society. In later, if not in earlier, times individual actors enjoyed a widespread reputation—“all the world” is acquainted with the talents of Kalaha-Kandala.20 The managers or directors, as already stated, were usually gifted and highly-cultured Brahmans. Female parts were in general, though not invariably, represented by females. One would like to know whether such was the case in a piece21 where—after the fashion of more than one Western play—a crafty minister passes off his daughter as a boy, on which assumption she is all but married to a person of her own sex.

The Indian drama would, if only for purposes of comparison, be invaluable to the student of this branch of literature. But from the point of view of purely literary excellence it holds its own against all except the very foremost dramas of the Summary. world. It is, indeed, a mere phrase to call Kālidāsa the Indian Shakespeare—a title which, moreover, if intended as anything more than a synonym for poetic pre-eminence, might fairly be disputed in favour of Babhavūti; while it would be absolutely misleading to place a dramatic literature, which, like the Indian, is the mere quintessence of the culture of a caste, by the side of one which represents the fullest development of the artistic consciousness of such a people as the Hellenes. The Indian drama cannot be described as national in the broadest and highest sense of the word; it is, in short, the drama of a literary class, though as such it exhibits many of the noblest and most refined, as well as of the most characteristic, features of Hindu religion and civilization. The ethics of the Indian drama are of a lofty character, but they are those of a scholastic system of religious philosophy, self-conscious of its completeness. To the power of Fate is occasionally ascribed a supremacy, to which gods as well as mortals must bow;22 but, if man’s present life is merely a 484 phase in the cycle of his destinies, the highest of moral efforts at the same time points to the summit of possibilities, and self-sacrifice is the supreme condition both of individual perfection and of the progress of the world. Such conceptions as these seem at once to enfold and to overshadow the moral life of the Indian drama. The affections and passions forming part of self it delineates with a fidelity to nature which no art can afford to neglect; on the other hand, the freedom of the picture is restricted by conditions which to us are unfamiliar and at times seem intolerable, but which it was impossible for the Indian poet’s imagination to ignore. The sheer self-absorption of ambition or love appears inconceivable by the minds of any of these poets; and their social philosophy is always based on the system of caste. On the other hand, they are masters of many of the truest forms of pathos, above all of that which blends with resignation. In humour of a delicate kind they are by no means deficient; to its lower forms they are generally strangers, even in productions of a professedly comic intention. Of wit, Indian dramatic literature—though a play on words is as the breath of its nostrils—furnishes hardly any examples intelligible to Western minds.

The distinctive excellence of the Indian drama is to be sought in the poetic robe which envelops it as flowers overspread the bosom of the earth in the season of spring. In its nobler productions, at least, it is never untrue to its Poetry of the Indian drama. half religious, half rural origin; it weaves the wreaths of idyllic fancies in an unbroken chain, adding to its favourite and familiar blossoms ever fresh beauties from an inexhaustible garden. Nor is it unequal to depicting the grander aspects of nature in her mighty forests and on the shores of the ocean. A close familiarity with its native literature can here alone follow its diction through a ceaseless flow of phrase and figure, listen with understanding to the hum of the bee as it hangs over the lotus, and contemplate with Sākuntalā’s pious sympathy the creeper as it winds round the mango tree. But the poetic beauty of the Indian drama reveals itself in the mysterious charm of its outline, if not in its full glow, even to the untrained; nor should the study of it—for which the materials seem continually on the increase—be left aside by any lover of literature.

3. Chinese Drama

Like the Indian drama, the Chinese arose from the union of the arts of dance and song. To the ballets and pantomimes out of which it developed itself, and which have continued to flourish by the side of its more advanced forms, the Chinese ascribe a primitive antiquity of origin; many of them originally had a symbolical reference to such subjects as the harvest, and war and peace. A very ancient pantomime is said to have symbolized the conquest of China by Wu-Wang; others were of a humbler, and often of a very obscure, character. To their music the Chinese likewise attribute a great antiquity of origin.

There are traditions which carry back the characters of the Chinese drama to the 18th century before the Christian era. Others declare the Emperor Wan-Te (fl. about a.d. 580) to have invented the drama; but this honour is more usually given to the emperor Yuen-Tsung (a.d. 720), who is likewise remembered as a radical musical reformer. Pantomimes henceforth fell into disrepute; and the history of the Chinese drama from this date is divided, with an accuracy we cannot profess to control, into four distinct periods. Each of these periods, we are told, has a style, and each style a name of its own; but these names, such as “Diversions of the Woods in Flower,” have little or no meaning for us; and it would therefore be useless to cite them.

The first period is that of the dramas composed under the T’ang dynasty, from a.d. 720 to 907. These pieces, called Tchhouen-Khi, were limited to the representation of extraordinary events, and were therefore, in design at least, a species of heroic drama. The ensuing times of civil war interrupted the “pleasures of peace and prosperity” (a Chinese phrase for dramatic performances)—which, however, revived.

The second period is that of the Tsung Dynasty, from 960 to 1119. The plays of this period are called Hi-Khio, and presented what became a standing peculiarity of the Chinese Classical age. drama, viz. that in them figures a principal personage who sings.

The third and best-known age of the Chinese drama was under the Kin and Yuen dynasties, from 1125 to 1367. The plays of this period are called Yuen-Pen and Tsa-Ki; the latter seem to have resembled the Hi-Khio, and to have treated very various subjects. The Yuen-Pen are the plays from which our literary knowledge of the Chinese drama is mainly derived; the short pieces called Yen-Kia were in the same style, but briefer. The list of dramatic authors under the Yuen dynasty, the most important period in Chinese literary annals, which covered the years 1260 to 1368, is tolerably extensive, comprising 85, among whom four are designated as courtesans; the number of plays composed by these and by anonymous authors is reckoned at not less than 564. In 1735 the Jesuit missionary Joseph Henry Prémare first revealed to Europe the existence of the tragedy Tchao-Chi-Cu-Eul (The Little Orphan of the House of Tchao), which was founded upon an earlier piece treating of the fortunes of an heir to the imperial throne, who was preserved in a mysterious box like another Cypselus or Moses. Voltaire seized the theme of the earlier play for a rhetorical tragedy, L’Orphelin de la Chine, in which he coolly professes it was his intention “to paint the manners of the Chinese and the Tartars.” The later play, which is something less elevated in the rank of its characters, and very decidedly less refined in treatment, was afterwards retranslated by Stanislas Julien; and to the labours of this scholar, of Sir J. F. Davis (1795-1890) and of Antoine Bazin (1799-1863), we owe a series of translated Chinese dramas, among which there can be no hesitation whatever in designating the master-piece.

The justly famous Pi-Pa-Ki (The Story of the Lute) belongs to a period rather later than that of the Yuen plays, having been composed towards the close of the 14th century by Kao-Tong-Kia, and reproduced in 1404, under the Ming Pi-Pa-Ki. dynasty, with the alterations of Mao-Tseu, a commentator of learning and taste. Pi-Pa-Ki, which as a domestic drama of sentiment possesses very high merit, long enjoyed a quite exceptional popularity in China; it was repeatedly republished with laudatory prefaces, and so late as the 18th century was regarded as a monument of morality, and as the master-piece of the Chinese theatre. It would seem to have remained without any worthy competitors; for, although it had been originally designed to produce a reaction against the immorality of the drama then in fashion, especially of Wang-Chi-Fou’s celebrated Si-Siang-Ki (The Story of the Western Pavilion), yet the fourth period of the Chinese drama, under the Ming dynasty, from 1368 to 1644, exhibited no improvement. “What” Decline and decay. (says the preface to the 1704 edition of Pi-Pa-Ki) “do you find there? Farcical dialogue, a mass of scenes in which one fancies one hears the hubbub of the streets or the ignoble language of the highways, the extravagances of demons and spirits, in addition to love-intrigues repugnant to delicacy of manners.” Nor would it appear that the Chinese theatre has ever recovered from its decay.

In theory, no drama could be more consistently elevated in purpose and in tone than the Chinese. Every play, we learn, should have both a moral and a meaning. A virtuous aim is imposed upon Chinese dramatists by an article Theoretical aims. of the penal code of the empire; and those who write immoral plays are to expect after death a purgatory which will last so long as these plays continue to be performed. In practice, however, the Chinese drama falls far short of its ideal; indeed, according to the native critic already cited, among ten thousand playwrights not one is to be found intent upon perfecting the education of mankind by means of precepts and examples.

The Chinese are, like the Hindus, unacquainted with the distinction between tragedy and comedy; they classify their plays according to subjects in twelve categories. It may be doubted whether what seems the highest of these is Religious drama. actually such; for the religious element in the Chinese drama is often sheer buffoonery. Moreover, Chinese religious 485 life, as reflected in the drama, seems one in which creed elbows creed, and superstitions are welcome whatever their origin. Of all religious traditions and doctrines, however, those of Buddhism (which had reached China long before the known beginnings of its drama) are the most prominent; thus, the theme of absolute self-sacrifice is treated in one play,23 that of entire absorption in the religious life in another.24 The historical Historical. drama is not unknown to the Chinese; and although a law prohibits the bringing on the stage of “emperors, empresses, and the famous princes, ministers, and generals of former ages,” no such restriction is observed in practice. In Han-Kong-Tseu (The Sorrows of Han), for instance, which treats a national historic legend strangely recalling in parts the story of Esther and the myth of the daughter of Erechtheus, the Domestic. emperor Yuen-Ti (the representative, to be sure, of a fallen dynasty) plays a part, and a sufficiently sorry one. By far the greater number, however, of the Chinese plays accessible in translations belong to the domestic species, and to that subspecies which may be called the criminal drama. Their favourite virtue is piety, of a formal25 or a practical26 kind to parents or parents-in-law; their favourite interest lies in the discovery of long-hidden guilt, and in the vindication of persecuted innocence.27 In the choice and elaboration of such subjects they leave little to be desired by the most ardent devotees of the literature of agony. Besides this description of plays, we have at least one love-comedy pure and simple—a piece of a nature not “tolerably mild,” but ineffably harmless.28

Free in its choice of themes, the Chinese drama is likewise remarkably unrestricted in its range of characters. Chinese society, it is well known, is not based, like Indian, upon the principle of caste; rank is in China determined Range of Characters. by office, and this again depends on the results of examination. These familiar facts are constantly brought home to the reader of Chinese plays. The Tchoang-Yuen, or senior classman on the list of licentiates, is the flower of Chinese society, and the hero of many a drama;29 and it is a proud boast that for years “one’s ancestors have held high posts, which they owed to their literary successes.”30 On the other hand, a person who has failed in his military examination, becomes, as if by a natural transition, a man-eating monster.31 But of mere class the Chinese drama is no respecter, painting with noteworthy freedom the virtues and the vices of nearly every phase of society. The same liberty is taken with regard to the female sex; it is clear that in earlier times there were few vexatious restrictions in Chinese life upon the social intercourse between men and women. The variety of female characters in the Chinese drama is great, ranging from the heroine who sacrifices herself for the sake of an empire32 to the well-brought-up young lady who avers that “woman came into the world to be obedient, to unravel skeins of silk, and to work with her needle”33—from the chambermaid who contrives the most gently sentimental of rendezvous,34 to the reckless courtesan who, like another Millwood, upbraids the partner of her guilt on his suing for mercy, and bids him die with her in hopes of a reunion after death.35 In marriage the first or legitimate wife is distinguished from the second, who is at times a ci-devant courtesan, and towards whom the feelings of the former vary between bitter jealousy36 and sisterly kindness.37

The conduct of the plays exhibits much ingenuity, and an aversion from restrictions of time and place; in fact, the nature of the plot constantly covers a long series of years, and spans wide intervals of local distance. The plays are divided into acts and scenes—the former being usually four in number, at times with an induction or narrative prologue spoken by some of the characters (Sie-Tsen). Favourite plays were, however, allowed Construction and conduct of plots. to extend to great length; the Pi-Pa-Ki is divided into 24 sections, and in another recension apparently comprised 42. “I do not wish,” says the manager in the prologue, “that this performance should last too long; finish it to-day, but cut out nothing”—whence it appears that the performance of some plays occupied more than a single day. The rule was always observed that a separate act should be given up to the dénouement; while, according to a theory of which it is not always easy to trace the operation, the perfection of construction was sought in the dualism or contrast of scene and scene, just as the perfection of diction was placed in the parallelism or antithesis of phrase and phrase. Being subject to no restrictions as to what might, or might not, be represented on the stage, the conduct of the plots allowed of the introduction of almost every variety of incidents. Death takes place, in sight of the audience, by starvation,38 by drowning,39 by poison,40 by execution;41 flogging and torture are inflicted on the stage;42 wonders are wrought;43 and magic is brought into play;44 the ghost of an innocently-executed daughter calls upon her father to revenge her foul murder, and assists in person at the subsequent judicial enquiry.45 Certain peculiarities in the conduct of the business are due to the usages of society rather than to dramaturgic laws. Marriages are generally managed—at least in the higher spheres of society—by ladies professionally employed as matrimonial agents.46 The happy resolution of the nodus of the action is usually brought about by the direct interposition of superior official authority47—a tribute to the paternal system of government, which is the characteristic Chinese variety of the deus ex machina. This naturally tends to the favourite close of a glorification of the emperor,48 resembling that of Louis XIV. at the end of Tartufe, or in spirit, at all events, those of the virgin queen in more than one Elizabethan play. It should be added that the characters save the necessity for a bill of the play by persistently announcing and re-announcing their names and genealogies, and the necessity for a book by frequently recapitulating the previous course of the plot.

One peculiarity of the Chinese drama remains to be noticed. The chief character of a play represents the author as well as the personage; he or she is hero or heroine and chorus in one. This is brought about by the hero’s (or heroine’s) The principal personage who sings. singing the poetical passages, or those containing maxims of wisdom and morality, or reminiscences and examples drawn from legend or history. Arising out of the dialogue, these passages at the same time diversify it, and give to it such elevation and brilliancy as it can boast. The singing character must be the principal personage in the action, but may be taken from any class of society. If this personage dies in the course of the play, another sings in his place. From the Poetic diction. mention of this distinctive feature of the Chinese drama it will be obvious how unfair it would be to judge of any of its productions, without a due appreciation of the lyric passages, which do not appear to be altogether restricted to the singing of the principal personage, for other characters frequently “recite verses.” In these lyrical or didactic passages are to be sought those flowers of diction which, as Julien has shown, consist partly in the use of a metaphorical phraseology of infinite nicety in its variations—such as a long series of phrases compounded with the word signifying jet and expressing severally the ideas of rarity, distinction, beauty, &c., or as others derived from the names of colours, birds, beasts, precious metals, elements, constellations, &c., or alluding to favourite legends or anecdotes. These features constitute the literary element par excellence of Chinese dramatic composition. At the same time, though it is impossible for the untrained reader to be alive to 486 the charms of so unfamiliar a phraseology, it may be questioned whether even in its diction the Chinese drama can claim to be regarded as really poetic. It may abound in poetic ornament; it is not, like the Indian, bathed in poetry.

On the other hand, the merits of this dramatic literature are by no means restricted to ingenuity of construction and variety of character—merits, in themselves important, which no candid criticism will deny to it. Its master-piece Merits of the Chinese drama. is not only truly pathetic in the conception and the main situations of its action, but includes scenes of singular grace and delicacy of treatment—such as that where the remarried husband of the deserted heroine in vain essays in the presence of his second wife to sing to his new lute, now that he has cast aside the old.49 In the last act of a tragedy appealing at once to patriotism and to pity, there is true imaginative power in the picture of the emperor, when aware of the departure, but not of the death, of his beloved, sitting in solitude broken only by the ominous shriek of the wild-fowl.50 Nor is the Chinese drama devoid of humour. The lively abigail who has to persuade her mistress into confessing herself in love by arguing (almost like Beatrice) that “humanity bids us love men”;51 the corrupt judge (a common type in the Chinese plays) who falls on his knees before the prosecuting parties to a suit as before “the father and mother who give him sustenance,”52 may serve as examples; and in Pi-Pa-Ki there is a scene of admirable burlesque on the still more characteristic theme of the humours of a competitive examination.53 If such illustrations could not easily be multiplied, they are at least worth citing in order to deprecate a perfunctory criticism on the qualities of a dramatic literature as to which our materials for judgment are still scanty.

While in the north of China houses are temporarily set apart for dramatic performances, in the south these are usually confined to theatres erected in the streets (Hi-Thaï). Scenery and costume. Thus scenic decorations of any importance must always have been out of question in the Chinese theatre. The costumes, on the other hand, are described as magnificent; they are traditionally those worn before the 17th century, in accordance with the historical colouring of most of the plays. Actors. The actor’s profession is not a respectable one in China, the managers being in the habit of buying children of slaves and bringing them up as slaves of their own. Women may not appear on the stage, since the emperor K’ien-Lung admitted an actress among his concubines; female parts are therefore played by lads, occasionally by eunuchs.

4. Japanese Drama

The Japanese drama, as all evidence seems to agree in showing, still remains what in substance it has always been—an amusement passionately loved by the lower orders, but hardly dignified by literature deserving the name. Apart from its native elements of music, dance and song, and legendary or historical narrative and pantomime, it is clearly to be regarded as a Chinese importation; nor has it in its more advanced forms apparently even attempted to emancipate itself from the reproduction of the conventional Chinese types. As early as the close of the 6th century Hada Kawatsu, a man of Chinese extraction, but born in Japan, is said to have been ordered to arrange entertainments for the benefit of the country, and to have written as many as thirty-three plays. The Japanese, however, ascribe the origin of their drama to the introduction of the dance called Sambāso as a charm against a volcanic depression of the earth which occurred in 805; and this dance appears still to be used as a prelude to theatrical exhibitions. In 1108 lived a woman called Iso no Zenji, who is looked upon as “the mother of the Japanese drama.” But her performances seem to have been confined to dancing or posturing in male attire (otokomai); and the introduction of the drama proper is universally attributed to Sarnwaka Kanzaburō, who in 1624 opened the first theatre (sibaïa) at Yeddo. Not long afterwards (1651) the playhouses were removed to their present site in the capital; and both here and in the provincial towns, especially of the north, the drama has since continued to flourish. Persons of rank were formerly never seen at these theatres; but actors were occasionally engaged to play in private at the houses of the nobles, who appear themselves to have taken part in performances of a species of opera affected by them, always treating patriotic legends and called . The mikado has a court theatre.

The subjects of the serious popular plays are mainly mythological—the acts of the great spirit Day-Sin, the incarnation of Brahma, and similar themes—or historical, treating of the doings of the early dynasties. In these the Subjects of the plays. names of the personages are changed. An example of the latter class is to be found in the jōruri, or musical romance, in which the universally popular tale of Chiushingura (The Loyal League) has been amplified and adapted for theatrical representation. This famous narrative of the feudal fidelity of the forty-seven ronins, who about the year 1699 revenged their chief’s judicial suicide upon the arrogant official to whom it was due, is stirring rather than touching in its incidents, and contains much bloodshed, together with a tea-house scene which suffices as a specimen of the Japanese comedy of manners. One of the books of this dramatic romance consists of a metrical description, mainly in dialogue, of a journey which (after the fashion of Indian plays) has to be carried out on the stage. The performance of one of these quasi-historical dramas sometimes lasts over several days; they are produced with much pomp of costume; but the acting is very realistic, and hari-kari is performed, almost “to the life.” Besides these tragic plays (in which, however, comic intermezzos are often inserted) the Japanese have middle-class domestic dramas of a very realistic kind. The language of these, unlike that of Chinese comedy, is often gross and scurrilous, but intrigues against married women are rigidly excluded. Fairy and demon operas and ballets, and farces and intermezzos, form an easy transition to the interludes of tumblers and jugglers. As a specimen of nearly every class of play is required to make up a Japanese theatrical entertainment, which lasts from sunrise to sunset, and as the lower houses appropriate and mutilate the plays of the higher, it is clear that the status of the Japanese theatre cannot be regarded as at all high. In respect, however, of its movable scenery and properties, it is in advance of its Chinese prototype. The performers are, except in the ballet, males only; and the comic acting is said to be excellent of its kind. Though the leading actors enjoy great popularity and very respectable salaries, the class is held in contempt, and the companies were formerly recruited from the lowest sources. The disabilities under which they lay have, however, been removed; a Dramatic Reform Association has been organized by a number of noblemen and scholars, and a theatre on European lines built (see Japan).

5. Persian and other Asiatic, Polynesian and Peruvian Drama

Such dramatic examples of the drama as may be discoverable in Siam will probably have to be regarded as belonging to a branch of the Indian drama. The drama of the Malay Siam. populations of Java and the neighbouring island of Sumatra also resembles the Indian, to which it may have owed what development it has reached. The Javanese, as we learn, distinguish among the lyrics sung on occasions of Java, Sumatra, &c. popular significance the panton, a short simile or fable, and the tcharita, a more advanced species, taking the form of dialogue and sung or recited by actors proper. From the tcharita the Javanese drama, which in its higher forms treats the stories of gods and kings, appears to have been derived. As in the Indian drama, the functions of the director or manager are of great importance; as in the Greek, the performers wear masks, here made of wood. The comic drama is often represented in both Java and Sumatra by parties of strollers consisting of 487 two men and a woman—a troop sufficient for a wide variety of plot.

Among other more highly civilized Asiatic peoples, the traces of the dramatic art are either few or late. The originally Aryan Persians exhibit no trace of the drama in their ample Persian. earlier literature. But in its later national development the two species, widely different from one another, of the religious drama or mystery and of the popular comedy or farce have made their appearance—the former in a growth of singular interest.

Of the Persian téaziés (lamentations or complaints) the subjects are invariably derived from religious history, and more or less directly connected with the “martyrdoms” of the house of Ali. The performance of these episodes or The téaziés. scenes takes place during the first ten days of the month of Muharram, when the adherents of the great Shi’ite sect all over Persia and Mahommedan India commemorate the deaths of the Prophet and his daughter Fatima, the mother of Ali, the martyrdoms of Ali himself, shamefully murdered in the sanctuary, and of his unoffending son Hasan, done to death by his miserable guilty Deianira of a wife, and lastly the never-to-be-forgotten sacrifice of Hasan’s brother, the heroic Hosain, on the bloody field of Kerbela (a.d. 680). With the establishment in Persia, early in the 16th century, of the Safawid (Sufi) dynasty by the Shi’ites, the cult of the martyrs Hasan and Hosain secured the official sanction which it has since retained. Thus the performance of these téaziés, and the defraying of the equipment of them, are regarded as religious, and in a theological sense meritorious, acts; and the plays are frequently provided by the court or by other wealthy persons, by way of pleasing the people or securing divine favour. The plays are performed, usually by natives of Isfahan, in courtyards of mosques, palaces, inns, &c., and in the country in temporary structures erected for the purpose.

It would seem that, no farther back than the beginning of the 19th century, the téaziés were still only songs or elegies in honour of the martyrs, occasionally chanted by persons actually representing them. Just, however, as Greek tragedy was formed by a gradual detachment of the dialogue from the choric song of which it was originally only a secondary outgrowth, and by its gradually becoming the substance of the drama, so the Miracle Play of Hasan and Hosain, as we may call it, has now come to be a continuous succession of dramatic scenes. Of these fifty-two have, thanks to the labours of Alexander Chodzko and Sir Lewis Pelly, been actually taken down in writing, and thirty-seven published in translations; and it is clear that there is no limit to the extension of the treatment, as is shown by such a téazié as the Marriage of Kassem, dealing with the unfortunate Hosain’s unfortunate son.54 The performance is usually opened by a prologue delivered by the rouzékhán, a personage of semi-priestly character claiming descent from the Prophet, who edifies and excites the audience by a pathetic recitation of legends and vehement admonitions in prose or verse concerning the subject of the action. But the custom seems to have arisen of specially prefacing the drama proper by a kind of induction which illustrates the cause or effect of the sacred story—as for instance that of Amir Timur (Tamerlane), who appears as lamenting and avenging the death of Hosain; or the episode of Joseph’s betrayal by his brethren, as prefiguring the cruelty shown to Ali and his sons. At the climax of the action proper Hosain prays to be granted at the day of judgment the key of the treasure of intercession; and the final scene shows the fulfilment of his prayer, which opens paradise to those who have helped the holy martyr, or who have so much as shed a single tear for him. It will thus be seen that not only is this complex and elaborate production unapproached in its length and in its patient development of a long sequence of momentous events by any chronicle history or religious drama, but that it embodies together with the passionately cherished traditions of a great religious community the expression of a long-lived resentment of foreign invasion—and is thus a kind of Oberammergau play and complaint of the Nibelungs in one.

The other kind of Persian drama is the témacha (= spectacle), a kind of comedy or farce, sometimes called teglid (disguising), performed by wandering minstrels or joculatores called loutys, who travel about accompanied by their bayadères, The témachas. and amuse such spectators as they find by their improvised entertainments, which seem to be on much the same level as English “interludes.” A favourite and ancient variety of the species is the karaguez or puppet-play, of which the protagonist is called kétchel péhlévan (the bald hero).

The modern Persian drama seems to have admitted Western influences, as in the case of such comedies as The Pleaders of the Court, and, avowedly, Monsieur Jourdan and Musla’li Shah, of whom the former steals away the wits of young Persia by his pictures of the delights of Paris.

There is no necessity for any reference here to the civilization or to the literature of the Hebrews, or to those of other Semitic peoples, with whom the drama is either entirely Hebrew literature. wanting, or only appears as a quite occasional and exotic growth. Dramatic elements are apparent in two of the books of the Hebrew scripture—the Book of Ruth and the Book of Job, of which latter the author of Everyman, and Goethe in his Faust, made so impressive a use.

From Polynesia and aboriginal America we also have isolated traces of drama. Among these are the performances, accompanied by dancing and intermixed with recitation and singing, of the South Sea Islanders, first described by South Seas; Peru. Captain Cook, and reintroduced to the notice of students of comparative mythology by W. Wyatt Gill. Of the so-called Inca drama of the Peruvians, the unique relic, Apu Ollantay, said to have been written down in the Quichua tongue from native dictation by Spanish priests shortly after the conquest of Peru, has been partly translated by Sir Clements Markham, and has been rendered into German verse. It appears to be an historic play of the heroic type, combining stirring incidents with a pathos finding expression in at least one lyric of some sweetness—the lament of the lost Collyar. With it may be contrasted the ferocious Aztek dramatic ballet, Rabinal-Achi (translated by Brasseur de Bourbourg), of which the text seems rather a succession of warlike harangues than an attempt at dramatic treatment of character. But these are mere isolated curiosities.

6. Dramatic Elements in Egyptian Culture

The civilization and religious ideas of the Egyptians so vitally influenced the people of whose drama we are about to speak that a reference to them cannot be altogether omitted. The influence of Egyptian upon Greek civilization has probably been overestimated by Herodotus; but while it will never be clearly known how much the Greeks owed to the Egyptians in divers branches of knowledge, it is certain that the former confessed themselves the scholars of Egypt in the cardinal doctrine of its natural theology. The doctrine of the immortality of the soul there found its most solemn expression in mysterious recitations connected with the rites of sepulture, and treating of the migration of the soul from its earthly to its eternal abode. These solemnities, whose transition into the Hellenic mysteries has usually been attributed to the agency of the Thracian worship of Dionysus, undoubtedly contained a dramatic element, upon the extent of which it is, however, useless to speculate. The ideas to which they sought to give utterance centred in that of Osiris, the vivifying power or universal soul of nature, whom Herodotus simply identifies with the Dionysus of the Greeks. The same deity was likewise honoured by processions among the rural Egyptian population, which, according to the same authority, in nearly all respects except the absence of choruses resembled the Greek phallic processions in honour of the wine-god.

That the Egyptians looked upon music as an important science seems fully established; it was diligently studied by their priests, though not, as among the Greeks, forming a part of general education, and in the sacred rites of their gods they as a rule permitted the use of flute and harp, as well as of vocal music. Dancing was as an art confined to professional persons; but though the higher orders abstained from its practice, the lower indulged 488 in it on festive occasions, when a tendency to pantomime naturally asserted itself, and licence and wanton buffoonery prevailed, as in the early rustic festivals of the Greek and Italian peoples. Of a dance of armed men, on the other hand, there seems no satisfactory trace in the representations of the Egyptian monuments.

7. Greek Drama

Whatever elements the Greek drama may, in the sources from which it sprang, have owed to Egyptian, or Phrygian, or other Asiatic influences, its development was independent and self-sustained. Not only in its beginnings, but Religious origin. so long as the stage existed in Greece, the drama was in intimate connexion with the national religion. This is the most signal feature of its history, and one which cannot in the same degree or to the same extent be ascribed to the drama of any other people, ancient or modern. Not only did both the great branches of the Greek drama alike originate in the usages of religious worship, but they never lost their formal union with it, though one of them (comedy) in its later growth abandoned all direct reference to its origin. Hellenic polytheism was at once so active and so fluid or flexible in its anthropomorphic formations, that no other religious system has ever with the same conquering force assimilated to itself foreign elements, or with equal vivacity and variety developed its own. Thus, the worship of Dionysus, introduced into Greece by the Phoenicians as that of the tauriform sun-god whom his worshippers adored with loud cries (whence Bacchus or Iacchus), and the god of generation (whence his phallic emblem) and production, was brought into connexion with the Dorian religion of the sun-god Apollo. Apollo and his sister, again, corresponded to the Pelasgian and Achaean divinities of sun and moon, whom the Phoenician Dionysus and Demeter superseded, or with whose worship theirs was blended. Dionysus, whose rites were specifically conducted with reference to his attributes as the wine-god, was attended by deified representations of his original worshippers, who wore the skin of the goat sacrificed to him. These were the satyrs. Out of the connected worships of Dionysus, Bacchus, Apollo and Demeter sprang the beginnings of the Greek drama.

“Both tragedy and comedy,” says Aristotle, “originated in a rude and unpremeditated manner—the first from the leaders of the dithyramb, and the second from those who led off the phallic songs.” This diversity of origin, and the distinction jealously maintained down to the latest times between the two branches of the dramatic art, even where they might seem to come into actual contact with one another, necessitate a separate statement as to the origin and history of either.

The custom of offering thanks to the gods by hymns and dances in the places of public resort was first practised by the Greeks in the Dorian states, whose whole system of life was organized on a military basis. Hence the Origin of tragedy. dances of the Dorians originally taught or imitated the movements of soldiers, and their hymns were warlike chants. Such were the beginnings of the chorus, and of its songs (called paeans, from an epithet of Apollo), accompanied first by the phorminx and then by the flute. A step in advance was taken when the poet with his trained singers and dancers, like the Indian sŭtra-dhāra, performed these religious functions as the representative of the population. From the Doric paean at a very early period several styles of choral dancing formed themselves, to which the three styles of dance in scenic productions—the tragic, the comic and the satyric—are stated afterwards to have corresponded. But none of these could have led to a literary growth. This was due to the introduction among the Dorians The dithyramb. of the dithyramb (from δῖος, descended from Zeus, and θρίαμβος, the Latin triumphus), originally a song of revellers, probably led by a flute-player and accompanied by the music of other Eastern instruments, in which it was customary in Crete to celebrate the birth of Bacchus (the doubly-born) and possibly also his later adventures. The leader of the band (coryphaeus) may be supposed to have at times assumed the character of the wine-god, whose worshippers bore aloft the vineclad thyrsus. The dithyramb was reduced to a definite form by the Lesbian Arion (fl. 610), who composed regular poems, turned the moving band of worshippers into a standing or “cyclic” chorus of attendants on Dionysus—a chorus of satyrs, a tragic or goat chorus—invented a style of music adapted to the character of the chorus, and called these songs “tragedies” or “goat-songs.” Arion, whose goat-chorus may perhaps have some connexion with an early Arcadian worship of Pan, associated it permanently with Dionysus, and thus became the inventor of “lyrical tragedy”—a transition Lyrical tragedy. stage between the dithyramb and the regular drama. His invention, or the chorus with which it dealt, was established according to fixed rules by his contemporary Stesichorus. About the time when Arion introduced these improvements into the Dorian city of Corinth, the (likewise Dorian) families at Sicyon honoured the hero-king Adrastus by tragic choruses. Hence the invention of tragedy was ascribed by the Sicyonians to their poet Epigenes; but this step, significant for the future history of the Greek drama, of employing the Bacchic chorus for the celebration of other than Bacchic themes, was soon annulled by the tyrant Cleisthenes.

The element which transformed lyrical tragedy into the tragic drama was added by the Ionians. The custom of the recitation of poetry by wandering minstrels, called rhapsodes (from ῥάβδος, staff, or from ῤάπτειν, to piece The rhapsodes. together), first sprang up in the Ionia beyond the sea; to such minstrels was due the spread of the Homeric poems and of subsequent epic cycles. These recitations, with or without musical accompaniment, soon included gnomic or didactic, as well as epic, verse; if Homer was a rhapsode, so was the sententious or “moral” Hesiod. The popular effect of these recitations was enormously increased by the metrical innovations of Archilochus (from 708), who invented the trochee and the iambus, the latter the arrowy metre which is the native form of satirical invective—the species of composition in which Archilochus excelled—though it was soon used for other purposes also. The recitation of these iambics may already have nearly approached to theatrical declamation. The rhapsodes were welcome guests at popular festivals, where they exercised their art in mutual emulation, or ultimately recited parts, perhaps the whole, of longer poems. The recitation of a long epic may thus have resembled theatrical dialogue; even more so must the alternation of iambic poems, the form being frequently an address in the second person. The rhapsode was in some sense an actor; and when these recitations reached Attica, they thus brought with them the germs of theatrical dialogue.

The rhapsodes were actually introduced into Attica at a very early period; the Iliad, we know, was chanted at the Brauronia, a rural festival of Bacchus, whose worship had early entered Attica, and was cherished among its rustic Invention of the tragic drama. population. Meanwhile the cyclic chorus of the Dorians had found its way into Attica and Athens, ever since the Athenians had recognized the authority of the great centre of the Apolline religion at Delphi. From the second half of the 6th century onwards the chorus of satyrs formed a leading feature of the great festival of Dionysus at Athens. It therefore only remained for the rhapsodic and the cyclic—in other words, for the epic and the choral—elements to coalesce; and this must have been brought about by a union of the two accompaniments of religious worship in the festive rites of Bacchus, and by the domestication of these rites in the ruling city. This occurred in the time of Peisistratus, perhaps after his restoration in 554. To Thespis (534), said to have been a contemporary of the tyrant and a native of an Attic deme (Icaria), the invention of tragedy is accordingly ascribed. Whether his name be that of an actual person or not, his claim to be regarded as the inventor of tragedy is founded on the statement that he introduced an actor (ὑποκριτής, originally, “answerer”), doubtless, at first, generally the poet himself, who, instead of merely alternating his recitations with the songs of the chorus, addressed his speech to its leader—the coryphaeus—with whom he thus carried on a 489 species of “dialogue.” Or, in other words, the leader of the chorus (coryphaeus), instead of addressing himself to the chorus, held converse with the actor. The chorus stood round its leader in front of the Bacchic altar (thymelē); the actor stood with the coryphaeus, who had occupied a more elevated position in order to be visible above his fellows, on a rude table, or possibly on a cart, though the wagon of Thespis may be a fiction, due to a confusion between his table and the wagon of Susarion. In any case, we have here, with the beginnings of dialogue, the beginning of the stage. It is a significant minor invention ascribed to Thespis, that he disguised the actor’s face first by means of a pigment, afterwards by a mask. In the dialogue was treated some myth relating to Bacchus, or to some other deity or hero. Whether or not Thespis actually wrote tragedies (and there seems no reason to doubt it), Phrynichus and one or two other poets are mentioned as having carried on choral tragedy as set on foot by him, and as having introduced improvements into its still predominating lyrical element. The step which made dramatic action possible, and with which the Greek drama thus really began, was, as is distinctly stated by Aristotle, taken by Aeschylus. He added a second actor; and, by reducing the functions of the chorus, he further established the dialogue as the principal part of tragedy. Sophocles afterwards added a third actor, by which change the preponderance of the dialogue was made complete.

If the origin of Greek comedy is simpler in its nature than that of Greek tragedy, the beginnings of its progress are involved in more obscurity. Its association with religious worship was not initial; its foundations lay in popular Origin of comedy. mirth, though religious festivals, and those of the vintage god in particular, must from the first have been the most obvious occasions for its exhibition. It is said to have been “invented” by Susarion, a native of Doric Megaris, whose inhabitants were famed for their coarse humour, which they communicated to their own and other Dorian colonies in Sicily, to this day the home of vivacious mimic dialogue. In the rural Bacchic vintage festivals bands of jolly companions (κῶμος, properly a revel continued after supper) went about in carts or afoot, carrying the phallic emblem, and indulging in the ribald licence of wanton mirth. From the song sung in these processions or at the Bacchic feasts, which combined the praise of the god with gross personal ridicule, and was called comus in a secondary sense, the Bacchic reveller taking part in it was called a comus-singer or comoedus. These phallic processions, which were afterwards held in most Greek cities, and in Athens seem to have early included a “topical” speech as well as a choral song, determined the character of Old Attic comedy, whose most prominent feature was an absolute licence of personal vilification.

Thus independent of one another in their origin, Greek tragedy and comedy never actually coalesced. The “satyr-drama,” though in some sense it partook of the nature of both, was in its origin as in its history connected with The satyr-drama. tragedy alone, whose origin it directly recalled. Pratinas of Philus, a contemporary of Aeschylus in his earlier days, is said to have restored the tragic chorus to the satyrs; i.e. he first produced dramas in which, though they were the same in form and theme as the tragedies, the choric dances were different and entirely carried on by satyrs. The tragic poets, while never writing comedies, henceforth also composed satyr-dramas; but neither tragedies nor satyr-dramas were ever written by the comic poets, and it was in conjunction with tragedies only that the satyr-dramas were performed. The theory of the Platonic Socrates, that the same man ought to be the best tragic and the best comic poet, was among the Greeks Tragi-comedy. never exemplified in practice. The so-called “hilaro-tragedy” or “tragi-comedy” of later writers, perhaps in some of its features in a measure anticipated by Euripides,55 in form nowise differed from tragedy; it merely contained a comic element in its characters, and invariably had a happy ending. It is an instructive fact that the serious and sentimental element in the comedy of Menander and his contemporaries did far more to destroy the essential difference between the two great branches of the Greek dramatic art.

Periods of Greek Tragedy.—The history of Greek—which to all intents and purposes remained Attic—tragedy divides itself into three periods.

I. The Period before Aeschylus (535-499).—From this we have but a few names of authors and plays—those of the former being (besides Thespis) Choerilus, Phrynichus and Pratinas, all of whom lived to contend with Aeschylus for the tragic prize. To each of them certain innovations are ascribed—for instance the introduction of female characters to Phrynichus. He is best remembered by the overpowering effect said to have been created by his Capture of Miletus, in which the chorus consisted of the wives of the Phoenician sailors in the service of the Great King.

II. The Classical Period of Attic Tragedy—that of Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides, and their contemporaries (499-405). To this belong all the really important phases in the progress of Greek tragedy, which severally connect themselves with the names of its three great masters. They may be regarded as the representatives of successive generations of Attic history and life, though of course in these, as in the progress of their art itself, there is an unbroken continuity.

Aeschylus (525-456) had not only fought both at Marathon and at Salamis against those Persians whose rout he celebrated with patriotic price,56 but he had been trained in the Eleusinian mysteries, and strenuously asserted the Aeschylus. value of the institution most intimately associated with the primitive political traditions of the past—the Areopagus.57 He had been born in the generation after Solon, to whose maxims he fondly clung; and it was the Dorian development of Hellenic life and the philosophical system based upon it with which his religious and moral convictions were imbued. Thus even upon the generation which succeeded him, and to which the powerful simplicity of his dramatic and poetic diction seemed strange, the ethical loftiness of his conceptions and the sublimity of his dramatic imagination fell like the note of a mightier age. To us nothing is more striking than the conciliatory tendencies of his conservative mind, and the progressive nature of what may have seemed to his later contemporaries antiquated ideals.

Sophocles (495-405) was the associate of Pericles, and an upholder of his authority, rather than a consistent pupil of his political principles; but his manhood, and perhaps the maturity of his genius, coincided with the great Sophocles. days when he could stand, like his mighty friend and the community they both so gloriously represented, on the sunny heights of achievement. Serenely pious as well as nobly patriotic, he nevertheless treats the myths of the national religion in the spirit of a conscious artist, contrasting with lofty irony the struggles of humanity with the irresistible march of its destinies. Perhaps he, too, was one of the initiated; and the note of personal responsibility which is the mystic’s inner religion is recognizable in his view of life.58 The art of Sophocles may in its perfection be said to typify the greatest epoch in the life of Athens—an epoch conscious of unequalled achievements, but neither wholly unconscious of the brief endurance which was its destiny.

Euripides (480-406), as is the fate of genius of a more complex kind, has been more variously and antithetically judged than either of his great fellow-tragedians. His art has been described as devoid of the idealism of theirs, Euripides. his genius as rhetorical rather than poetical, his morality as that of a sophistical wit. On the other hand, he has been recognized not only as the most tragic of the Attic tragedians and the most pathetic of ancient poets, but also as the most humane in his social philosophy and the most various in his psychological insight. At least, though far removed from the more naïf age of the national life, he is, both in patriotic spirit and in his choice of themes, genuinely Attic; and if he was “haunted on the stage by the daemon of Socrates,” he was, like Socrates himself, the representative of an age which was a seed-time as well as a season of decay. His technical innovations 490 corresponded to his literary characteristics; but neither in the treatment of the chorus, nor in his management of the beginning and the ending of a tragedy, did he introduce any radical change. To Euripides the general progress of dramatic literature nevertheless owes more than to any other ancient poet. Tragedy followed in his footsteps in Greece and at Rome. Comedy owed him something in the later phases of the very Aristophanes who mocked him, and more in the human philosophy expressed in the sentiments of Menander; and, when the modern drama came to engraft the ancient upon its own crude growth, his was directly or indirectly the most powerful influence in the establishment of a living connexion between them.

The incontestable pre-eminence of the three great tragic poets was in course of time acknowledged at Athens by the usage allowing no tragedies but theirs to be performed more than once, and by the prescription that one The great tragic masters and their contemporaries. play of theirs should be performed at each Dionysia, as well as by the law of Lycurgus (c. 330) which obliged the actors to use, in the case of works of the great masters, authentic copies preserved in the public archives. Yet it is possible that the exclusiveness of these tributes is not entirely justifiable; and not all the tragic poets contemporary with the great writers were among the myriad of younglings derided by Aristophanes. Of those who attained to celebrity Ion of Chios (d. before 419) seems to have followed earlier traditions of style than Euripides; Agathon, who survived the latter, on the other hand, introduced certain innovations of a transnormal kind both into the substance and the form of dramatic composition.59

III. Of the third period of Greek tragedy the concluding limit cannot be precisely fixed. Down to the days of Alexander the Great, Athens had remained the chief home of tragedy. Though tragedies must have begun to be The successors of the great masters at Athens. acted at the Syracusan and Macedonian courts, since Aeschylus, Euripides and Agathon had sojourned there—though the practice of producing plays at the Dionysia before the allies of Athens must have led to their holding similar exhibitions at home—yet before the death of Alexander we meet with no instance of a tragic poet writing or of a tragedy written outside Athens. An exception should indeed be made in favour of the tyrant Dionysius of Syracuse, who (like Critias in his earlier days at Athens) was “addicted to” tragic composition. Not all the tragedians of this period, however, were Athenians born; though the names of Euphorion, the son of Aeschylus, Iophon, the son of Sophocles, and Euripides and Sophocles, the nephew and the grandson respectively of their great namesakes, illustrate the descent of the tragic art as an hereditary family possession. Chaeremon (fl. 380) already exhibits tragedy on the road to certain decay, for we learn that his plays were written for reading.

Soon after the death of Alexander theatres are found spread over the whole Hellenic world of Europe and Asia—a result to which the practice of the conqueror and his father of celebrating their victories by scenic performances The Alexandrians. had doubtless contributed. Alexandria having now become a literary centre with which even Athens was in some respects unable to compete, while the latter still remained the home of comedy, the tragic poets flocked to the capital of the Ptolemies; and here, in the canon of Greek poets drawn up by command of Ptolemy Philadelphus (283-247), Alexander the Aetolian undertook the list of tragedies, while Lycophron was charged with the comedies. But Lycophron himself was included in all the versions of the list of the seven tragic poets famed as the “Pleias” who still wrote in the style of the Attic masters and followed the rules observed by them. Tragedy and the dramatic art continued to be favoured by the later Ptolemies; and about 100 b.c. we meet with the curious phenomenon of a Jewish poet, Ezechiel, composing Greek tragedies, of one of which (the Exodus from Egypt) fragments have come down to us. Tragedy, with the satyr-drama and comedy, survived in Alexandria beyond the days of Cicero and Varro; nor was their doom finally sealed till the emperor Caracalla abolished theatrical performances in the Egyptian capital in a.d. 217.

Thus Greek tragedy is virtually only another name for Attic; nor was any departure from the lines laid down The tragedy of the great masters. by its three great masters made in most respects by the Roman imitators of these poets and of their successors.

Tragedy was defined by Plato as an imitation of the noblest life. Its proper themes—the deeds and sufferings of heroes—were familiar to audiences intimately acquainted with the mythology of the national religion. To such Subjects of Greek tragedy. themes Greek tragedy almost wholly confined itself; and in later days there were numerous books which discussed these myths of the tragedians. They only very exceptionally treated historic themes, though one great national calamity,60 and a yet greater national victory,61 and in later times a few other historical subjects,62 were brought upon the stage. Such veiled historical allusions as critical ingenuity has sought not only in passages but in the entire themes of other Attic tragedies63 cannot, of course, even if accepted as such, stamp the plays in which they occur as historic dramas. No doubt Attic tragedy, though after a different and more decorous fashion, shared the tendency of her comic sister to introduce allusions to contemporary events and persons; and the indulgence of this tendency was facilitated by the revision (διασκυή) to which the works of the great poets were subjected by them, or by those who produced their works after them.64 So far as we know, the subjects of the tragedies before Aeschylus were derived from the epos; and it was a famous saying of this poet that his dramas were “but dry scraps from the great banquets of Homer”—an expression which may be understood as including the poems which belong to the so-called Homeric cycles. Sophocles, Euripides and their successors likewise resorted to the Trojan, and also to the Heraclean and the Thesean myths, and to Attic legend in general, as well as to Theban, to which already Aeschylus had had recourse, and to the side or subsidiary myths connected with these several groups. These substantially remained to the last the themes of Greek tragedy, the Trojan myths always retaining so prominent a place that Lucian could jest on the universality of their dominion. Purely invented subjects were occasionally treated by the later tragedians; of this innovation Agathon was the originator.65

Thespis is said to have introduced the use of a “prologue” and a “rhesis” (speech)—the former being probably the opening speech recited by the coryphaeus, the latter the dialogue between him and the actor. It was a natural result Construction. of the introduction of the second actor that a second rhesis should likewise be added; and this tripartite division would be the earliest form of the trilogy,—three sections of the same myth forming the beginning, middle and end of a single The Aeschylean trilogy. drama, marked off from one another by the choral songs. From this Aeschylus proceeded to the treatment of these several portions of a myth in three separate plays, connected together by their subject and by being performed in sequence on a single occasion. This is the Aeschylean trilogy, of which we have only one extant example, the Oresteia—as to which critics may differ whether Aeschylus adhered in it to his principle that the strength should 491 lie in the middle—in other words, that the interest should centre in the second play. In any case, the symmetry of the trilogy The tetralogy. was destroyed by the practice of performing after it a satyr-drama, probably as a rule, if not always, connected in subject with the trilogy, which thus became a tetralogy, though this term, unlike the other, seems to be a purely technical expression invented by the learned.66 Sophocles, a more conscious and probably a more self-critical artist than Aeschylus, may be assumed from the first to have elaborated his tragedies with greater care; and to this, as well as to his innovation of the third actor, which materially added to the fulness of the action, we may attribute his introduction of the custom of contending for the prize with single plays. It does not follow that he never produced connected trilogies, though we have no example of such by him or any later author; on the other hand, there is no proof that either he or any of his successors ever departed from the Aeschylean rule of producing three tragedies, followed by a satyr-drama, on the same day. This remained the third and last stage in the history of the construction Complicated actions. of Attic tragedy. The tendency of its action towards complication was a natural progress, and is emphatically approved by Aristotle. This complication, in which Euripides excelled, led to his use of prologues, in which one of the characters opens the play by an exposition of the circumstances under which its action begins. This practice, though ridiculed by Aristophanes, was too convenient not to be adopted by the successors of Euripides, and Menander transferred it to comedy. As the dialogue increased in importance, so the dramatic significance of the chorus diminished. While in Aeschylus it mostly, and in Sophocles occasionally, takes part in the action, its songs could not but more and more approach the character of lyrical intermezzos; and this they openly assumed when Agathon began the practice of inserting choral songs (embolima) which had nothing to do with the action of the play. In the general contrivance of their actions it was only natural that, as compared with Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides should exhibit an advance in both freedom and ingenuity; but the palm, due to a treatment at once piously adhering to the substance of the ancient legends and original in an effective dramatic treatment of them, must be given to Sophocles. Euripides was, moreover, less skilful in untying complicated actions than in weaving them; hence his frequent resort67 to the expedient of the deus ex machina, which Sophocles employs only in his latest play.68

The other distinctions to be drawn between the dramatic qualities of the three great tragic masters must be mainly based upon a critical estimate of the individual genius of each. In the characters of their tragedies, Aeschylus Characters. and Sophocles avoided those lapses of dignity with which from one point of view Euripides has been charged by Aristophanes and other critics, but which, from another, connect themselves with his humanity. If his men and women are less heroic and statuesque, they are more like men and women. Aristotle objected to the later tragedians that, compared with the great masters, they were deficient in the drawing of character—by which he meant the lofty drawing of lofty character. In Diction. diction, the transition is even more manifest from the “helmeted phrases” of Aeschylus, who had Milton’s love of long words and sonorous proper names, to the play of Euripides’ “smooth and diligent tongue”; but to a sustained style even he remained essentially true, and it was reserved for his successors to introduce into tragedy the “low speech”—i.e. the conversational language—of comedy. Upon the whole, however, the Euripidean diction seems to have remained the standard of later tragedy, the flowery style of speech introduced by Agathon finding no permanent favour.

Finally, Aeschylus is said to have made certain reforms in tragic costume of which the object is self-evident—to have improved the mask, and to have invented the cothurnus Improvements in costume, &c. or buskin, upon which the actor was raised to loftier stature. Euripides was not afraid of rags and tatters; but the sarcasms of Aristophanes on this head seem feeble to those who are aware that they would apply to King Lear as well as to Telephus.

Periods of Greek Comedy.—The history of Greek comedy is likewise that of an essentially Attic growth, although Sicilian comedy was earlier in date than her Attic sister or descendant. The former is represented by Epicharmus (fl. 500), and by the names of one or two other poets. It probably had a chorus, and, dealing as it did in a mixture of philosophical discourse, antithetical rhetoric and wild buffoonery, necessarily varied in style. His comedies were the earliest examples of the class distinguished as motoriae from the statariae and the mixtae by their greater freedom and turbulence of movement. Though in some respects Sicilian comedy seems to have resembled the Middle rather than the Old Attic comedy, its subjects sometimes, like those of the latter, coincided with the myths of tragedy, of which they were doubtless parodies. The so-called “mimes” of Sophron (fl. 430) were dramatic scenes from Sicilian everyday life, intended, not for the stage, but for recitation, and classed as “male” and “female” according to the sex of the characters.

Attic comedy is usually divided into three periods or species.

I. Old comedy, which dated from the complete establishment of democracy by Pericles, though a comedy directed against Themistocles is mentioned. The Megarean farcical entertainments had long spread in the rural districts The Old comedy. of Attica, and were now introduced into the city, where from about 460 onwards the “comus” became a matter of public concern. Cratinus (c. 450-422) and Crates (c. 449-425) first moulded these beginnings into the forms of Attic art. The final victory of Pericles and the democratic party may be reckoned from the ostracism of Thucydides (444); and so eagerly was the season of freedom employed by the comic poets that already four years afterwards a law—which, however, remained only a short time in force—limited their licence. Cratinus,69 an exceedingly bold and broad satirist, apparently of conservative tendencies, was followed by Eupolis (446-after 415), every one of whose plays appears to have attacked some individual,70 by Phrynichus, Plato and others; but the representative of old comedy in its fullest development is Aristophanes (c. 444-c. 380), a comic poet of unique and unsurpassed genius. Dignified by the acquisition of a chorus (more numerous—twenty-four to twelve or afterwards fifteen—though of a less costly kind than Aristophanes. the tragic) of masked actors, and of scenery and machinery, as well as by a corresponding literary elaboration and elegance of style, Old Attic comedy nevertheless remained true both to its origin and to the purposes of its introduction into the free imperial city. Its special season was at the festival of the Lenaea, when the Athenians could enjoy the fun against one another without espying strangers; but it was also performed at the Great Dionysia. It borrowed much from tragedy, but it retained the phallic abandonment of the old rural festivals, the licence of word and gesture, and the audacious directness of personal invective. These characteristics are not features peculiar to Aristophanes. He was twitted by some of the older comic poets with having degenerated from the full freedom of the art by a tendency to refinement, and he took credit to himself for having superseded the time-honoured cancan and the stale practical joking of his predecessors by a nobler kind of mirth. But in daring, as he likewise boasted, he had no peer; and the shafts of his wit, though dipped in wine-lees and at times feathered from very obscene fowl, flew at high game.71 He has been accused of seeking to degrade what he ought to have recognized as good72; and it has been shown with complete success that he is not to be taken as an impartial or accurate 492 authority on Athenian history. But partisan as he was, he was also a genuine patriot; and his very political sympathies—which were conservative, like those of the comic poets in general, not only because it was the old families upon whom the expense of the choregia in the main devolved—were such as have often stimulated the most effective political satire. Of the conservative quality of reverence he was, however, altogether devoid; and his love for Athens was that of the most free-spoken of sons. Flexible even in his religious notions, he was, in this as in other respects, ready to be educated by his times; and, like a true comic poet, he could be witty at the expense even of his friends, and, it might almost be said, of himself. In wealth of fancy73 and in beauty of lyric melody, he has few peers among the great poets of all times.

The distinctive feature of Old, as compared with Middle comedy, is the parabasis, the speech in which the chorus, moving towards and facing the audience, addressed it in the name of the poet, often abandoning all reference to the The parabasis. action of the play. The loss of the parabasis was involved in the loss of the chorus, of which comedy was deprived in consequence of the general reduction of expenditure upon the comic drama, culminating in the law of the personally aggrieved dithyrambic poet Cinesias (396).74 But with the downfall of the independence of Athenian public life, the ground had been cut from under the feet of its most characteristic representative. Already in 414, in the anxious time after the sailing of the Sicilian expedition, the law of Syracosius had prohibited the comic poets from making direct reference to current events; but the Birds had taken their flight above the range of all regulations. The catastrophe of the city (405) was preceded by the temporary overthrow of the democracy (411), and was followed by the establishment of an oligarchical “tyranny” under Spartan protection; and, when liberty was restored (404), the citizens for a time addressed themselves to their new life in a soberer spirit, and continued (or passed) the law prohibiting the introduction by name of any individual as one of the personages of a play. The change to which comedy had to accommodate itself was one which cannot be defined by precise dates, yet it was not the less inevitable in its progress and results. Comedy, in her struggle for existence, now chiefly devoted herself to literary and social themes, such as the criticism of tragic poets,75 and the literary craze of women’s rights,76 and the transition to Middle comedy accomplished itself. Of the later plays of Aristophanes, three77 are without a parabasis, and in the last of those preserved to us which properly belongs to Middle comedy78 the chorus is quite insignificant.

II. Middle comedy, whose period extends over the remaining years of Athenian freedom (from about 400 to 338), thus differed in substance as well as in form from its predecessor. It is represented by the names of thirty-seven writers The Middle Comedy. (more than double the number of poets attributed to Old comedy), among whom Eubulus, Antiphanes and Alexis are stated to have been pre-eminently fertile and successful. It was a comedy of manners as well as character, although its ridicule of particular classes of men tended to the creation of standing types, such as soldiers, parasites, courtesans, revellers, and—a favourite figure already drawn by Aristophanes79—the self-conceited cook. In style it necessarily inclined to become more easy and conversational and to substitute insinuation for invective; while in that branch which was devoted to the parodying of tragic myths its purpose may have been to criticize, but its effect must have been to degrade. This species of the comic art had found favour at Athens already before the close of the great civil war; its inventor was the Thasian Hegemon, whose Gigantomachia was amusing the Athenians on the day when the news arrived of the Sicilian disaster.

III. New comedy, which is dated from the establishment of the Macedonian supremacy (338), is merely a further development of Middle, from which indeed it was not distinguished till the time of Hadrian. If its favourite types were The New Comedy. more numerous, including the captain (of mercenaries)—the original of a long line of comic favourites—the cunning slave, &c., they were probably also more conventional. New comedy appears to have first constituted love intrigues the main subject of dramatic actions. The most famous of the sixty-four writers said to have belonged to this period of comedy were Philemon (fl. from 330), Menander (342-329) and his contemporary Philemon and Menander. Diphilus. Of these authors we know something from fragments, but more from their Latin adapters Plautus and Terence. As comedians of character, they were limited by a range of types which left little room for originality of treatment; in the construction of their plots they were skillful rather than varied. In style, as well as to some extent in construction, Menander seems to have taken Euripides as his model, infusing into his comedy an element of moral and sentimental reflection, which refined if it did not enliven it.

New comedy, and with it Greek comedy proper, is regarded as having come to an end with Posidippus (fl. c. 280). Other comic writers of a later date are, however, mentioned, among them Rhinthon of Tarentum (fl. c. 300), whose Decay of comedy. mixed compositions have been called by various names, among them by that of “phlyacographies” (from phlyax, idle chatter). He was succeeded by Sopater, Sotades and others; but the dramatic element in these often obscene, but not perhaps altogether frivolous, travesties is not always clearly ascertainable. It is certain that Greek comedy gradually ceased to be productive; and though even in its original form it long continued to be acted in imperial Rome, these are phases of its history which may here be passed by.

The religious origin of the Attic drama impresses itself upon all its most peculiar features. Theatrical performances were held at Athens only at fixed seasons in the early part of the year—at the Bacchic festivals of the country Results of religious origin of Attic drama. Dionysia (vintage), the Lenaea (wine-press), probably at the Anthesteria, and above all, at the Great Dionysia, or the Dionysia par excellence, at the end of March and beginning of April, when in her most glorious age Athens was crowded with visitors from the islands and cities of her federal empire. As a part of religious worship, the performances took place in a sacred locality—the Lenaeum on the south-eastern declivity of the Acropolis, where the first wine-press (lenos) was said to have been set up, and where now an altar of Bacchus (thymele) formed the centre of the theatre. For the same reason the exhibitions claimed the attendance of the whole population, and room was therefore provided on a grand scale—according to the Platonic Socrates, for “more than 30,000” spectators (see Theatre). The performances lasted all day, or were at least, in accordance with their festive character, extended to as great a length as possible. To their religious origin is likewise to be attributed the fact that they were treated as a matter of state concern. The expenses of the chorus, which in theory represented the people at large, were defrayed on behalf of the state by the liturgies (public services) of wealthy citizens, chosen in turn by the tribes to be choragi (leaders, i.e. providers of the chorus), the duty of training being, of course, deputed by them to professional persons (chorodidascali). Publicly appointed and sworn judges decided between the merits of the dramas produced in competition with one another; the successful poet, performers and choragus were crowned with ivy, and the last-named was allowed at his own expense to consecrate a tripod in memory of his victory in the neighbourhood of the sacred Bacchic enclosure. Such a monument—one of the most graceful relics of ancient Athens—still stands in the place where it was erected, and recalls to posterity the victory of Lysicrates, achieved in the same year as that of Alexander on the Granicus. The dramatic exhibitions being a matter of religion and state, the entrance money (theoricum), which had been introduced to 493 prevent overcrowding, was from the time of Pericles provided out of the public treasury. The whole population had a right to its Bacchic holiday; neither women, nor boys, nor slaves were excluded from theatrical spectacles at Athens.

The religious character of dramatic performances at Athens, and the circumstances under which they accordingly took place, likewise determined their externals of costume and scenery. The actor’s dress was originally the festive Costume and scenery. Dionysian attire, of which it always retained the gay and variegated hues. The use of the mask, surmounted, high over the forehead, by an ample wig, was due to the actor’s appearing in the open air and at a distance from most of the spectators; the several species of mask were elaborated with great care, and adapted to the different types of theatrical character. The cothurnus, or thick-soled boot, which further raised the height of the tragic actor (while the comedian wore a thin-soled boot), was likewise a relic of Bacchic costume. The scenery was, in the simplicity of its original conception, suited to open-air performances; but in course of time the art of scene-painting came to be highly cultivated, and movable scenes were contrived, together with machinery of the ambitious kind required by the Attic drama, whether for bringing gods down from heaven, or for raising mortals aloft.

On a stage and among surroundings thus conventional, it might seem as if little scope could have been left for the actor’s art. But, though the demands made upon the Attic actor differed in kind even from those made upon his Actors. Roman successor, and still more from those which the histrionic art has to meet in modern times, they were not the less rigorous. Mask and buskin might increase his stature, and the former might at once lend the appropriate expression to his appearance and the necessary resonance to his voice. But in declamation, dialogue and lyric passage, in gesticulation and movement, he had to avoid the least violation of the general harmony of the performance. Yet it is clear that the refinements of by-play must, from the nature of the case, have been impossible on the Attic stage; the gesticulation must have been broad and massive; the movement slow, and the grouping hard, in tragedy; and the weighty sameness of the recitation must have had an effect even more solemn and less varied than the half-chant which still lingers on the modern stage. Not more than three actors, as has been seen, appeared in any Attic tragedy. The actors were provided by the poet; perhaps the performer of the first parts (protagonist) was paid by the state. It was again a result of the religious origin of Attic dramatic performances and of the public importance attached to them, that the actor’s profession was held in high esteem. These artists were as a matter of course free Athenian citizens, often the dramatists themselves, and at times were employed in other branches of the public service. In later days, when tragedy had migrated to Alexandria, and when theatrical entertainments had spread over all the Hellenic world, the art of acting seems to have reached an unprecedented height, and to have taken an extraordinary hold of the public mind. Synods, or companies, of Dionysian artists abounded, who were in possession of various privileges, and in one instance at least (at Pergamum) of rich endowments. The most important of these was the Ionic company, established first in Teos, and afterwards in Lebedos, near Colophon, which is said to have lasted longer than many a famous state. We likewise hear of strolling companies performing in partibus. Thus it came to pass that the vitality of some of the masterpieces of the Greek drama is without a parallel in theatrical history; while Greek actors were undoubtedly among the principal and most effective agents of the spread of literary culture through a great part of the known world.

The theory and technical system of the drama exercised the critical powers both of dramatists, such as Sophocles, and of the greatest among Greek philosophers. If Plato touched the subject incidentally, Aristotle has in his Poetics Writers on the theory of the drama. (after 334) included an exposition of it, which, mutilated as it is, has formed the basis of all later systematic inquiries. The specialities of Greek tragic dramaturgy refer above all to the chorus; its general laws are those of the regular drama of all times. The theories of Aristotle and other earlier writers were elaborated by the Alexandrians, many of whom doubtless combined example with precept; they also devoted themselves to commentaries on the old masters, such as those in which Didymus (c. 30 b.c.) abundantly excelled, and collected a vast amount of learning on dramatic composition in general, which was doomed to perish, with so many other treasures, in the flames kindled by religious fanaticism.

8. Roman Drama

In its most productive age, as well as in the times of its decline and decay, the Roman drama exhibits the continued coexistence of native forms by the side of those imported from Greece—either kind being necessarily often subject to the influence of the other. Italy (with Sicily) has ever been the native land of acting and of scenic representation; and, though Roman dramatic literature at its height is but a faint reflex of Greek examples, there is perhaps no branch of Roman literary art more congenial than this to the soil whence it sprang.

Quick observation and apt improvisation have always been distinctive features in the Italian character. Thus in the rural festivities of Italy there developed from a very early period in lively intermixture the elements of the Origin of its native forms. dance, of jocular and abusive succession of song, speech and dialogue, and of an assumption of character such as may be witnessed in any ordinary dialogue carried on by southern Italians at the present day. Not less indigenous was the invariable accompaniment of the music of the flute (tibia). The occasions of these half obligatory, half impromptu festivities were religious celebrations, public or private—among the latter more especially weddings, which have in all ages been provocative of demonstrative mirth. The so-called Fescennine verses (from Fescennium in southern Etruria, and very possibly connected with fascinum = phallos), which were afterwards confined to weddings, and ultimately suggested an elaborate species of artistic poetry, never merged into actual dramatic performances. Saturae. In the saturae, on the other hand—a name originally suggested by the goatskins of the shepherds, but from primitive times connected with the “fulness” of both performers and performance—there seems from the first to have been a dramatic element; they were probably comic songs or stories recited with gesticulation and the invariable flute accompaniment. Introduced into the city, these entertainments received a new impulse from the performances of the Etruscan players (ludiones) who had been brought into Rome when scenic games (ludi scenici) were introduced there in 364 b.c. for purposes Istriones. of religious propitiation. These (h)istriones, as they were called at Rome (istri had been their native name), who have had the privilege of transmitting their appellation to the entire histrionic art and its professors, were at first only dancers and pantomimists in a city where their speech was exotic. But their performances encouraged and developed those of other players and mountebanks, so that after the establishment of the regular drama at Rome on the Greek model, the saturae came to be performed as farcical after-pieces (exodia), until they gave way to other species. Among these the mimi were at Rome Mimi. probably coeval in their beginnings with the stage itself, where those who performed them were afterwards known under the same name, possibly in the place of an older appellation (planipedes, bare-footed, representatives of slaves and humble folk). These loose farces, after being probably at first performed independently, were then played as after-pieces, till in the imperial period, when they reasserted their predominance, they were again produced independently. At the close of the republican period the mimus found its way into literature, through D. Laberius, C. Matius and Publilius Syrus, and was assimilated in both form and subjects to other varieties of the comic drama—preserving, however, as its distinctive feature, a preponderance of the mimic or gesticulatory element. Together with the pantomimus (see below) the mimus continued to prevail in the days of the Empire, having transferred its 494 original grossness to its treatment of mythological subjects, with which it dealt in accordance with the demands of a “lubrique and adulterate age.” As a matter of course, the mimus freely borrowed from other species, among which, so far as they were Atellanae. of native Italian origin, the Atellane fables (from Atella in Campania) call for special mention. Very probably of Oscan origin, they began with delineations of the life of small towns, in which dramatic and other satire has never ceased to find a favourite subject. The principal personages in these living sketches gradually assumed a fixed and conventional character, which they retained even when, after the final overthrow of Campanian independence (210), the Atellanae had been transplanted to Rome. Here the heavy father or husband (pappus), the ass-eared glutton (maccus), the full-cheeked, voracious chatterbox (bucco), and the wily sharper (dorsenus) became accepted comic types, and, with others of a similar kind, were handed down, to reappear in the modern Italian drama. In these characters lay the essence of the Atellanae: their plots were extremely simple; the dialogue (perhaps interspersed with songs in the Saturnian metre) was left to the performers to improvise. In course of time these plays assumed a literary form, being elaborated as after-pieces by Lucius Pomponius of Bononia, Novius and other authors; but under the Empire they were gradually absorbed in the pantomimes.

The regular, as distinct from the popular, Roman drama, on the other hand, was of foreign (i.e. Greek) origin; and its early history, at all events, attaches itself to more or less fixed dates. It begins with the year 240 b.c., Origin of the regular Roman drama. when at the ludi Romani, held with unusual splendour after the first Punic War, its victorious conclusion was, in accordance with Macedonian precedent, celebrated by the first production of a tragedy and a comedy on the Roman stage. The author of both, who appeared in person as an actor, was Livius Andronicus (b. 278 or earlier), a native of the Greek city of Tarentum, where the Dionysiac festivals enjoyed high popularity. His models were, in tragedy, the later Greek tragedians and their revisions of the three great Attic masters; in comedy, we may feel sure, Menander and his school. Greek examples continued to dominate the regular Roman drama during the whole of its course, even when it resorted to native themes.

The main features of Roman tragedy admit of no doubt, although our conclusions respecting its earlier progress are only derived from analogy, from scattered notices, especially of the titles of plays, and from such fragments—mostly History of Roman tragedy. very brief—as have come down to us. Of the known titles of the tragedies of Livius Andronicus, six belong to the Trojan cycle, and this preference consistently maintained itself among the tragedians of the “Trojugenae”; next in popularity seem to have been the myths of the house of Tantalus, of the Pelopidae and of the Argonauts. The distinctions drawn by later Roman writers between the styles of the tragic poets of the republican period must in general be taken on trust. The Campanian Cn. Naevius (fl. from 236) wrote comedies as well as tragedies, so that the rigorous separation observed among the Greeks in the cultivation of the two dramatic species was at first neglected at Rome. His realistic tendency, displayed in that fondness for political allusions which brought upon him the vengeance of a noble family (the Metelli) incapable of understanding a joke of this description, might perhaps under more favourable circumstances have led him more fully to develop a Praetexta. new tragic species invented by him. But the fabula praetexta or praetextata (from the purple-bordered robe worn by higher magistrates) was not destined to become the means of emancipating the Roman serious drama from the control of Greek examples. In design, it was national tragedy on historic subjects of patriotic interest—which the Greeks had treated only in isolated instances; and one might at first sight marvel why, after Naevius and his successors had produced skilful examples of the species, it should have failed to overshadow and outlast in popularity a tragedy telling the oft-told foreign tales of Thebes and Mycenae, or even the pseudo-ancestral story of Troy. But it should not be forgotten to how great an extent so-called early Roman history consisted of the traditions of the gentes, and how little the party-life of later republican Rome lent itself to a dramatic treatment likely to be acceptable both to the nobility and to the multitude. As for the emperors, the last licence they would have permitted to the theatre was a free popular treatment of the national history; if Augustus prohibited the publication of a tragedy by his adoptive father on the subject of Oedipus, it was improbable that he or his successors should have sanctioned the performance of plays dealing with the earthly fortunes of Divus Julius himself, or with the story of Marius, or that of the Gracchi, or any of the other tragic themes of later republican or imperial history. The historic drama at Rome thus had no opportunity for a vigorous life, even could tragedy have severed its main course from the Greek literature of which it has been well called a “free-hand copy.” The praetextae of which we know chiefly treat—possibly here and there helped to form80—legends of a hoary antiquity, or celebrate battles chronicled in family or public records81; and in the end the species died a natural death.82

Q. Ennius (239-168), the favourite poet of the great families, was qualified by his Tarentine education, which taught the Oscan youth the Greek as well as the Latin tongue (so that he boasted “three souls”), to become the literary Ennius and his successors. exponent of the Hellenizing tendencies of his age of Roman society. Nearly half of the extant names of his tragedies belong to the Trojan cycle; and Euripides was clearly his favourite source and model. M. Pacuvius (b. c. 229), like Ennius subject from his youth up to the influences of Greek civilization, and the first Roman dramatist who devoted himself exclusively to the tragic drama, was the least fertile of the chief Roman tragedians, but was regarded by the ancients as indisputably superior to Ennius. He again was generally (though not uniformly) held to have been surpassed by L. Accius (b. 170), a learned scholar and prolific dramatist, of whose plays 50 titles and a very large number of fragments have been preserved. The plays of the last-named three poets maintained themselves on the stage till the close of the republic; and Accius was quoted by the emperor Tiberius.83 Of the other tragic writers of the republic several were dilettanti—such as the great orator and eminent politician C. Julius Strabo; the cultivated officer Q. Tullius Cicero, who made an attempt, disapproved by his illustrious brother, to introduce the satyr-drama into the Roman theatre; L. Cornelius Balbus, a Caesarean partisan; and finally C. Julius Caesar himself.

Tragedy continued to be cultivated under the earlier emperors; and one author, the famous and ill-fated L. Annaeus Seneca (4 b.c.-a.d. 65), left behind him a series of works which were to exercise a paramount influence upon the Seneca. beginnings of modern tragedy. In accordance with the character of their author’s prose-work, they exhibit a strong predominance of the rhetorical element, and an artificiality of style far removed from that of the poets Sophocles and Euripides, from whom Seneca derived his themes. Yet he is interesting, not only by these devices and by a “sensational” choice of themes, but also by a quickness of treatment which we may call “modern,” a quality not easily resisted in a dramatist. The metrification of his plays is very strict, and they were doubtless intended for recitation, whether or not also designed for the stage. A few tragic poets are mentioned after Seneca, till about the reign of Domitian (81-96) the list comes to an end. The close of Roman tragic literature is obscurer than its beginning; and, while there are traces of tragic performances at Rome as late as even the 6th century, we are ignorant how long the works of the old 495 masters of Roman tragedy maintained themselves on the stage.

It would obviously be an error to draw from the plays of Seneca conclusions as to the method and style of the earlier writers. In general, however, no important changes seem to have occurred in the progress of Roman tragic Characteristics of Roman tragedy. composition. The later Greek plays remained, so far as can be gathered, the models in treatment; and, inasmuch as at Rome the several plays were performed singly, there was every inducement to make their action as full and complicated as possible. The dialogue-scenes (diverbia) appear to have been largely interspersed with musical passages (cantica); but the effect of the latter must have suffered from the barbarous custom of having the songs sung by a boy, placed in front of the flute-player (cantor), while the actor accompanied them with gesticulations. The chorus (unlike the Greek) stood on the stage itself and seems occasionally at least to have taken part in the action. But the whole of the musical element can hardly have attained to so full a development as among the Greeks. The divisions of the action appear at first to have been three; from the addition of prologue and epilogue may have arisen the invention (probably due in tragedy to Varro) of the fixed number of five acts. In style, such influence as the genius of Roman literature could exercise must have been in the direction of the rhetorical and the pathetic; a superfluity of energy on the one hand, and a defect of poetic richness on the other, can hardly have failed to characterize these, as they did all the other productions of early Roman poetry.

In Roman comedy two different kinds—respectively called palliata and togata from well-known names of dress—were distinguished,—the former treating Greek subjects and imitating Greek originals, the latter professing a native History of Roman comedy. character. The palliata sought its originals especially in New Attic comedy; and its authors, as they advanced in refinement of style, became more and more dependent upon their models, and unwilling to gratify the coarser Palliata. tastes of the public by local allusions or gross seasonings. But that kind of comedy which shrinks from the rude breath of popular applause usually has in the end to give way to less squeamish rivals; and thus, after the species had been cultivated for about a century (c. 250-150 b.c.), palliatae ceased to be composed except for the amusement of select circles, though the works of the most successful authors, Plautus and Terence, kept the stage even after the establishment of the empire. Among the earlier writers of palliatae were the tragic poets Andronicus, Naevius and Ennius, but they were alike Plautus. surpassed by T. Maccius Plautus (254-184), nearly all of whose comedies esteemed genuine by Varro—not less than 20 in number—have been preserved, though twelve of them were not known to the modern world before 1429. He was exclusively a comic poet, and, though he borrowed his plots from the Greeks—from Diphilus and Philemon apparently in preference to the more refined Menander—there was in him a genuinely national as well as a genuinely popular element. Of the extent of his originality it is impossible to judge; probably it lies in his elaboration of types of character and the comic turns of his dialogue rather than in his plots. Modern comedy is indebted to him in all these points; and, in consequence of this fact, as well as of the attention his text has for linguistic reasons received from scholarship both ancient and modern, his merits have met with quite their full share of recognition. Caecilius Statius (an Insubrian brought to Rome as a captive c. 200) stands midway between Plautus and Terence, but no Terence. plays of his remain. P. Terentius Afer (c. 185-159) was, as his cognomen implies, a native of Carthage, of whose conqueror he enjoyed the patronage. His six extant comedies seem to be tolerably close renderings of their Greek originals, nearly all of which were plays of Menander. It was the good fortune of the works of Terence to be preserved in an exceptionally large number of MSS. in the monastic libraries of the middle ages, and thus (as will be seen) to become a main link between the ancient and the Christian drama. As a dramatist he is distinguished by correctness of style rather than by variety in his plots or vivacity in his characters; his chief merit—and at the same time the quality which has rendered him so suitable for modern imitation—is to be sought in the polite ease of his dialogue. In general, the main features of the palliatae, which were divided into five acts, are those of the New Comedy of Athens, like which they had no chorus; for purposes of explanation from author to audience the prologue sufficed; the Roman versions were probably terser than their originals, which they often altered by the process called contamination.

The togatae, in the wider sense of the term, included all Roman plays of native origin—among the rest, the praetextae, in contradistinction to which and to the transient species of the trabeatae (from the dress of the knights) Togatae. the comedies dealing with the life of the lower classes were afterwards called tabernariae (from taberna, a shop), a name suited by some of their extant titles,84 while others point to the treatment of provincial scenes.85 The togata, which was necessarily more realistic than the palliata, and doubtless fresher as well as coarser in tone, flourished in Roman literature between 170 and 80 b.c. In this species Titinius, all whose plays bear Latin titles and were tabernariae, was succeeded by the more refined L. Afranius, who, though still choosing natural subjects, seems to have treated them in the spirit of Menander. His plays continued to be performed under the empire, though with an admixture of elements derived from that lower species, the pantomime, to which they also were in the end to succumb. The Romans likewise adopted the burlesque kind of comedy called from its inventor Rhinthonica, and by other names (see above). But with them, the general course of the drama, which with the Greeks lost itself in the sand, could not fail to be merged into the flood.

The end of Roman dramatic literature was dilettantism and criticism; the end of the Roman drama was spectacle and show, buffoonery and sensual allurement. It was for this that the theatre had passed through all its early The Roman theatre. troubles, when the political puritanism of the old school had upheld the martial games of the circus against the enervating influence of the stage. In those days the guardians of Roman virtue had sought to diminish the attractions of the theatre by insisting upon its remaining as uncomfortable as possible; but as was usual at Rome, the privileges of the upper orders were at last extended to the population at large, though a separation of classes continued to be characteristic of a Roman audience. The first permanent theatre erected at Rome was that of Cn. Pompeius (55 b.c.), which contained nearly 18,000 seats; but even of this the portion allotted to the performers (scaena) was of wood; nor was it till the reign of Tiberius (a.d. 22) that, after being burnt down, the edifice was rebuilt in stone.

Though a species of amateur literary censorship, introduced by Pompeius, became customary in the Augustan age, in general the drama’s laws at Rome were given by the drama’s patrons—in other words, the production of plays was Actors. a matter of private speculation. The exhibitions were contracted for with the officials charged with the superintendence of public amusements (curatores ludorum); the actors were slaves trained for the art, mostly natives of southern Italy or Greece. Many of them rose to reputation and wealth, purchased their freedom, and themselves became directors of companies; but, though Sulla might make a knight of Roscius, and Caesar and his friends defy ancient prejudice, the stigma of civil disability (infamia) was not removed from the profession, which in the great days of the Attic drama had been held in honour at Athens. But, on the whole, the social treatment of actors was easy in the days of the early empire; senators and knights actually appeared on the stage; Nero sang on it; and a pantomimus was made praefectus urbi by Elagabalus.

The actor’s art was carried on at Rome under conditions differing in other respects from those of the Greek theatre. 496 The Romans loved a full stage, and from the later period of the republic liked to see it crowded with supernumeraries. This accorded with their military instincts, and with the general grossness of their tastes, which led them in the theatre as well as in the circus to delight in spectacle and tumult, and to applaud Pompeius when he furnished forth the return of Agamemnon in the Clytaemnestra with a grand total of 600 heavily-laden mules. On the other hand, the actors stood nearer to the spectators in the Roman theatre than in the Greek, the stage (pulpitum) not being separated from the first rows of the audience by an orchestra occupied by the chorus; and this led in earlier times to the absence of masks, diversely coloured wigs serving to distinguish the age of the characters. Roscius, however, is said (because of an obliquity of vision which disfigured his countenance) to have introduced the use of masks; and the retrograde innovation, though disapproved of, maintained itself. The tragic actors wore the crepida, corresponding to the cothurnus, and a heavy toga, which in the praetexta had the purple border giving its name to the species. The conventional costumes of the various kinds of comedy are likewise indicated by their names. The comparative nearness of the actors to the spectators encouraged the growth of that close criticism of acting which has always been dear to an Italian public, and which in ancient days manifested itself at Rome in all the ways familiar to modern audiences. Where there is criticism, devices are apt to spring up for anticipating or directing it; and the evil institution of the claque is modelled on Roman precedent, typified by the standing conclusion “plaudite!” in the epilogues of the palliatae.

In fine, though the art of acting at Rome must have originally formed itself on Greek example and precept, it was doubtless elaborated with a care unknown to the greatest Attic artists. Its most famous representatives were Gallus, Roscius and Aesopus. called after his emancipation Q. Roscius Gallus (d. c. 62 b.c.), who, like the great “English Roscius,” excelled equally in tragedy and comedy, and his younger contemporary Clodius Aesopus, a Greek by birth, likewise eminent in both branches of his art, though in tragedy more particularly. Both these great actors are said to have been constant hearers of the great orator Hortensius; and Roscius wrote a treatise on the relations between oratory and acting. In the influence of oratory upon the drama are perhaps to be sought the chief among the nobler features of Roman tragedy to which a native origin may be fairly ascribed.

9. Downfall of the Classical Drama

The ignoble end of the Roman—and with it of the ancient classical—drama has been already foreshadowed. The elements of dance and song, never integrally united with the dialogue in Roman tragedy, were now altogether separated from it. While it became customary simply to recite tragedies to the small audiences who continued (or, as a matter of courtesy, affected) to appreciate them, the pantomimus commended itself to the heterogeneous multitudes of the Roman theatre and to an effete Pantomimus. upper class by confining the performance of the actor to gesticulation and dancing, a chorus singing the accompanying text. The species was developed with extraordinary success already under Augustus by Pylades and Bathyllus; and so popular were these entertainments that even eminent poets, such as Lucan (d. a.d. 65), wrote the librettos for these fabulae salticae (ballets), of which the subjects were generally mythological, only now and then historical, and chiefly of an amorous kind. A single masked performer was able to enchant admiring crowds by the art of gesticulation and movement only. In what direction this art tended, when suiting itself to the most abnormal demands of a recklessly sensual age, may be gathered from the remark of one of the last pagan historians of the empire, that the introduction of pantomimes was a sign of the general moral decay of the world which began with the Mimus. beginning of the monarchy. Comedy more easily lost itself in the cognate form of the mimus, which survived all other kinds of comic entertainments because of its more audacious immorality and open obscenity. Women took part in these performances, by means of which, as late as the 6th century, a mima acquired a celebrity which ultimately raised her to the imperial throne, and perhaps occasioned the removal of a disability which would have rendered her marriage with Justinian impossible.

Meanwhile, the regular drama had lingered on, enjoying in all its forms imperial patronage in the days of the literary revival under Hadrian (117-138); but the perennial taste for the spectacles of the amphitheatre, which The drama and the Christian Church. was as strong at Byzantium as it was at Rome, and which reached its climax in the days of Constantine the Great (306-337), under whom the reaction set in, determined the downfall of the dramatic art. It was not absolutely extinguished even by the irruptions of the northern barbarians; but a bitter adversary had by this time risen into power. The whole authority of the Christian Church had, without usually caring to distinguish between the nobler and the looser elements in the drama, involved all its manifestations in a consistent condemnation (as in Tertullian’s De spectaculis, 200 c.), comprehended them all in an uncompromising anathema. When the faith of that Church was acknowledged as the religion of the Roman empire, the doom of the theatre was sealed. It died hard, however, both in the capitals and in many of the provincial centres of East and West alike. At Rome the last mention of spectacula as still in existence seems to date from the sway of the East-Goths under Theodoric and his successor, in the earlier half of the 6th century. In the capital and provinces of the Eastern empire the decline and fall of the stage cannot be similarly traced; but its end is authoritatively assigned to the period of Saracen invasions which began with the Omayyad dynasty in the 7th century.

It cannot be pretended that the doom which thus slowly and gradually overtook the Roman theatre was undeserved. The remnants of the literary drama had long been overshadowed by entertainments such as both earlier and later Roman emperors—Domitian and Trajan as well as Galerius and Constantine—had found themselves constrained to prohibit in the interests of public morality and order, by the bloody spectacles of the amphitheatre and by the maddening excitement of the circus. The art of acting had sunk into pandering to the lewd or frivolous itch of eye and ear; its professors had, in the words of a most judicious modern historian, become “a danger to the peace of householders, as well as to the peace of the streets”; and the theatre had contributed its utmost to the demoralization of a world. The attitude taken up by the Christian Church towards the stage was in general as unavoidable as its particular expressions were at times heated by fanaticism or distorted by ignorance. Had she not visited with her condemnation a wilderness of decay, she could not herself have become—what she little dreamt of becoming—the nursing mother of the new birth of an art which seemed incapable of regeneration.

Though already in the 4th century scenici had been excluded from the benefit of Christian sacraments, and excommunication had been extended to those who visited theatres instead of churches on Sundays and holidays, while the clergy Survival of the mimes. were absolutely prohibited from entering a theatre, and though similar enactments had followed at later dates—yet the entertainments of the condemned profession had never been entirely suppressed, and had even occasionally received imperial patronage. The legislation on the subject in the Codex Theodosianus (accepted by both empires in the earlier part of the 5th century) shows a measure of tolerance indicating a conviction that the theatrical profession could not be suppressed. Gradually, however, as they lost all footing in the centres of civic life, the mimes and their fellows became a wandering fraternity, who doubtless appeared at festivals when their services were required, and vanished again into the depths of the obscurity which has ever covered that mysterious existence—the strollers’ life. It was thus that these strange intermediaries of civilization carried down such traditions as survived of the acting drama of pagan antiquity into the succeeding ages.

(Article continued in Volume 8 Slice 7.)


1 e.g. Mrichchhakatīkā; Mālatī and Mādhava.

2 Vikrama and Urvāsī.

3 Śaŕada-Tilaka.

4 Sākuntalā; Uttara-Rāma-Charitra.

5 Arichandra, act iv.

6 Nāgānanda, act i.

7 Act iii.; cf. Nāgānanda, act iii.

8 Veni-Samhāra; Prachaṅda-Paṅdāva.

9 Viddha-Salabhanjika.

10 Sākuntalā; Uttara-Rāma-Charitra.

11 Ib. act vii.

12 Vikrama and Urvāsī, act iv.

13 Ratnāvalī.

14 Vikrama and Urvāsī: Arichandra; Nāgānanda.

15 Mȓichchhakatīkā.

16 Mȓichchhakatīkā.

17 Mudrā-Rakshasa.

18 Sākuntalā; Nāgānanda.

19 Sākuntalā, acts vi. and vii; Mālatī and Mādhava, act v.

20 Induction to Anargha-Rāghava.

21 Viddha-Salabhanjika.

22 Vikrama and Urvāsī.

23 The Self-Sacrifice of Tchao-Li.

24 Lai-Seng-Tchai (The Debt to be Paid in the Next World).

25 Lao-Seng-Eul.

26 Pi-Pa-Ki.

27 The Circle of Chalk (Hoeï-Lan-Ki); The Tunic Matched; The Revenge of Teou-Ngo.

28 Tchao-Meï-Hiang (The Intrigues of a Chambermaid).

29 Tchao-Meï-Hiang; Ho-Han-Chan; Pi-Pa-Ki.

30 Hoei-Lan-Ki, Prol. sc. i.

31 Tchao-Li.

32 Han-Kong-Tseu.

33 Pi-Pa-Ki, sc. 2.

34 Tchao-Meï-Hiang.

35 He-Lang-Tan, act iv.; cf. Hoei-Lan-Ki, act iv.

36 Hoeï-Lan-Ki.

37 Pi-Pa-Ki.

38 Pi-Pa-Ki, sc. 15.

39 Ho-Han-Chan, act ii.

40 Hoeï-Lan-Ki, act i.

41 Teou-Ngo-Yuen, act iii.

42 Hoeï-Lan-Ki, act ii.

43 Teou-Ngo-Yuen, act iii.

44 Pi-Pa-Ki, sc. 18.

45 Teou-Ngo-Yuen, act. iv.

46 Tchao-Meï-Hiang; Pi-Pa-Ki.

47 Hoeï-Lan-Ki.

48 Ho-Han-Chan.

49 Pi-Pa-Ki, sc. 14.

50 Han-Kong-Tseu.

51 Tchao-Meï-Hiang, act ii.

52 Teou-Ngo-Yuen, act ii.; cf. Hoeï-Lan-Ki.

53 Pi-Pa-Ki, sc. 5.

54 Translated by Comte de Gobineau, in his Religions et philosophies dans l’Asie centrale (Paris, 1865).

55 Alcestis; Orestes.

56 Persae.

57 Eumenides.

58 Antigone; Oedipus Rex.

59 Anthos.

60 Phrynichus, Capture of Miletus.

61 Id., Phoenissae; Aeschylus, Persae (Persae-trilogy?).

62 Moschion, Themistocles; Theodectes, Mausolus; Lycophron, Marathonii; Cassandrei; Socii; Philiscus, Themistocles.

63 Aeschylus, Septem c. Thebas; Prometheus Vinctus; Danais-trilogy; Sophocles, Antigone; Oedipus Coloneus; Euripides, Medea.

64 Quite distinct from this revision was the practice against which the law of Lycurgus was directed, of “cobbling and heeling” the dramas of the great masters by alterations of a kind familiar enough to the students of Shakespeare as improved by Colley Cibber and other experts. The later tragedians also appear to have occasionally transposed long speeches or episodes from one tragedy into another—a device largely followed by the Roman dramatists, and called contamination by Latin writers.

65 Anthos (The Flower).

66 One satyr-drama only is preserved to us, the Cyclops of Euripides, a dramatic version of the Homeric tale of the visit of Odysseus to Polyphemus. Lycophron, by using the satyr-drama (in his Menedemus) as a vehicle of personal ridicule applied it to a purpose resembling that of Old Attic Comedy.

67 Ion; Supplices; Iphigenia in Tauris; Electra; Helena; Hippolytus; Andromache.

68 Philoctetes.

69 Archilochi; Pytine (The Bottle).

70 Maricas (Cleon); Baptae (Alcibiades); Lacones (Cimon).

71 Knights.

72 Clouds.

73 Birds.

74 Strattis, The Choricide (against Cinesias).

75 Aristophanes, Frogs; Phrynichus, Musae; Tragoedi.

76 Aristophanes, Ecclesiazusae.

77 Lysistrata; Thesmophoriazusae; Plutus II.

78 Plutus.

79 Aeolosicon.

80 Naevius, Lupus (The Wolf); Romulus; Ennius, Sabinae (The Sabine Women); Accius, Brutus.

81 Naevius, Clastidium (Marcellus?); Ennius, Ambracia; Pacuvius, Paulus; Accius, Aeneadae (Decius?).

82 Balbus’s Iter (The Mission), an isolated play on an episode of the Pharsalian campaign, seems to have been composed for the mere private delectation of its author and hero. Octavia, a late praetexta ascribed to Seneca, was certainly not written by him.

83 “Oderint dum metuant” (Atreus).

84 Augur; Cinerarius (The Crimper); Fullonia (The Fuller’s Trade); Libertus (The Freedman); Tibicina (The Flute-Girl).

85 Brundisinae; Ferentinatis; Setina.







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