[Danaë], daughter of Acrisius, king of Argos, confined by her father in an inaccessible tower of brass to prevent the fulfilment of an oracle that she should be the mother of a son who would kill him, but Zeus found access to her in the form of a shower of gold, and she became the mother of Perseus, by whose hand Acrisius met his fate. See [Perseus].
[Dana`ides], daughters of Danaüs, who, for murdering their husbands on the night after marriage, were doomed in the nether world to the impossible task of filling with water a vessel pierced with holes. See [Danaüs].
[Danaüs], son of Belus, and twin-brother of Ægyptus, whom fearing, he fled from with his fifty daughters to Argos, where he was chosen king; by-and-by the fifty sons of Ægyptus, his brother, came to Argos to woo, and were wedded to, their cousins, whom their father provided each with a dagger to murder her husband, which they did, all except Hypermnestra, whose husband, Lynceus, escaping, succeeded her father as king, to the defeat of the old man's purpose in the crime.
[Danby, Francis], painter, born near Wexford; settled for a time in Bristol, then in Switzerland, and finally at Exmouth; his works are mostly landscape, instinct with feeling, but some of them are historical, the subjects being taken from Scripture, as the "Passage of the Red Sea," or from pagan sources, as "Marius among the Ruins of Carthage" (1793-1861).
[Dance, George], English architect; was architect to the City of London, and designed the Mansion House, his chief work (1700-1768). George, his son, built Newgate Prison (1740-1825).
[Dance of Death], an allegorical representation in a dramatic or pictorial form of Death, figuring, originally as a skeleton, and performing his part as a chief actor all through the drama of life, and often amid the gayest scenes of it; a succession of woodcuts by Holbein in representation of this dance is well known.
[Dancing Mania], an epidemic of frequent occurrence, especially in German towns, during the Middle Ages, of the nature of hysteria, showing itself in convulsive movements beyond the control of the will, and in delirious acts, sometimes violently suicidal; the most signal occurrence of the mania was at Aix-la-Chapelle in July 1374.
[Dancourt, Florent Carton], French dramatist, a prolific author; a favourite of Louis XIV.; wrote comedies, chiefly on the follies of the middle classes of the time (1661-1725).
[Dandie Dinmont], a humorous, jovial store-farmer in "Guy Mannering."
[Dandin, George], one of Molière's comedies, illustrative of the folly a man commits when he marries a woman of higher rank than his own, George being his impersonation of a husband who has patiently to endure all the extravagant whims and fancies of his dame of a wife.