Domesday Book (or, Doomsday Book),—The name of one of the oldest and most valuable records of England, containing the results of a statistical survey of that country made by William the Conqueror, and completed in the year 1086. The origin of the name—which seems to have been given to other records of the same kind—is somewhat uncertain; but it has obvious reference to the supreme authority of the book in doom or judgment on the matters contained in it.
Dominie Sampson.—Guy Mannering, Scott. A village schoolmaster and scholar, poor as a church mouse, and modest as a girl. He cites Latin like a porcus literarum and exclaims “prodigious!” He is no uncommon personage in a country where a certain portion of learning is easily attained by those who are willing to suffer hunger and thirst in exchange for acquiring Greek and Latin.
Don Adriano de Armado.—A pompous, fantastical Spaniard in Shakespeare’s Love’s Labor’s Lost, who had a mint of phrases in his brain.
Donatello (don-ä-tel´lō).—The hero of Hawthorne’s romance The Marble Faun. He is a young Italian with a singular likeness to the Faun of Praxiteles. He leads an innocent but purely animal existence, until a sudden crime awakens his conscience and transforms his whole nature.
Don Cherubim.—The Bachelor of Salamanca, in Le Sage’s novel of this name; a man placed in different situations of life, and made to associate with all classes of society, in order to give the author the greatest possible scope for satire.
Donegild.—Man of Law’s Tale, Chaucer. The mother of Alla, king of Northumberland, hating Constance, the wife of Alla, because she was a Christian, she put her on a raft with her infant son and turned her adrift. When Alla returned from Scotland and discovered this cruelty of his mother, he put her to death. The tradition of St. Mungo resembles the Man of Law’s Tale in many respects.
Don Juan (don jū´an; Sp. pron. dōn Hö-än´).—Typifies in literature a profligate. He gives himself up so entirely to the gratification of sense, especially to the most powerful of all the impulses, that of love, that he acknowledges no higher consideration, and proceeds to murder the man that stands between him and his wish, fancying that in so doing he had annihilated his very existence. He then defies that Spirit to prove to his senses his existence. The Spirit returns and compels Don Juan to acknowledge the supremacy of spirit, and the worthlessness of a merely sensuous existence. The traditions concerning Don Juan have been dramatized by Tirso de Molina. Glück has a musical ballet, Don Juan, and Mozart has immortalized the character in his opera Don Giovanni; and Byron in a half-finished poem.
Don Quixote (dōn kē-hō´tā).—A celebrated Spanish romance by Cervantes. Don Quixote is represented as “a gaunt country gentleman of La Mancha, full of genuine Castilian honor and enthusiasm, gentle and dignified in his character, trusted by his friends, and loved by his dependents,” but “so completely crazed by long reading the most famous books of chivalry that he believes them to be true, and feels himself called on to become the impossible knight-errant they describe, and actually goes forth into the world to defend the oppressed and avenge the injured, like the heroes of his romances.” The fame of Cervantes will always rest upon this incomparable satire.
Dorrit.—See [Little Dorrit].