Dorothe’a, the heroine of Goethe’s poem entitled Hermann and Dorothea (1797).

DOR’OTHEUS (3 syl.), the man who spent all his life in endeavoring to elucidate the meaning of one single word in Homer.

DOR’OTHY (Old), the housekeeper of Simon Glover and his daughter “the fair maid of Perth.”—­Sir.  W. Scott, Fair Maid of Perth (time, Henry IV.).

Dor’othy, charwoman of Old Trapbois the miser and his daughter Martha.—­Sir W. Scott, Fortunes of Nigel (time, James I.).

DOROTHY PEARSON.  The childless wife of a Puritan settler in New England.  Her husband brings her home a boy whom he found crouching under the gallows of his Quaker father, and she adopts him at once, despite the opposition of “the congregation.”  A fortnight after he entered the family, his own mother invades the pulpit of the Orthodox meeting house, and delivers an anathema against her sect.  Her boy presses forward to meet her, but, after a conflict of emotions she returns him to Dorothy.  He submits, but pines for his mother through the months that pass before her return with the news of religious toleration.  Dorothy’s loving offices have smoothed the child’s pathway to the grave, and she hangs above him with tears of maternal grief as he breathes his last in his mother’s arms.—­Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Gentle Boy (1851.)

Dorothy Q.  Oliver Wendell Holmes’s “grandmother’s mother.”  Her portrait taken at the age of “thirteen summers, or less,” is the subject of his lines, “Dorothy Q. A Family Portrait.”

  “O, Damsel Dorothy!  Dorothy Q! 
  Strange is the gift that I owe to you;
  Such a gift as never a king
  Save to daughter or son might bring,—­
  All my tenure of heart and hand
  All my title to house and land,
  Mother and sister and child and wife
  And joy and sorrow, and death and life!”

DORRILLON (Sir William), a rich Indian merchant and a widower.  He had one daughter, placed under the care of Mr. and Miss Norberry.  When this daughter (Maria) was grown to womanhood, Sir William returned to England, and wishing to learn the character of Maria, presented himself under the assumed name of Mr. Mandred.  He found his daughter a fashionable young lady, fond of pleasure, dress, and play, but affectionate and good-hearted.  He was enabled to extricate her from some money difficulties, won her heart, revealed himself as her father, and reclaimed her.

Miss [Maria] Dorrillon, daughter of Sir William; gay, fashionable, light-hearted, accomplished, and very beautiful.  “Brought up without a mother’s care or father’s caution,” she had some excuse for her waywardness and frivolity.  Sir George Evelyn was her admirer, whom for a time she teased to the very top of her bent; then she married, loved and reformed.—­Mrs. Inchbald, Wives as they Were and Maids as they Are (1797).