DENS, PETER, a Catholic theologian, born at Boom near Antwerp; author of a work entitled “Theologia Moralis et Dogmatica,” a minute and casuistic vindication in catechetical form of the tenets of the Catholic Church, and in use as a text-book in Catholic colleges (1690-1775).

DENTATUS, M. CURIUS, a Roman of the old stamp; as consul gained two victories over rival States and two triumphs in one year; drove Pyrrhus out of Italy (275 B.C.), and brought to Rome immense booty, of which he would take nothing to himself; in his retirement took to tilling a small farm with his own hand.

DENVER (134), the capital of Colorado, U.S., on a plain 5196 ft. above the sea-level; originally founded as a mining station in 1858, now a large and flourishing and well-appointed town; is the centre of a great trade, and a great mining district.

DEODAR (25), a small protected independent State in the NW. of Gujarat, India.

DEODORAKI, a glacier in the Caucasus Mountains.

DEPARCIEUX, French mathematician, born at Cessoux, dep. of Gard; known for the “Tables” which bear his name, containing a reckoning of the chances of longevity for different ages (1703-1768).

DEPARTMENT, a territorial division in France instituted in 1790, under which the old division into provinces was broken up; each department, of which there are now 87, is broken up into arrondissements.

DEPPING, a learned French historian, born at Muenster; wrote a “History of Normandy,” and on “Trade of Europe with the Levant” (1784-1853).

DEPTFORD (101), a town on the S. bank of the Thames, partly in Kent and partly in Surrey, now forming part of London; once with an extensive Government dockyard and arsenal, the site of it purchased by the Corporation of London as a market for foreign cattle; is now the central station for the Electric Light Company.

DE QUINCEY, THOMAS, a great English prose writer, born in Manchester; son of a merchant called Quincey; his father dying, he was under a guardian, who put him to school, from which in the end he ran away, wandered about in Wales for a time, and by-and-by found his way to London; in 1803 was sent to Oxford, which in 1807 he left in disgust; it was here as an anodyne he took to opium, and acquired that habit which was the bane of his life; on leaving Oxford he went to Bath beside his mother, where he formed a connection by which he was introduced to Wordsworth and Southey, and led to settle to literary work at Grasmere, in the Lake District; here he wrote for the reviews and magazines, particularly Blackwood’s, till in 1821 he went up to London and published his “Confessions” under the nom de plume of “The English Opium-Eater”; leaving Grasmere in 1828 he settled in Edinburgh, and at Polton, near Lasswade, where he died; is characterised by Stopford Brooke as “owing to the overlapping and involved melody of his style one of our best, as he is one of our most various miscellaneous writers”; he was a writer of very miscellaneous ability and acquirement (1785-1859).