DIVINE COMEDY, THE, the great poem of Dante, consisting of three compartments, “Inferno,” “Purgatorio,” and “Paradiso”; “three kingdoms ...  Dante’s World of Souls...; all three making up the true Unseen World, as it figured in the Christianity of the Middle Ages; a thing for ever memorable, for ever true in the essence of it, to all men ... but delineated in no human soul with such depth of veracity as in this of Dante’s ... to the earnest soul of Dante it is all one visible fact—­Hell, Purgatory, Paradise, with him not mere emblems, but indubitable awful realities.”  See DANTE, and CARLYLE’S “HEROES AND HERO-WORSHIP.”

DIVINE DOCTOR, Jean de Ruysbroek, the mystic (1294-1381).

DIVINE PAGAN, HYPATIA (q. v.).

DIVINE RIGHT, a claim on the part of kings, now all but extinct, though matter of keen debate at one time, that they derive their authority to rule direct from the Almighty, and are responsible to no inferior power, a right claimed especially on the part of and in behalf of the Bourbons in France and the Stuart dynasty in England, and the denial of which was regarded by them and their partisans as an outrage against the ordinance of very Heaven.

DIXIE LAND, nigger land in U.S.

DIXON, W. HEPWORTH, an English writer and journalist, born in Manchester; called to the bar, but devoted himself to literary work; wrote Lives of Howard, Penn, Robert Blake, and Lord Bacon, “New America,” “Spiritual Wives,” &c.; was editor of the Athenoeum from 1853 to 1869; died suddenly (1821-1879).

DIZIER, ST. (13), a flourishing French town, 30 m. from
Chalons-sur-Marne.

DIZZY, a nickname given to Benjamin Disraeli.

DJEZZAR (i. e.  Butcher), the surname of Achmed Pasha, pacha of Acre; was born at Bosnia; sold as a slave, and raised himself by his servility to his master to the length of executing his cruellest wishes; in 1799 withstood a long siege of Acre by Bonaparte, and obliged him to retire (1735-1804).

DJINNESTAN, the region of the Jinns.

DNIEPER, a river of Russia, anciently called the Borysthenes, the third largest for volume of water in Europe, surpassed only by the Danube and the Volga; rises in the province of Smolensk, and flowing in a generally southerly direction, falls into the Black Sea below Kherson after a course of 1330 m.; it traverses some of the finest provinces of the empire, and is navigable nearly its entire length.

DNIESTER, a river which takes its rise in Austria, in the
Carpathians, enters Russia, flows generally in a SE. direction past
Bender, and after a rapid course of 650 m. falls into the Black Sea at
Akjerman.

DOAB, THE, a richly fertile, densely peopled territory in the Punjab, between the Jumna and Ganges, and extending 500 m.  N., that is, as far as the Himalayas; it is the granary of Upper India.

DOBELL, SIDNEY, poet, born at Cranbrook, in Kent; wrote, under the pseudonym of Sidney Yendys, the “Roman,” a drama, “Balder,” and, along with Alexander Smith, sonnets on the war (the Crimean); suffered much from weak health (1824-1874).