DODD, DR. WILLIAM, an English divine, born at Bourne, Lincolnshire; was one of the royal chaplains; attracted fashionable audiences as a preacher in London, but lived extravagantly, and fell hopelessly into debt, and into disgrace for the nefarious devices he adopted to get out of it; forged a bond for L4500 on the Earl of Chesterfield, who had been a pupil of his; was arrested, tried, convicted, and sentenced to death, a sentence which was carried out notwithstanding the great exertions made to procure a pardon; wrote a “Commentary on the Bible,” and compiled “The Beauties of Shakespeare” (1729-1777).

DODDRIDGE, PHILIP, a Nonconformist divine, born in London; was minister at Kebworth, Market Harborough, and Northampton successively, and much esteemed both as a man and a teacher; suffered from pulmonary complaint; went to Lisbon for a change, and died there; was the author of “The Family Expositor,” but is best known by his “Rise and Progress of Religion in the Soul,” and perhaps also by his “Life of Colonel Gardiner” (1702-1751).

DOeDERLEIN, LUDWIG, a German philologist, born at Jena; became professor of Philology at Erlangen; edited Tacitus, Horace, and other classic authors, but his principal works were on the etymology of the Latin language (1791-1863).

DODGER, THE ARTFUL, a young expert in theft and other villanies in Dickens’s “Oliver Twist.”

DODGSON, CHARLES LUTWIDGE, English writer and man of genius, with the nom de plume of Lewis Carroll; distinguished himself at Oxford in mathematics; author of “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland,” with its sequel, “Through the Looking-Glass,” besides other works, mathematical, poetic, and humorous; mingled humour and science together (1833-1898).

DODINGTON, GEORGE BUBB, an English politician, notorious for his fickleness, siding now with this party, now with that; worked for and won a peerage before he died; with all his pretensions, and they were many, a mere flunkey at bottom (1691-1762).

DODO, an ungainly bird larger than a turkey, with short scaly legs, a big head and bill, short wings and tail, and a greyish down plumage, now extinct, though it is known to have existed in the Mauritius some 200 years ago.

DODO`NA, an ancient oracle of Zeus, in Epirus, close by a grove of oak trees, from the agitation of the branches of which the mind of the god was construed, the interpreters being at length three old women; it was more or less a local oracle, and was ere long superseded by the more widely known oracle of DELPHI (q. v.).

DODS, MEG, an old landlady of consistently inconsistent qualities in “St. Ronan’s Well”; also the pseudonym of the authoress of a book on cookery.

DODSLEY, ROBERT, an English poet, dramatist, and publisher; wrote a drama called “The Toyshop,” which, through Pope’s influence, was acted in Drury Lane with such success as to enable the author to commence business as a bookseller in Pall Mall; projected and published the Miscellany, and continued to write plays, the most popular “Cleone”; is best known in connection with his “Collection of Old Plays”; he was a patron of Johnson, and much esteemed by him (1703-1764).