DORCAS SOCIETY, a society for making clothing for the poor.  See Acts ix. 39.

DORCHESTER (7), the county town of Dorset, on the Frome; was a Roman town, and contains the ruins of a Roman amphitheatre.

DORDOGNE, a river in the S. of France, which, after a course of 300 m., falls into the estuary of Garonne; also a dep. (478) through which it flows.

DORE, GUSTAVE, a French painter and designer, born in Strasburg; evinced great power and fertility of invention, having, it is alleged, produced more than 50,000 designs; had a wonderful faculty for seizing likenesses, and would draw from memory groups of faces he had seen only once; among the books he illustrated are the “Contes Drolatiques” of Balzac, the works of Rabelais and Montaigne, Dante’s “Inferno,” also his “Purgatorio” and “Paradiso,” “Don Quixote,” Tennyson’s “Idylls,” Milton’s works, and Coleridge’s “Ancient Mariner”; among his paintings were “Christ Leaving the Praetorium,” and “Christ’s Entry into Jerusalem”; he has left behind him works of sculpture as well as drawings and pictures; his art has been severely handled by the critics, and most of all by Ruskin, who treats it with unmitigated scorn (1832-1883).

DORIA, ANDREA, a naval commander, born in Genoa, of noble descent, though his parents were poor; a man of patriotic instincts; adopted the profession of arms at the age of 19; became commander of the fleet in 1513; attacked with signal success the Turkish corsairs that infested the Mediterranean; served under Francis I. to free his country from a faction that threatened its independence, and, by his help, succeeded in expelling it; next, in fear of the French supremacy, served, under Charles V., and entering Genoa, was hailed as its liberator, and received the title of “Father and Defender of his country”; the rest of his life, and it was a long one, was one incessant wrestle with his great rival Barbarossa, the chief of the corsairs, and which ended in his defeat (1466-1560).

DORIANS, one of the four divisions of the Hellenic race, the other three being the Achaeans, the AEolians, and the Ionians; at an early period overran the whole Peloponnesus; they were a hardy people, of staid habits and earnest character.

DORIC, the oldest, strongest, and simplest of the four Grecian orders of architecture.

DORINE, a petulant domestic in Moliere’s “Tartuffe.”

DORIS, a small mountainous country of ancient Greece, S. of
Thessaly, and embracing the valley of the Pindus.

DORIS, the wife of Nereus, and mother of the Nereids.

DORISLAUS, ISAAC, a lawyer, born at Alkmaar, in Holland; came to England, and was appointed Judge-Advocate; acted as such at King Charles’s trial, and was for that latter offence assassinated at the Hague one evening by certain high-flying Royalist cut-throats, Scotch several of them; “his portrait represents him as a man of heavy, deep-wrinkled, elephantine countenance, pressed down by the labours of life and law” (1595-1649).