Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 7.djvu/375

Rh various factories on the Don ; and the Scythians and Sarmatians nomadized throughout the district. Afterwards came the Alans, the Huns, the Ugrians, the Bulgarians, the Avars, and the Khazars, the last even building the small town of Sarkel ; then followed the Pechenegs, the Polovians, and finally the Tatars, whose power was gradually diminished during the and  by the encroachments of the Russian Cossacks.  DON JUAN, a legendary personage whose story, originating in Spain, has found currency in various poetic and dramatic forms throughout most of the countries of Europe. The character has a certain historic basis in so far as it is localized at Seville in the time of Peter the Cruel, or, according to another version, of Charles V. Don Juan, who belonged to the illustrious Tenorio family, lived a life of unbridled licentiousness. In an attempt to abduct Giralda, daughter of the governor of Seville, he was encountered by her father, whom he subsequently killed in a duel. In mocking defiance of the spirit world, in whose existence his sensuality had destroyed all faith, he visited the tomb of the murdered man in the vault of San Francesco and challenged his statue to follow him to supper. The invitation was accepted ; the animated statue appeared at table among the guests, and carried the blaspheming sceptic to hell. In a few later dramatic versions of the story some features are introduced belonging to another personage of the same name, Don Juan of Marana, who, having sold himself to the devil, passed the greater part of his life in debauchery and crime. His mother, however, had provided that masses should be said for his salvation, and, being converted through the influence of these, he ended his days in a monastery, where he subjected himself to the severest penance. As a dramatic type Don Juan is essentially the impersonation of the scepticism that results from sensuality, and is thus the complement of Faust, whose scepticism is the result of speculation. In its literary treatment it has received various degrees of intensity. In the hands of the earlier Spanish dramatists it becomes, without their in tending it, a solemn and impressive moral beacon, while Byron s Don Juan is a gay adventurer, with nothing in common with the legendary personage except his name and his libertinism. The first introduction of the story into dramatic literature seems to have been in Lope de Vega s Money makes the Man, where the incident of a walking statue occurs ; but the earliest occasion on which the story was dramatized as a whole was in the Burlador de SevMa (The Deceiver of Seville) of Gabriel Tellez, who published his secular works under the name Tirso de Molina. The Don Juan of this play is almost heroic in his fearlessness, indulging his cold grim humour without restraint even in the realized presence of the supernatural ; but his unrelieved depravity revolts the moral sense. From Spain the drama was soon after 1620 transferred to Italy, where a translation of it was produced at .Naples. A few years later it was transferred to Paris, where it was frequently acted, some times in the form of a translation of the work of Tellez, and sometimes in more or less free imitations, of which several were produced. A new aspect was given to the character in Moliere s Don Juan, ou le Festin de Pierre (1665), where the hero, though as heartlessly depraved as in the Spanish original, loses some of the sterner elements both of his wickedness and of his humour, and becomes more seductive and more amusing. Into English literature the story was first introduced by Shadwell s Libertine (1676), a grossly indecent and, from a literary point of view, worthless play. The continued popularity of the legend in the country of its birth is attested by the fact that it has furnished the groundwork for a play Don Juan Tenorio (1844), and two poems El Desafio del Diablo and Un Testigo di Bronce (1845), by the celebrated poet Zorrilla. During the present century it has also been a favourite subject with French writers of the romantic school, having been dealt with by Dumas the elder, Musset, Levasseur, Mallefille, and others. Its capacity for musical treatment has been tested by two composers of the first rank. Gluck made Don Juan the hero of a ballet, and Mozart s opera, Don Giovanni, the libretto of which was furnished by Da Ponte, has probably done more to popularize the story in the Moli&re as distinct from the severer early Spanish form than any other setting, literary or musical, it has ever received.  DONAGHADEE, a market town of Ireland, in county Down, situated near the mouth of Belfast Lough on the Irish channel, is the nearest port in Ireland to Great Britain, being 21 miles S.W. of Port Patrick in Wigtown shire. It consists of two principal streets, and possesses a harbour which admits vessels of 16 feet in draught. On the north-east side of the town there is a rath 70 feet high, in which a powder magazine has been built. The town is frequented for sea-bathing in the summer months. Population, 2226.  DONALDSON,, a philologist and biblical critic, born, died February 10,. He was educated at the London university and at Trinity College, Cambridge, of which college he was afterwards elected a fellow. He graduated in, being placed in the second class of the mathematical tripos, and second in the classical tripos, when G. J. Kennedy was senior, and W. Forsyth, the author of Hortensius, third classic. After his degree he devoted himself with unre mitting energy to classical philology, and the New Cratylus, which appeared five years later, is not only a work of wonderful erudition for so young a man, but forms a landmark in the history of philology in England. In he was elected to the head-mastership of King Edward s school at Bury St Edmunds, a position which he held for over ten years. On resigning this post he returned to Cambridge, where his time was divided between literary work and private tuition. At the time of his death, which was accelerated by over-study, he was engaged in the pre paration of a Greek lexicon. The New Cratylus, the work on which Dr Donaldson s fame mainly rests, is an attempt to apply the general principles of comparative philology to the Greek language. The book consists of two parts a general introduction, in which the philosophy of language and the ethnographical affinities of the ancient Greeks are discussed, and a treatise on the grammatical structure and etymology of Greek. It is mainly founded on the comparative grammar of Bopp, but a large part of it is original, and it is but just to the English philologist to observe that the great German s grammar was not completed till ten years after the first edition of the Cratylus. In the Varronianus, which followed in, the same method is applied to the classi fication and analysis of Latin and the other Italian dialects. It includes a critical commentary on the remains of old Latin, Umbrian, and Oscan. If we consider the recent birth and rapid strides of philology it is not wonderful that these early essays should have been superseded by the riper labours of such men as Curtius, Schleicher, and Mommsen. Distinguished as Donaldson s works are by wide and varied learning, much ingenuity, and independence of thought, they are deficient in soberness of judgment, and, most of all, in the ability to distinguish between certain inference and uncertain conjecture. More especially are these defects apparent in the ethnographical theories of the Varronianus. To take a single instance, the origin and affinities of the Etruscan language, problems which have yet to be solved, are stated no less confidently than those of modern French.