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DEM hands. In 413. Demosthenes was sent to Sicily to succour Nicias, who had suffered a defeat through the imprudence of his colleagues Euthydemus and Menander, and was reduced to considerable distress in the harbour of Syracuse. His arrival at the head of seventy-three triremes and about eight thousand men, saved the Athenian armament from immediate destruction. But a night attack which he made upon the fort of Epipolæ, held by the Syracusans, having been repulsed with great loss, Demosthenes felt persuaded that the enterprise was desperate, and counselled an immediate departure. But by a strange and most culpable fatuity, Nicias violently resisted the proposal until it was too late. Even after he yielded to the pressure of affairs and the representations of his colleague, the retreat of the Athenians was delayed for a month in consequence of an eclipse of the moon, which Nicias regarded as a divine prohibition against the immediate departure of the armament. The consequences were utterly ruinous to the Athenians. The fleet was defeated by the Syracusans in two pitched battles, and great part of their ships destroyed. Demosthenes and Nicias then made a desperate attempt to retreat by land, but after enduring dreadful hardships and losing great numbers of their men by privations, sickness, and the sword, Demosthenes was taken prisoner, and Nicias was compelled to surrender at discretion. The unfortunate generals were ordered to be put to death by a decree of the public assembly, but they escaped the ignominy of the sentence by a voluntary death.—(Thucydides, Books v., vi., and vii.; Plutarch, Nicias, chap, xxviii.)—J. T.  DEMOUSTIER,, born at Villers-Coterets in 1760; died in 1801. Educated at the college of Lisieux, he practised as avocat for some time; then abandoned his profession for that of literature. He was an amiable man, greatly loved by his friends; wrote a number of poems which had for a while a run of popularity. He resided in the country, but was a member of several literary societies. Demoustier's "Lettres à Emilie sur la Mythologie" were for a long time popular, and seem to us to have deserved their popularity. They have been translated into Italian and into English, and often reprinted. Several of Demoustier's works still remain in manuscript. Among these are the twelve latter cantos of a romance called "Le Siége de Cythère." A collection of his works was printed in Paris in 1804.—J. A., D.  DEMPSTER,, a learned Scotchman, and professor of humanity in the university of Bologna, was the son of Thomas Dempster, laird of Muiresk in Aberdeenshire, where he was born on 23rd August, 1579. He was the twenty-fourth out of twenty-nine children by the same father and mother. He was educated first at Aberdeen, then at Pembroke hall, Cambridge, and finally at Paris, Louvain, and Rome. He took the degree of D.C.L., and was made regent in the college of Navarre in the university of Paris at a time when, if his own account may be believed, he was only seventeen years of age. He soon quitted Paris for Toulouse, where he taught humanity. He was subsequently elected professor of eloquence at the protestant college of Nismes, though he adhered to the Romish faith, and he held successively the office of regent in the colleges of Lisieux, Grassins, Du Plessis, and Beauvais. His turbulent temper involved him in continual disputes either with his brother professors or with the students; and in consequence of a quarrel which arose out of his having caused a student who had sent a challenge to one of his companions to be ignominiously flogged, he was obliged to take refuge in England. King James bestowed upon him the title of historiographer royal, with a present of £200, 19th February, 1615. Shortly after he married in London Susanna Waller, a woman of great beauty but of a light and reckless disposition; and finding that, through the remonstrances of the clergy, his hopes of preferment were defeated, he quitted England and returned to Italy. After a brief stay in Rome he repaired to Tuscany, and in 1616 was appointed professor of pandects in the university of Pisa. A new quarrel with an Englishman caused him to leave Pisa in 1619, and he obtained the office of professor of humanity in Bologna, where his reputation attracted pupils of high rank, and the honour of knighthood was conferred upon him by Pope Urban VIII. His tranquillity, however, was of short duration. His wife eloped with one of his pupils; and, after an ineffectual attempt to overtake the fugitives, he was suddenly attacked with fever at Butri, near Bologna, 6th September, 1625, and died after a brief illness in his forty-sixth year. Dempster's intellectual endowments were of a high order, but impaired by serious defects. His learning was extensive rather than accurate. His works are very numerous. A list of fifty of them is given by Dr. Irving in his Lives of Scottish Writers.—J. T.  DENHAM,, Lieutenant-colonel, an adventurous African explorer, was born in London, of the middle rank, on the 1st January, 1786. Educated at Merchant Taylors', he was placed, "on friendly terms," to fit himself for an agricultural life, with a gentleman having the management of a large property in Wiltshire. In this position, as in his subsequent one in the office of a London solicitor, his gay and easy temper advanced him more in the good graces of his instructors, than in the knowledge and practice either of agriculture or law; and at last, "running a little out of bounds," he, in 1811, volunteered into the army. He served through the ensuing Peninsular campaigns, not obtaining his commission—a lieutenancy in the 23rd fusiliers—until he had "roughed" it for some time in a Portuguese regiment. Present at Waterloo, he was placed on half pay by the peace, and afterwards studied with success in the senior department of the royal military college at Farnham, which he entered in 1819. Seized by a desire to engage in the exploration of Africa, he associated himself with Clapperton and Oudney in the expeditions across the desert to Bornou, in the course of which they discovered Lake Tchad (1822). A sketch of the expedition has been given in the article ; but it may be mentioned that Denham alone took part in the slave-hunting foray made early in 1823 to the south of Bornou, under the auspices of its sultan, and his party being defeated, he narrowly escaped with his life. Returning to England in 1825, to be feted as a lion, he published in the following year the well-known "Narrative of Travels and Discoveries in Northern and Central Africa in the years 1822-24," enriched by illustrations from his own drawings, and which has gone through several editions. After the publication of this work he was appointed superintendent or director-general of the liberated African department at Sierra Leone, where he arrived at the commencement of 1827, and entered on the discharge of his functions with spirit and zeal. During a voyage of inspection to Fernando Po, his appointment to the lieutenant-governorship of Sierra Leone reached him from Europe; but three weeks after he had landed again at Free Town to enjoy his new honours, he fell a victim to the fatal fever of the country, dying on the 9th of June, 1829. An interesting memoir of him, described as "from the most authentic source," will be found in the Annual Biography and Obituary for 1831.—F. E.  DENHAM,, was born in Dublin in 1615. To Ireland he owes somewhat more than his birth—perhaps somewhat of his early dissipation and his lasting genius; for though his father's family were English, yet the baron of the Irish exchequer. Sir John Denham, married the daughter of the Irish baron of Mellefont, Sir Garret More. Two years after the child's birth Sir John was made baron of the exchequer in England, and so the family passed to London, where the son was educated. In Trinity college, Oxford, "he was looked upon," says Wood, "as a slow and dreaming young man, and given more to cards and dice than his study." After taking his degree he entered Lincoln's inn, where he seems to have divided his time between the desk and the dice-box. The result of the former we do not know; the latter eventuated in his being "rooked" sometimes of "all he could wrap or get" by the "unsanctified crew of gamesters" with whom he consorted. From the allurements of this vice, though he abandoned it for a while, he did not finally free himself till he had lost several thousands. To his credit, however, be it said, that he was not addicted to the kindred vice of drunkenness, though some merry frolics are related in which he indulged when he had drank a little too much. But there were good things in the dreamer and the gambler, and they came out in due time. At this period that school of poetry which Dr. Johnson happily dubbed "The Metaphysical," was in the ascendant. Donne, Ben Jonson, and Cowley, may be considered as its exponents. Amongst those who sought to emancipate poetry from its affectations, the first place must be given to Denham and Waller. In 1642 the former published his tragedy "The Sophy." He took the world by surprise, breaking out, as Waller said, "like the Irish rebellion threescore thousand strong when nobody was aware or in the least suspected it." His next poem was "Cooper's Hill," one of the first successful attempts at "local poetry" which has been since so abundantly cultivated. 