DODSLEY, ROBERT (1703-1764).—­Poet, dramatist, and bookseller, b. near Mansfield, and apprenticed to a stocking-weaver, but not liking this employment, he ran away and became a footman.  While thus engaged he produced The Muse in Livery (1732).  This was followed by The Toy Shop, a drama, which brought him under the notice of Pope, who befriended him, and assisted him in starting business as a bookseller.  In this he became eminently successful, and acted as publisher for Pope, Johnson, and Akenside.  He projected and pub. The Annual Register, and made a collection of Old English Plays, also of Poems by Several Hands in 6 vols.  In addition to the original works above mentioned he wrote various plays and poems, including The Blind Beggar of Bethnal Green (1741), and Cleone (1758).

DONNE, JOHN (1573-1631).—­Poet and divine, s. of a wealthy ironmonger in London, where he was b. Brought up as a Roman Catholic, he was sent to Oxf. and Camb., and afterwards entered Lincoln’s Inn with a view to the law.  Here he studied the points of controversy between Romanists and Protestants, with the result that he joined the Church of England.  The next two years were somewhat changeful, including travels on the Continent, service as a private sec., and a clandestine marriage with the niece of his patron, which led to dismissal and imprisonment, followed by reconciliation.  On the suggestion of James I., who approved of Pseudo-Martyr (1610), a book against Rome which he had written, he took orders, and after executing a mission to Bohemia, he was, in 1621, made Dean of St. Paul’s.  D. had great popularity as a preacher.  His works consist of elegies, satires, epigrams, and religious pieces, in which, amid many conceits and much that is artificial, frigid, and worse, there is likewise much poetry and imagination of a high order.  Perhaps the best of his works is An Anatomy of the World (1611), an elegy.  Others are Epithalamium (1613), Progress of the Soul (1601), and Divine Poems.  Collections of his poems appeared in 1633 and 1649.  He exercised a strong influence on literature for over half a century after his death; to him we owe the unnatural style of conceits and overstrained efforts after originality of the succeeding age.

DORAN, JOHN (1807-1878).—­Miscellaneous writer, of Irish parentage, wrote a number of works dealing with the lighter phases of manners, antiquities, and social history, often bearing punning titles, e.g., Table Traits with Something on Them (1854), and Knights and their Days.  He also wrote Lives of the Queens of England of the House of Hanover (1855), and A History of Court Fools (1858), and ed.  Horace Walpole’s Journal of the Reign of George III. His books contain much curious and out-of-the-way information.  D. was for a short time ed. of The Athenaeum.