ged by the English, whom, in consequence, he is never weary of
abusing; his poems are numerous, and, except one, all short, consisting
of ballads, as many as 1175 of them, a form of composition which he is
said to have invented; he deals extensively in satire, and if he wields
the shafts of it against the plunderers of his country, he does no less
against the oppressors of the poor (1328-1415).

DESDEMONA, the wife of Othello the Moor, who, in Shakespeare's play
of that name, kills her on a groundless insinuation of infidelity, to his
bitter remorse.

DESEZE, a French advocate, had the courage, along with advocate
Tronchet, to defend Louis XVI. when dragged to judgment by the
Convention, and who, honourably fulfilling his perilous office, pled for
the space of three hours, an honourable pleading "composed almost
overnight; courageous, yet discreet; not without ingenuity, and soft
pathetic eloquence"; he was imprisoned for a time, but escaped the
scaffold; on the return of the Bourbons he was made a peer (1750-1828).

DESMOND, EARLDOM OF, an Irish title long extinct by the death of the
last earl in 1583; he had rebelled against Elizabeth's government, been
proclaimed, and had taken refuge in a peasant's cabin, and been betrayed.

DES MOINES (62), the largest city in Iowa, U.S., and the capital,
founded in 1846.

DESMOULINS, CAMILLE, one of the most striking figures in the French
Revolution, born at Guise, in Picardy; studied for the bar in the same
college with Robespierre, but never practised, owing to a stutter in his
speech; was early seized with the revolutionary fever, and was the first
to excite the same fever in the Parisian mob, by his famous call "To
arms, and, for some rallying sign, cockades--green ones--the colour of
Hope, when," as we read in Carlyle, "as with the flight of locusts, the
green tree-leaves, green ribbons from the neighbouring shops, all green
things, were snatched to make cockades of"; was one of the ablest
advocates of the levelling principles of the Revolution; associated
himself first with Mirabeau and then with Danton in carrying them out,
and even supported Robespierre in the extreme course he took; but his
heart was moved to relent when he thought of the misery the guillotine
was working among the innocent families, the wives and the children, of
its victims, would, along with Danton, fain have brought the Reign of
Terror to a close; for this he was treated as a renegade, p