were
immensely popular; "acted better," says Carlyle, who witnessed one of
these performances, "than any Macready in the world; a whole tragic,
comic, heroic _theatre_ visible, performing under one _hat_, and keeping
us laughing--in a sorry way some of us thought--the whole night"; the
strain proved too much for him; he was seized with a fit at his
residence, Gad's Hill, near Rochester, on June 8, 1870, and died the
following morning; he was a little man, with clear blue intelligent eyes,
a face of most extreme mobility, and a quiet shrewdness of expression
(1812-1870).

DICTATOR, a magistrate invested with absolute authority in ancient
republican Rome in times of exigence and danger; the constitution obliged
him to resign his authority at the end of six months, till which time he
was free without challenge afterwards to do whatever the interest of the
commonwealth seemed to him to require; the most famous dictators were
Cincinnatus, Camillus, Sulla, and Caesar, who was the last to be invested
with this power; the office ceased with the fall of the republic, or
rather, was merged in the perpetual dictatorship of the emperor.

DICTATOR OF LETTERS, Voltaire.

DICTYS CRETENSIS (i. e. of Crete), the reputed author of a
narrative of the Trojan war from the birth of Paris to the death of
Ulysses, extant only in a Latin translation; the importance attached to
this narrative and others ascribed to the same author is, that they are
the source of many of the Greek legends we find inwoven from time to time
in the mediaeval literature that has come down to us.

DIDDLER, JEREMY, a needy, artful swindler in Kenny's farce of
"Raising the Wind."

DIDEROT, DENIS, a French philosopher, born at Langres, the son of a
cutler there; a zealous propagator of the philosophic ideas of the 18th
century, and the projector of the famous "Encyclopedie," which he edited
along with D'Alembert, and which made a great noise in its day, but did
not enrich its founder, who was in the end driven to offer his library
for sale to get out of the pecuniary difficulties it involved him in, and
he would have been ruined had not Catharine of Russia bought it, which
she not only did, but left it with him, and paid him a salary as
librarian. Diderot fought hard to obtain a hearing for his philosophical
opinions; his first book was burnt by order of the parlement of Paris,
while for his second he was clapped in jail; and all along he had to
front th