works. In 1851 he was commissioned by the president of the United States to lay out the public grounds at Washington lying around the capitol, the president's house, and the Smithsonian institute. He began this work with great zeal and interest, but his superintendence of it and his life were suddenly cut short. On the 27th of July he was a passenger on board the Henry Clay steamer, when she was burnt on the Hudson river; and while endeavouring to save others, he perished either in the water or the flames.—F. B.
DOYLE, Sir Charles William, an eminent British officer, was a native of Ireland, and died in 1843. Entering the army in 1793 as lieutenant in the fourteenth foot, he remained in active service during the long period of thirty-seven years. He served in Holland and Flanders, as well as in the Mediterranean, West Indies, and Egypt; but it was in the Peninsular war that he especially distinguished himself. He was sent into Spain in 1808 in the capacity of a military commissioner, and soon after had conferred on him the rank of major-general in the Spanish armies. A standing memorial of his conduct in the affair of Olite was raised in the regiment, which was then formed and styled the "Triadores of Doyle." He won high favour with the Spaniards, who made him a knight of the order of Charles III., and introduced him to the special notice of the British government. They also struck a medal in honour of his heroic exploit of taking by assault the town and battery of Bagur, and of the great assistance which he rendered in the capture of the castle of Palamos. Wellington meanwhile recommended him to be appointed colonel of a regiment to be raised in Catalonia; and, soon after, his defence of Tarragona procured him the additional honour of the cross of distinction, while his services in Arragon, Catalonia, and Valencia were rewarded with the rank of lieutenant-general in the Spanish armies. Doyle subsequently had the chief command of the army of reserve which was raised at Cadiz during the siege. Besides other honours which we need not mention, he was in 1819 created a knight-commander of the Guelph for his services in the Hanoverian army at Valenciennes and Lannois, and a grand cross in 1839.—R. M., A.
DOYLE, James, R.C. Bishop of Kildare and Leighlin, whose polemic and political writings under the signature of J. K. L. exercised in their day an extensive influence, was born near New Ross, county of Wexford, in 1787. His father was a small farmer, and belonged to a family once locally influential. For a year or two young Doyle went daily to a village school, at which Roman catholics and protestants sat and studied side by side; but from his twelfth year he resided at an academy kept by a zealous Roman catholic priest named Crane; and as soon as he had attained the canonical age, he entered at Grantstown the noviciate of the hermits of St. Augustine. In the prosecution of his studies, James Doyle proceeded to the university of Coimbra in Portugal during the spring of 1806, where he studied with extraordinary industry, and highly distinguished himself; but his honours were soon interrupted by the invasion of Portugal under Napoleon. The royal house of Braganza fled to Brazil; all was excitement and confusion—in the midst of which the duke of Wellington, then Sir A. Wellesley, arrived in Mondego Bay. His army was soon joined by a volunteer force, chiefly comprised of the Coimbra students, foremost among whom stood James Doyle, who had substituted a cuirass and helmet for his collegiate gown and cap. The battles of Rolica, Vimiera, and other sanguinary engagements followed. The French invaders were expelled, and the royal house of Braganza was reinstated. But Mr. Doyle distinguished himself still more at the council board than in the field: tempting proposals were made to him, as we learn from a pastoral charge which he addressed to his flock in 1823—"We have at an early period of our life rejected the favours of the great, and fled even from the smiles of a court, that we might in our native land, from which we had become an exile to procure an education, labour in the most humble department of the sacred ministry." The sceptical opinions of Voltaire and Rousseau then furiously swept the continent; and the university of Coimbra was not exempt from the visitation. Doyle was naturally of a speculative and inquiring turn of mind; and we learn from one of his letters on the state of Ireland, that he paced the halls of the college, debating with himself whether he would be a christian or an unbeliever. "I recollect," he writes, "and always with fear and trembling, the danger to which I exposed the gifts of faith and christian morality which I had received from a bounteous God; and since I became a man, and was enabled to think like a man, I have not ceased to give thanks to the Father of mercies, who did not deliver me over to the pride and presumption of my own heart. But even then, when all things which could have influence on a youthful mind combined to induce me to shake off the yoke of Christ, I was arrested by the majesty of religion; her innate dignity, her grandeur and solemnity, as well as her sweet influence upon the heart, filled me with awe and veneration. I found her presiding in every place, glorified by her votaries, and respected or feared by her enemies. I looked into antiquity, and found her worshipped by Moses; and not only by Moses, but that Numa and Plato, though in darkness and error, were amongst the most ardent of her votaries. I read attentively the history of the ancient philosophers as well as law-givers, and discovered that all of them paid their homage to her as to the best emanation of the one supreme, invisible, and omnipotent God. I concluded that religion sprung from the Author of our being, and that it conducted man to his last end. I examined the systems of religion prevailing in the East; I read the Koran with attention; I perused the Jewish history, and the history of Christ, of his disciples, and of his church, with an intense interest, and I did not hesitate to continue attached to the religion of our Redeemer, as alone worthy of God." In 1809 Doyle returned to Ireland, was ordained, and taught theology at the Augustinian seminary at Ross until 1813, when he removed to Carlow college. Here he filled first the chair of rhetoric, then of humanity, and finally of theology; and, on the death of Bishop Corcoran in 1819, Doyle, then aged thirty-three only, was elected by the clergy as their episcopal pastor. The reformatory arrangements which he at once grasped and mastered were of vast importance; but it was not until 1822 that he made his debut as a public writer. In that year Magee, archbishop of Dublin, uttered the celebrated antithesis that the catholics had a church without a religion; and the dissenters a religion without a church. Dr. Doyle at once retorted. Affecting the greatest humility, he displayed extensive erudition; and, in a masterly letter in which all the subtleties of dogmatic theology were clothed in the most powerful and argumentative language, he took a review of the Reformation, tithes, pluralities, the appropriation of church property, and finally denounced the church itself as an usurpation and the bishops as usurpers; maintaining that the apostolical right of succession could never be transferred from the catholic church to the protestant. In the following year Dr. Doyle published his eloquent and powerful "Vindication of the Religious and Civil Principles of the Irish Catholics." This work was soon followed by twelve elaborate "Letters on the State of Ireland," which at once became an authority, and were repeatedly quoted in parliament. Their great celebrity led to a decision on the part of the senate, in 1825, to summon Dr. Doyle to give evidence before a select committee of that body on the state of Ireland. This he delivered with such perspicuity and irresistible powers of persuasion, that at least a dozen of the leading members of parliament, who had previously opposed the catholic claims, announced themselves converted by the evidence of Dr. Doyle. During the previous year he laboured with much ability, as Bossuet had done before him, to effect a union of the catholic and protestant churches. He considered that the points on which they differed were few, while those on which they agreed were many; and that a few matters of discipline on the catholic side (which were perfectly optional to alter or abrogate) were the chief stumbling-block to protestants. Dr. Doyle's labours to promote education for the people were unflagging and powerful. He regarded popular ignorance as the source of almost all their crimes; and he constantly inculcated the necessity of early culture, spiritual and general. He established schools in every parish; he personally visited the districts disturbed by Ribbonism and Whitefeet; and it was no unusual sight to see the bishop, with crosier grasped, standing on the side of a steep hill in a remote county, addressing and converting vast crowds of the disaffected people. The immense number of letters, tracts, and essays on education, public morality, poor laws, tithes, and the catholic claims, which Dr. Doyle threw off, it would be tedious to enumerate. The activity of his mind wore out his body, and for several years before his death his health was most precarious; but he did not spare himself in consequence. On the subject of poor laws he differed
