The Nuttall Encyclopaedia Part 266

JOUBERT, BARTHeLEMI, French general; distinguished himself in the Rhine and Italian campaigns, and fell mortally wounded at the battle of Novi; one of the most promising generals France ever had (1769-1799).

JOUBERT, JOSEPH, author of "Pensees," born in Montignac, Perigord; educated in Toulouse, succeeded to a small competency, came to Paris, got access to the best literary circles, and was the most brilliant figure in the salon of Madame de Beaumont; his works were exclusively _pensees_ and maxims, and bear at once on ethics, politics, theology, and literature; "There is probably," Professor Saintsbury says, "no writer in any language who has said an equal number of remarkable things on an equal variety of subjects in an equally small s.p.a.ce and with an equally high and unbroken excellence of style and expression;... all alike have the characteristic of intense compression; he describes his literary aim in the phrase 'tormented by the ambition of putting a book into a page, a page into a phrase, and a phrase into a word'" (1754-1824).

JOUFFROY D'ABBANS, CLAUDE, MARQUIS DE, is claimed by the French as the first inventor of the steamboat; he made a paddle-steamer ply on the Rhone in 1783, but misfortunes due to the Revolution hindered his progress, till he was forestalled by Fulton on the Seine in 1803 (1751-1832).

JOUGS, an iron collar hung by a chain in some public place, was fastened round a culprit's neck, who was thus exposed in a sort of pillory; in use in Scotland from the 16th to the 18th centuries.

JOULE, JAMES PRESCOTT, a celebrated physicist, born at Salford; was a pupil of Dalton's, and devoted his time to physical and chemical research; made discoveries in connection with the production of heat by voltaic electricity, demonstrated the equivalence of heat and energy, and established on experimental grounds the doctrine of the conservation of energy (1818-1889).

JOURDAN, JEAN BAPTISTE, COMTE VON, marshal of France, born at Limoges; gained for the Republic the victory of Fleurus in 1794, but was in 1795 defeated at Hochst, and subsequently by the Archduke Charles of Austria; served under Napoleon, and became Governor of the Hotel des Invalides under Louis Philippe (1762-1833).

JOWETT, BENJAMIN, Master of Balliol College, Oxford, born at Camberwell; was a fellow and tutor of his college till his election to the masters.h.i.+p in 1870; his name will always be a.s.sociated with Balliol College, where his influence was felt, and made the deepest impression; he wrote an article "On the Interpretation of Scripture" in the "Essays and Reviews," and a commentary on certain epistles of St. Paul, but he achieved his greatest literary successes by his translations of Plato's "Dialogues," the "History" of Thucydides, and the "Politics" of Aristotle (1817-1893).

JUAN, DON, a poem of Byron's, a work which, as Stopford Brooke remarks, "was written in bold revolt against all the conventionality of social morality, religion, and politics, and in which--escaped from his morbid self, he ran into the opposite extreme--he claimed for himself and others absolute freedom of individual act and thought in opposition to the force of society which tends to make all men after one pattern."

JUAN FERNANDEZ, a mountainous island 3000 ft. high, off the Chilian coast, 420 m. W. of Valparaiso; was the lonely residence of ALEXANDER SELKIRK (1704-1709) (q. v.); was used as a penal settlement from 1819 to 1835, and is inhabited by a few seal and sea-lion hunters.

JUAREZ, BENITO, president of Mexico, born in Oaxaca, of Indian extraction; was elected to the Presidency twice over, in 1861 and 1867 (1806-1872).

JUBA, a great river rising in the Abyssinian mountains and flowing S. into the Indian Ocean, with a town of the same name at its mouth; marks the northern limit of British East Africa.

JUBILEE, a festival among the Jews every fiftieth year in celebration of their emanc.i.p.ation from Egypt.

JUBILEE, YEAR OF, a year during which it was required that all land which had pa.s.sed out of the original owner's hands during the 50 years preceding should be restored, all who during that time had been forced to sell their liberty should be released, and all debts contracted in that period should be remitted, a requirement, however, which does not appear to have been very rigorously or regularly observed.

JUDaeA, a southern district of Palestine extending in one direction between Samaria and the desert of Arabia, and in the other between the Mediterranean and the Dead Sea.

JUDAH, KINGDOM OF, the kingdom in the S. of Palestine of the two tribes of Judah and Benjamin that remained true to the house of David after the revolt of the other ten under Jeroboam, who formed what was called the kingdom of Israel, a larger, but a weaker.

JUDAIZERS, a party, called also EBIONITES, in the primitive Church who sought to overlay the simple ordinances of Christianity with Judaic observances and rites, "a yoke which neither they nor their fathers were able to bear."

JUDAS, surnamed ISCARIOT, one of the twelve Apostles of Christ, who from some infatuation that unaccountably possessed him, and to his everlasting infamy, betrayed his Master to His enemies for 30 pieces of silver; was designated by Christ as the Son of Perdition.

JUDAS MACCABaeUS, a son of MATTATHIAS (q. v.), who succeeded his father in the leaders.h.i.+p of the Jews against the Syrians in the war of the Maccabees, and who gave name to the movement, a man of chivalric temper, great energy, firm determination, dauntless courage, and powerful physique; who, with the elect of his countrymen of kindred spirit encountered and overthrew the Syrians in successive engagements, till before a great muster of the foe his little army was overwhelmed and himself slain in 160 B.C. See MACCABEES.

JUDE, EPISTLE OF, an epistle in the New Testament, of which Judas, the brother of James, was the author; written to some unknown community in the primitive Church, in which a spirit of antinomian libertinism had arisen, and the members of which are denounced as denying the sovereign authority of the Church's Head by the practical disobedience and scorn of the laws of His kingdom. For the drift and modern uses of this epistle see Ruskin's "Fors Clavigera," chaps. lxvi. and lxvii., where it is shown that the enemies of the faith in Jude's day are its real enemies in ours.

JUDGES, BOOK OF, a book of the Old Testament; gives an account of a series of deliverances achieved on behalf of Israel by ministers of G.o.d of the nation so called, when, after their occupation of the land, now this tribe and now that was threatened with extinction by the Canaanites; these deliverers bore the character of heroes rather than judges, but they were rather tribal heroes than national, there being as yet no king in Israel to unite them into one; of these the names of twelve are given, of which only six attained special distinction, and their rule covered a period of 300 years, which extended between the death of Joshua and the birth of Samuel; the story throughout is one: apostasy and consequent judgment, but the return of the Divine favour on repentance insured.

JUDGMENT, PRIVATE, a.s.sumption of judgment by individual reason on matters which are not amenable to a lower tribunal than the universal reason of the race.

JUDITH, a wealthy, beautiful, and pious Jewish widow who, as recorded in one of the books of the Apocrypha called after her, entered, with only a single maid as attendant, the camp of the a.s.syrian army under Holofernes, that lay investing Bethulia, her native place; won the confidence of the chief, persuaded him to drink while alone with him in his tent till he was brutally intoxicated, cut off his head, and making good her escape, suspended it from the walls of the place, with the issue of the utter rout of his army by a sally of the townsfolk.

JUDSON, ADONIRAM, Burmese missionary and scholar, born at Maiden, Ma.s.s.; sailed for Burma 1812, and for 40 years laboured devotedly, translating the Bible into Burmese, and compiling a Burmese-English dictionary; he died at sea on his way home (1788-1850).

JUGGERNAUT (22) or PURI, a town on the S. coast of Orissa, in Bengal; one of the holy places of India, with a temple dedicated to Vishnu, and containing an idol of him called Jagannatha (or the Lord of the World), which, in festival times, attracts thousands of pilgrims to wors.h.i.+p at its shrine, on one of which occasions the idol is dragged forth in a ponderous car by the pilgrims and back again, under the wheels of which, till prohibited, mult.i.tudes would throw themselves to be crushed to death in the hope of thereby attaining a state of eternal beat.i.tude.

JUGURTHA, king of Numidia; succeeded by violent measures to the throne, and maintained his ground in defiance of the Romans, who took up arms against him and at last led him captive to Rome to die of hunger in a dungeon.

JUKES, JOSEPH BEET, geologist, born near Birmingham; graduated at Cambridge; took part in several expeditions, and finally became lecturer in the Royal College of Science, Dublin, where he died; he published among other works a "Student's Manual of Geology" (1811-1869).

JULIA, daughter and only child of Augustus Caesar; celebrated for her beauty and the dissoluteness of her morals, and became the wife in succession of Marcellus, Agrippa, and Tiberius.

JULIAN THE APOSTATE, Roman emperor for 18 months, from 361 to 363; was born at Constantinople, his father being a half-brother of Constantine the Great, on whose death most of Julian's family were murdered; embittered by this event, Julian threw himself into philosophic studies, and secretly renounced Christianity; as joint emperor with his cousin from 355 he showed himself a capable soldier, a vigorous and wise administrator; on becoming sole emperor he proclaimed his apostasy, and sought to restore paganism, but without persecuting the Church; though painted in blackest colours by the Christian Fathers, he was a lover of truth, chaste, abstinent, just, and affectionate, if somewhat vain and superst.i.tious; he was killed in an expedition against Persia; several writings of his are extant, but a work he wrote against the Christians is lost (331-363).

JuLICH, a duchy on the W. bank of the Rhine, its capital a place of the same name, 20 m. W. of Koln.

JULIEN, STANISLAS AIGNAN, an eminent Sinalogue, born in Orleans, originally eminent in Greek; turned his attention to Chinese, and in 12 months time translated a part of one of the cla.s.sical works in that language; originally professor of Greek, he became in 1827 professor of Chinese in the College of France in succession to Remusat; he was not less distinguished as a Sanskrit and Pali scholar (1797-1873).

JULIUS, the name of three popes: ST. J. I., Pope from 337 to 332; J. II., pope from 1502 to 1513; J. III., Pope from 1550 to 1555, of which only J. II. deserves notice. J. II., an Italian by birth, was more of a soldier than a priest, and, during his pontificate, was almost wholly occupied with wars against the Venetians for the recovery of Romagna, and against the French to drive them out of Italy, in which attempt he called to his aid the spiritual artillery at his command, by ex-communicating Louis XII. and putting his kingdom under an interdict in 1542; he sanctioned the marriage of Henry VIII. with Catharine of Aragon, commenced to rebuild St. Peter's at Rome, and was the patron of Michael Angelo and Raphael.

JULLIEN, LOUIS ANTOINE, a distinguished musical conductor, born in the Ba.s.ses-Alpes; did much to popularise music by large bands, but he was unfortunate in his speculations, and died insane and in debt (1812-1860).

JULY, the seventh month of the year, so called in honour of Julius Caesar, who reformed the calendar, and was born in this month; it was famous as the month of the outbreak of the second Revolution of France in Paris in 1830.

JUMNA, the chief affluent of the Ganges, which it joins at Allahabad, rises in the Punjab, and flows through the North-West Provinces, having Delhi and Agra on its banks; its course is 860 m., and it falls over 10,000 ft.; its waters are used for irrigation by means of ca.n.a.ls, being of little use for navigation.