VOLUME XV SLICE V Joints to Justinian I. (continued 3)

His powers as a dramatist were at their height during the earlier half of the reign of James I.; and by the year 1616 he had produced nearly all the plays which are worthy of his genius. They include the tragedy of Catiline (acted and printed 1611), which achieved only a doubtful success, and the comedies of Volpone, or the Fox (acted 1605 and printed in 1607 with a dedication “from my house in the Blackfriars”), Epicoene, or the Silent Woman (1609; entered in the Stationers’ Register 1610), the Alchemist (1610; printed in 1610), Bartholomew Fair and The Devil is an Ass (acted respectively in 1614 and 1616). During the same period he produced several masques, usually in connexion with Inigo Jones, with whom, however, he seems to have quarrelled already in this reign, though it is very doubtful whether the architect is really intended to be ridiculed in Bartholomew Fair under the character of Lanthorn Leatherhead. Littlewit, according to Fleay, is Daniel. Among the most attractive of his masques may be mentioned the Masque of Blackness (1606), the Masque of Beauty (1608), and the Masque of Queens (1609), described by Swinburne as “the most splendid of all masques” and as “one of the typically splendid monuments or trophies of English literature.” In 1616 a modest pension of 100 marks a year was conferred upon him; and possibly this sign of royal favour may have encouraged him to the publication of the first volume of the folio collected edition of his works (1616), though there are indications that he had contemplated its production, an exceptional task for a playwright of his times to take in hand, as early as 1612.

He had other patrons more bountiful than the Crown, and for a brief space of time (in 1613) had travelled to France as governor (without apparently much moral authority) to the eldest son of Sir Walter Raleigh, then a state prisoner in the Tower, for whose society Jonson may have gained a liking at the Mermaid Tavern in Cheapside, but for whose personal character he, like so many of his contemporaries, seems to have had but small esteem. By the year 1616 Jonson seems to have made up his mind to cease writing for the stage, where neither his success nor his profits had equalled his merits and expectations. He continued to produce masques and entertainments when called upon; but he was attracted by many other literary pursuits, and had already accomplished enough to furnish plentiful materials for retrospective discourse over pipe or cup. He was already entitled to lord it at the Mermaid, where his quick antagonist in earlier wit-combats (if Fuller’s famous description be authentic) no longer appeared even on a visit from his comfortable retreat at Stratford. That on the other hand Ben carried his wicked town habits into Warwickshire, and there, together with Drayton, made Shakespeare drink so hard with them as to bring upon himself the fatal fever which ended his days, is a scandal with which we may fairly refuse to load Jonson’s memory. That he had a share in the preparing for the press of the first folio of Shakespeare, or in the composition of its preface, is of course a mere conjecture.

It was in the year 1618 that, like Dr Samuel Johnson a century and a half afterwards, Ben resolved to have a real holiday for once, and about midsummer started for his ancestral country, Scotland. He had (very heroically for a man of his habits) determined to make the journey on foot; and he was speedily followed by John Taylor, the water-poet, who still further handicapped himself by the condition that he would accomplish the pilgrimage without a penny in his pocket. Jonson, who put money in his good friend’s purse when he came up with him at Leith, spent more than a year and a half in the hospitable Lowlands, being solemnly elected a burgess of Edinburgh, and on another occasion entertained at a public banquet there. But the best-remembered hospitality which he enjoyed was that of the learned Scottish poet, William Drummond of Hawthornden, to which we owe the so-called Conversations. In these famous jottings, the work of no extenuating hand, Jonson lives for us to this day, delivering his censures, terse as they are, in an expansive mood whether of praise or of blame; nor is he at all generously described in the postscript added by his fatigued and at times irritated host as “a great lover and praiser of himself, a contemner and scorner of others.” A poetical account of this journey, “with all the adventures,” was burnt with Jonson’s library.

After his return to England Jonson appears to have resumed his former course of life. Among his noble patrons and patronesses were the countess of Rutland (Sidney’s daughter) and her cousin Lady Wroth; and in 1619 his visits to the country seats of the nobility were varied by a sojourn at Oxford with Richard Corbet, the poet, at Christ Church, on which occasion he took up the master’s degree granted to him by the university; whether he actually proceeded to the same degree granted to him at Cambridge seems unknown. He confessed about this time that he was or seemed growing “restive,” i.e. lazy, though it was not long before he returned to the occasional composition of masques. The extremely spirited Gipsies Metamorphosed (1621) was thrice presented before the king, who was so pleased with it as to grant to the poet the reversion of the office of master of the revels, besides proposing to confer upon him the honour of knighthood. This honour Jonson (hardly in deference to the memory of Sir Petronel Flash) declined; but there was no reason why he should not gratefully accept the increase of his pension in the same year (1621) to £200—a temporary increase only, inasmuch as it still stood at 100 marks when afterwards augmented by Charles I.

The close of King James I.’s reign found the foremost of its poets in anything but a prosperous condition. It would be unjust to hold the Sun, the Dog, the Triple Tun, or the Old Devil with its Apollo club-room, where Ben’s supremacy must by this time have become established, responsible for this result; taverns were the clubs of that day, and a man of letters is not considered lost in our own because he haunts a smoking-room in Pall Mall. Disease had weakened the poet’s strength, and the burning of his library, as his Execration upon Vulcan sufficiently shows, must have been no mere transitory trouble to a poor poet and scholar. Moreover he cannot but have felt, from the time of the accession of Charles I. early in 1625 onwards, that the royal patronage would no longer be due in part to anything like intellectual sympathy. He thus thought it best to recur to the surer way of writing for the stage, and in 1625 produced, with no faint heart, but with a very clear anticipation of the comments which would be made upon the reappearance of the “huge, overgrown play-maker,” The Staple of News, a comedy excellent in some respects, but little calculated to become popular. It was not printed till 1631. Jonson, whose habit of body was not more conducive than were his ways of life to a healthy old age, had a paralytic stroke in 1626, and a second in 1628. In the latter year, on the death of Middleton, the appointment of city chronologer, with a salary of 100 nobles a year, was bestowed upon him. He appears to have considered the duties of this office as purely ornamental; but in 1631 his salary was suspended until he should have presented some fruits of his labours in his place, or—as he more succinctly phrased it—“yesterday the barbarous court of aldermen have withdrawn their chandlerly pension for verjuice and mustard, £33, 6s. 8d.” After being in 1628 arrested by mistake on the utterly false charge of having written certain verses in approval of the assassination of Buckingham, he was soon allowed to return to Westminster, where it would appear from a letter of his “son and contiguous neighbour,” James Howell, he was living in 1629, and about this time narrowly escaped another conflagration. In the same year (1629) he once more essayed the stage with the comedy of The New Inn, which was actually, and on its own merits not unjustly, damned on the first performance. It was printed in 1631, “as it was never acted but most negligently played”; and Jonson defended himself against his critics in his spirited Ode to Himself. The epilogue to The New Inn having dwelt not without dignity upon the neglect which the poet had experienced at the hands of “king and queen,” King Charles immediately sent the unlucky author a gift of £100, and in response to a further appeal increased his standing salary to the same sum, with the addition of an annual tierce of canary—the poet-laureate’s customary royal gift, though this designation of an office, of which Jonson discharged some of what became the ordinary functions, is not mentioned in the warrant dated the 26th of March 1630. In 1634, by the king’s desire, Jonson’s salary as chronologer to the city was again paid. To his later years belong the comedies, The Magnetic Lady (1632) and The Tale of a Tub (1633), both printed in 1640, and some masques, none of which met with great success. The patronage of liberal-minded men, such as the earl, afterwards duke, of Newcastle—by whom he must have been commissioned to write his last two masques Love’s Welcome at Welbeck (1633) and Love’s Welcome at Bolsover (1634)—and Viscount Falkland, was not wanting, and his was hardly an instance in which the fickleness of time and taste could have allowed a literary veteran to end his career in neglect. He was the acknowledged chief of the English world of letters, both at the festive meetings where he ruled the roast among the younger authors whose pride it was to be “sealed of the tribe of Ben,” and by the avowal of grave writers, old or young, not one of whom would have ventured to dispute his titular pre-eminence. Nor was he to the last unconscious of the claims upon him which his position brought with it. When, nearly two years after he had lost his surviving son, death came upon the sick old man on the 6th of August 1637, he left behind him an unfinished work of great beauty, the pastoral drama of The Sad Shepherd (printed in 1641). For forty years, he said in the prologue, he had feasted the public; at first he could scarce hit its taste, but patience had at last enabled it to identify itself with the working of his pen.

We are so accustomed to think of Ben Jonson presiding, attentive to his own applause, over a circle of younger followers and admirers that we are apt to forget the hard struggle which he had passed through before gaining the crown now universally acknowledged to be his. Howell records, in the year before Ben’s death, that a solemn supper at the poet’s own house, where the host had almost spoiled the relish of the feast by vilifying others and magnifying himself, “T. Ca.” (Thomas Carew) buzzed in the writer’s ear “that, though Ben had barrelled up a great deal of knowledge, yet it seemed he had not read the Ethics, which, among other precepts of morality, forbid self-commendation.” Self-reliance is but too frequently coupled with self-consciousness, and for good and for evil self-confidence was no doubt the most prominent feature in the character of Ben Jonson. Hence the combativeness which involved him in so many quarrels in his earlier days, and which jarred so harshly upon the less militant and in some respects more pedantic nature of Drummond. But his quarrels do not appear to have entered deeply into his soul, or indeed usually to have lasted long.2 He was too exuberant in his vituperations to be bitter, and too outspoken to be malicious. He loved of all things to be called “honest,” and there is every reason to suppose that he deserved the epithet. The old superstition that Jonson was filled with malignant envy of the greatest of his fellow-dramatists, and lost no opportunity of giving expression to it, hardly needs notice. Those who consider that Shakespeare was beyond criticism may find blasphemy in the saying of Jonson that Shakespeare “wanted art.” Occasional jesting allusions to particular plays of Shakespeare may be found in Jonson, among which should hardly be included the sneer at “mouldy” Pericles in his Ode to Himself. But these amount to nothing collectively, and to very little individually; and against them have to be set, not only the many pleasant traditions concerning the long intimacy between the pair, but also the lines, prefixed to the first Shakespeare folio, as noble as they are judicious, dedicated by the survivor to “the star of poets,” and the adaptation, clearly sympathetic notwithstanding all its buts, de Shakespeare nostrat. in the Discoveries. But if Gifford had rendered no other service to Jonson’s fame he must be allowed to have once for all vindicated it from the cruellest aspersion which has ever been cast upon it. That in general Ben Jonson was a man of strong likes and dislikes, and was wont to manifest the latter as vehemently as the former, it would be idle to deny. He was at least impartial in his censures, dealing them out freely to Puritan poets like Wither and (supposing him not to have exaggerated his free-spokenness) to princes of his church like Cardinal du Perron. And, if sensitive to attack, he seems to have been impervious to flattery—to judge from the candour with which he condemned the foibles even of so enthusiastic an admirer as Beaumont. The personage that he disliked the most, and openly abused in the roundest terms, was unfortunately one with many heads and a tongue to hiss in each—no other than that “general public” which it was the fundamental mistake of his life to fancy he could “rail into approbation” before he had effectively secured its goodwill. And upon the whole it may be said that the admiration of the few, rather than the favour of the many, has kept green the fame of the most independent among all the masters of an art which, in more senses than one, must please to live.

Jonson’s learning and industry, which were alike exceptional, by no means exhausted themselves in furnishing and elaborating the materials of his dramatic works. His enemies sneered at him as a translator—a title which the preceding generation was inclined to esteem the most honourable in literature. But his classical scholarship shows itself in other directions besides his translations from the Latin poets (the Ars poetica in particular), in addition to which he appears to have written a version of Barclay’s Argenis; it was likewise the basis of his English Grammar, of which nothing but the rough draft remains (the MS. itself having perished in the fire in his library), and in connexion with the subject of which he appears to have pursued other linguistic studies (Howell in 1629 was trying to procure him a Welsh grammar). And its effects are very visible in some of the most pleasing of his non-dramatic poems, which often display that combination of polish and simplicity hardly to be reached—or even to be appreciated—without some measure of classical training.

Exclusively of the few lyrics in Jonson’s dramas (which, with the exception of the stately choruses in Catiline, charm, and perhaps may surprise, by their lightness of touch), his non-dramatic works are comprised in the following collections. The book of Epigrams (published in the first folio of 1616) contained, in the poet’s own words, the “ripest of his studies.” His notion of an epigram was the ancient, not the restricted modern one—still less that of the critic (R. C., the author of The Times’ Whistle) in whose language, according to Jonson, “witty” was “obscene.” On the whole, these epigrams excel more in encomiastic than in satiric touches, while the pathos of one or two epitaphs in the collection is of the truest kind. In the lyrics and epistles contained in the Forest (also in the first folio), Jonson shows greater variety in the poetic styles adopted by him; but the subject of love, which Dryden considered conspicuous by its absence in the author’s dramas, is similarly eschewed here. The Underwoods (not published collectively till the second and surreptitious folio) are a miscellaneous series, comprising, together with a few religious and a few amatory poems, a large number of epigrams, epitaphs, elegies and “odes,” including both the tributes to Shakespeare and several to royal and other patrons and friends, besides the Execration upon Vulcan, and the characteristic ode addressed by the poet to himself. To these pieces in verse should be added the Discoveries—Timber, or Discoveries made upon Men and Matters, avowedly a commonplace book of aphorisms noted by the poet in his dally readings—thoughts adopted and adapted in more tranquil and perhaps more sober moods than those which gave rise to the outpourings of the Conversations at Hawthornden. As to the critical value of these Conversations it is far from being only negative; he knew how to admire as well as how to disdain. For these thoughts, though abounding with biographical as well as general interest, Jonson was almost entirely indebted to ancient writers, or (as has been shown by Professor Spingarn and by Percy Simpson) indebted to the humanists of the Renaissance (see Modern Language Review, ii. 3, April 1907).

The extant dramatic works of Ben Jonson fall into three or, if his fragmentary pastoral drama be considered to stand by itself, into four distinct divisions. The tragedies are only two in number—Sejanus his Fall and Catiline his Conspiracy.3 Of these the earlier, as is worth noting, was produced at Shakespeare’s theatre, in all probability before the first of Shakespeare’s Roman dramas, and still contains a considerable admixture of rhyme in the dialogue. Though perhaps less carefully elaborated in diction than its successor, Sejanus is at least equally impressive as a highly wrought dramatic treatment of a complex historic theme. The character of Tiberius adds an element of curious psychological interest on which speculation has never quite exhausted itself and which, in Jonson’s day at least, was wanting to the figures of Catiline and his associates. But in both plays the action is powerfully conducted, and the care bestowed by the dramatist upon the great variety of characters introduced cannot, as in some of his comedies, be said to distract the interest of the reader. Both these tragedies are noble works, though the relative popularity of the subject (for conspiracies are in the long run more interesting than camarillas) has perhaps secured the preference to Catiline. Yet this play and its predecessor were alike too manifestly intended by their author to court the goodwill of what he calls the “extraordinary” reader. It is difficult to imagine that (with the aid of judicious shortenings) either could altogether miss its effect on the stage; but, while Shakespeare causes us to forget, Jonson seems to wish us to remember, his authorities. The half is often greater than the whole; and Jonson, like all dramatists and, it might be added, all novelists in similar cases, has had to pay the penalty incurred by too obvious a desire to underline the learning of the author.

Perversity—or would-be originality—alone could declare Jonson’s tragedy preferable to his comedy. Even if the revolution which he created in the comic branch of the drama had been mistaken in its principles or unsatisfactory in its results, it would be clear that the strength of his dramatic genius lay in the power of depicting a great variety of characters, and that in comedy alone he succeeded in finding a wide field for the exercise of this power. There may have been no very original or very profound discovery in the idea which he illustrated in Every Man in his Humour, and, as it were, technically elaborated in Every Man out of his Humour—that in many men one quality is observable which so possesses them as to draw the whole of their individualities one way, and that this phenomenon “may be truly said to be a humour.” The idea of the master quality or tendency was, as has been well observed, a very considerable one for dramatist or novelist. Nor did Jonson (happily) attempt to work out this idea with any excessive scientific consistency as a comic dramatist. But, by refusing to apply the term “humour” (q.v.) to a mere peculiarity or affectation of manners, and restricting its use to actual or implied differences or distinctions of character, he broadened the whole basis of English comedy after his fashion, as Molière at a later date, keeping in closer touch with the common experience of human life, with a lighter hand broadened the basis of French and of modern Western comedy at large. It does not of course follow that Jonson’s disciples, the Bromes and the Cartwrights, always adequately reproduced the master’s conception of “humorous” comedy. Jonson’s wide and various reading helped him to diversify the application of his theory, while perhaps at times it led him into too remote illustrations of it. Still, Captain Bobadil and Captain Tucca, Macilente and Fungoso, Volpone and Mosca, and a goodly number of other characters impress themselves permanently upon the memory of those whose attention they have as a matter of course commanded. It is a very futile criticism to condemn Jonson’s characters as a mere series of types of general ideas; on the other hand, it is a very sound criticism to object, with Barry Cornwall, to the “multitude of characters who throw no light upon the story, and lend no interest to it, occupying space that had better have been bestowed upon the principal agents of the plot.”

In the construction of plots, as in most other respects, Jonson’s at once conscientious and vigorous mind led him in the direction of originality; he depended to a far less degree than the greater part of his contemporaries (Shakespeare with the rest) upon borrowed plots. But either his inventive character was occasionally at fault in this respect, or his devotion to his characters often diverted his attention from a brisk conduct of his plot. Barry Cornwall has directed attention to the essential likeness in the plot of two of Jonson’s best comedies, Volpone and The Alchemist; and another critic, W. Bodham Donne, has dwelt on the difficulty which, in The Poetaster and elsewhere, Ben Jonson seems to experience in sustaining the promise of his actions. The Poetaster is, however, a play sui generis, in which the real business can hardly be said to begin till the last act.

Dryden, when criticizing Ben Jonson’s comedies, thought fit, while allowing the old master humour and incontestable “pleasantness,” to deny him wit and those ornaments thereof which Quintilian reckons up under the terms urbana, salsa, faceta and so forth. Such wit as Dryden has in view is the mere outward fashion or style of the day, the euphuism or “sheerwit” or chic which is the creed of Fastidious Brisks and of their astute purveyors at any given moment. In this Ben Jonson was no doubt defective; but it would be an error to suppose him, as a comic dramatist, to have maintained towards the world around him the attitude of a philosopher, careless of mere transient externalisms. It is said that the scene of his Every Man in his Humour was originally laid near Florence; and his Volpone, which is perhaps the darkest social picture ever drawn by him, plays at Venice. Neither locality was ill-chosen, but the real atmosphere of his comedies is that of the native surroundings amidst which they were produced; and Ben Jonson’s times live for us in his men and women, his country gulls and town gulls, his alchemists and exorcists, his “skeldring” captains and whining Puritans, and the whole ragamuffin rout of his Bartholomew Fair, the comedy par excellence of Elizabethan low life. After he had described the pastimes, fashionable and unfashionable, of his age, its feeble superstitions and its flaunting naughtinesses, its vapouring affectations and its lying effronteries, with an odour as of “divine tabacco” pervading the whole, little might seem to be left to describe for his “sons” and successors. Enough, however, remained; only that his followers speedily again threw manners and “humours” into an undistinguishable medley.

The gift which both in his art and in his life Jonson lacked was that of exercising the influence or creating the effects which he wished to exercise or create without the appearance of consciousness. Concealment never crept over his efforts, and he scorned insinuation. Instead of this, influenced no doubt by the example of the free relations between author and public permitted by Attic comedy, he resorted again and again, from Every Man out of his Humour to The Magnetic Lady, to inductions and commentatory intermezzos and appendices, which, though occasionally effective by the excellence of their execution, are to be regretted as introducing into his dramas an exotic and often vexatious element. A man of letters to the very core, he never quite understood that there is and ought to be a wide difference of methods between the world of letters and the world of the theatre.

The richness and versatility of Jonson’s genius will never be fully appreciated by those who fail to acquaint themselves with what is preserved to us of his “masques” and cognate entertainments. He was conscious enough of his success in this direction—“next himself,” he said, “only Fletcher and Chapman could write a masque.” He introduced, or at least established, the ingenious innovation of the anti-masque, which Schlegel has described, as a species of “parody added by the poet to his device, and usually prefixed to the serious entry,” and which accordingly supplies a grotesque antidote to the often extravagantly imaginative main conception. Jonson’s learning, creative power and humorous ingenuity—combined, it should not be forgotten, with a genuine lyrical gift—all found abundant opportunities for displaying themselves in these productions. Though a growth of foreign origin, the masque was by him thoroughly domesticated in the high places of English literature. He lived long enough to see the species produce its poetic masterpiece in Comus.

The Sad Shepherd, of which Jonson left behind him three acts and a prologue, is distinguished among English pastoral dramas by its freshness of tone; it breathes something of the spirit of the greenwood, and is not unnatural even in its supernatural element. While this piece, with its charming love-scenes between Robin Hood and Maid Marion, remains a fragment, another pastoral by Jonson, the May Lord (which F. G. Fleay and J. A. Symonds sought to identify with The Sad Shepherd; see, however, W. W. Greg in introduction to the Louvain reprint), has been lost, and a third, of which Loch Lomond was intended to be the scene, probably remained unwritten.

Though Ben Jonson never altogether recognized the truth of the maxim that the dramatic art has properly speaking no didactic purpose, his long and laborious life was not wasted upon a barren endeavour. In tragedy he added two works of uncommon merit to our dramatic literature. In comedy his aim was higher, his effort more sustained, and his success more solid than were those of any of his fellows. In the subsidiary and hybrid species of the masque, he helped to open a new and attractive though undoubtedly devious path in the field of dramatic literature. His intellectual endowments surpassed those of most of the great English dramatists in richness and breadth; and in energy of application he probably left them all behind. Inferior to more than one of his fellow-dramatists in the power of imaginative sympathy, he was first among the Elizabethans in the power of observation; and there is point in Barrett Wendell’s paradox, that as a dramatist he was not really a poet but a painter. Yet it is less by these gifts, or even by his unexcelled capacity for hard work, than by the true ring of manliness that he will always remain distinguished among his peers.

Jonson was buried on the north side of the nave in Westminster Abbey, and the inscription, “O Rare Ben Jonson,” was cut in the slab over his grave. In the beginning of the 18th century a portrait bust was put up to his memory in the Poets’ Corner by Harley, earl of Oxford. Of Honthorst’s portrait of Jonson at Knole Park there is a copy in the National Portrait Gallery; another was engraved by W. Marshall for the 1640 edition of his Poems.

Bibliography.—The date of the first folio volume of Jonson’s Works (of which title his novel but characteristic use in applying it to plays was at the time much ridiculed) has already been mentioned as 1616; the second, professedly published in 1640, is described by Gifford as “a wretched continuation of the first, printed from MSS. surreptitiously obtained during his life, or ignorantly hurried through the press after his death, and bearing a variety of dates from 1631 to 1641 inclusive.” The works were reprinted in a single folio volume in 1692, in which The New Inn and The Case is Altered were included for the first time, and again in 6 vols. 8vo in 1715. Peter Whalley’s edition in 7 vols., with a life, appeared in 1756, but was superseded in 1816 by William Gifford’s, in 9 vols. (of which the first includes a biographical memoir, and the famous essay on the “Proofs of Ben Jonson’s Malignity, from the Commentators on Shakespeare”). A new edition of Gifford’s was published in 9 vols. in 1875 by Colonel F. Cunningham, as well as a cheap reprint in 3 vols. in 1870. Both contain the Conversations with Drummond, which were first printed in full by David Laing in the Shakespeare Society’s Publications (1842) and the Jonsonus Virbius, a collection (unparalleled in number and variety of authors) of poetical tributes, published about six months after Jonson’s death by his friends and admirers. There is also a single-volume edition, with a very readable memoir, by Barry Cornwall (1838). An edition of Ben Jonson’s works from the original texts was recently undertaken by C. H. Herford and Percy Simpson. A selection from his plays, edited for the “Mermaid” series in 1893-1895 by B. Nicholson, with an introduction by C. H. Herford, was reissued in 1904. W. W. Bang in his Materialien zur Kunde des alten englischen Dramas has reprinted from the folio of 1616 those of Ben Jonson’s plays which are contained in it (Louvain, 1905-1906). Every Man in his Humour and Every Man out of his Humour have been edited for the same series (16 and 17, 1905 and 1907) by W. W. Bang and W. W. Greg. Every Man in his Humour has also been edited, with a brief biographical as well as special introduction, to which the present sketch owes some details, by H. B. Wheatley (1877). Some valuable editions of plays by Ben Jonson have been recently published by American scholars in the Yale Studies in English, edited by A. S. Cook—The Poetaster, ed. H. S. Mallory (1905); The Alchemist, ed. C. M. Hathaway (1903); The Devil is an Ass, ed. W. S. Johnson (1905); The Staple of News, ed. De Winter (1905); The New Inn, ed. by G. Bremner (1908); The Sad Shepherd (with Waldron’s continuation) has been edited by W. W. Greg for Bang’s Materialien zur Kunde des alten englischen Dramas (Louvain, 1905).

The criticisms of Ben Jonson are too numerous for cataloguing here; among those by eminent Englishmen should be specially mentioned John Dryden’s, particularly those in his Essay on Dramatic Poësy (1667-1668; revised 1684), and in the preface to An Evening’s Love, or the Mock Astrologer (1668), and A. C. Swinburne’s Study of Ben Jonson (1889), in which, however, the significance of the Discoveries is misapprehended. See also F. G. Fleay, Biographical Chronicle of the English Drama (1891), i. 311-387, ii. 1-18; C. H. Herford, “Ben Jonson” (art. in Dict. Nat. Biog., vol. xxx., 1802); A. W. Ward, History of English Dramatic Literature, 2nd ed. (1899), ii. 296-407; and for a list of early impressions, W. W. Greg, List of English Plays written before 1643 and printed before 1700 (Bibliographical Society, 1900), pp. 55-58 and supplement 11-15. An important French work on Ben Jonson, both biographical and critical, and containing, besides many translations of scenes and passages, some valuable appendices, to more than one of which reference has been made above, is Maurice Castelain’s Ben Jonson, l’homme et l’œuvre (1907). Among treatises or essays on particular aspects of his literary work may be mentioned Emil Koeppel’s Quellenstudien zu den Dramen Ben Jonson’s, &c. (1895); the same writer’s “Ben Jonson’s Wirkung auf zeitgenössische Dramatiker,” &c., in Anglicistische Forschungen, 20 (1906); F. E. Schelling’s Ben Jonson and the Classical School (1898); and as to his masques, A. Soergel, Die englischen Maskenspiele (1882) and J. Schmidt, “Über Ben Jonson’s Maskenspiele,” in Herrig’s Archiv, &c., xxvii. 51-91. See also H. Reinsch, “Ben Jonson’s Poetik und seine Beziehungen zu Horaz,” in Münchener Beiträge, 16 (1899).

(A. W. W.)

1 His Christian name of Benjamin was usually abbreviated by himself and his contemporaries; and thus, in accordance with his famous epitaph, it will always continue to be abbreviated.

2 With Inigo Jones, however, in quarrelling with whom, as Howell reminds Jonson, the poet was virtually quarrelling with his bread and butter, he seems to have found it impossible to live permanently at peace; his satirical Expostulation against the architect was published as late as 1635. Chapman’s satire against his old associate, perhaps due to this quarrel, was left unfinished and unpublished.

3 Of The Fall of Mortimer Jonson left only a few lines behind him; but, as he also left the argument of the play, factious ingenuity contrived to furbish up the relic into a libel against Queen Caroline and Sir Robert Walpole in 1731, and to revive the contrivance by way of an insult to the princess dowager of Wales and Lord Bute in 1762.

JOPLIN, a city of Jasper county, Missouri, U.S.A., on Joplin creek, about 140 m. S. of Kansas City. Pop. (1890), 9943; (1900), 26,023, of whom 893 were foreign-born and 773 were negroes; (1910 census) 32,073. It is served by the Missouri Pacific, the St Louis & San Francisco, the Missouri, Kansas & Texas, and the Kansas City Southern railways, and by interurban electric lines. The city has a fine court-house, a United States government building, a Carnegie library and a large auditorium. Joplin is the trade centre of a rich agricultural and fruit-growing district, but its growth has been chiefly due to its situation in one of the most productive zinc and lead regions in the country, for which it is the commercial centre. In 1906 the value of zinc-ore shipments from this Missouri-Kansas (or Joplin) district was $12,074,105, and of shipments of lead ore, $3,048,558. The value of Joplin’s factory product in 1905 was $3,006,203, an increase of 29.3% since 1900. Natural gas, piped from the Kansas fields, is used for light and power, and electricity for commercial lighting and power is derived from plants on Spring River, near Vark, Kansas, and on Shoal creek. The municipality owns its electric-lighting plant; the water-works are under private ownership. The first settlement in the neighbourhood was made in 1838. In 1871 Joplin was laid out and incorporated as a town; in 1872 it and a rival town on the other side of Joplin creek were united under the name Union City; in 1873 Union City was chartered as a city under the name Joplin; and in 1888 Joplin was chartered as a city of the third class. The city derives its name from the creek, which was named in honour of the Rev. Harris G. Joplin (c. 1810-1847), a native of Tennessee.

JOPPA, less correctly Jaffa (Arab. Yāfā), a seaport on the coast of Palestine. It is of great antiquity, being mentioned in the tribute lists of Tethmosis (Thothmes) III.; but as it never was in the territory of the pre-exilic Israelites it was to them a place of no importance. Its ascription to the tribe of Dan (Josh. xix. 46) is purely theoretical. According to the authors of Chronicles (2 Chron. ii. 16), Ezra (iii. 7) and Jonah (i. 3) it was a seaport for importation of the Lebanon timber floated down the coasts or for ships plying even to distant Tarshish. About 148 B.C. it was captured from the Syrians by Jonathan Maccabaeus (1 Macc. x. 75) and later it was retaken and garrisoned by Simon his brother (xii. 33, xiii. 11). It was restored to the Syrians by Pompey (Jos., Ant. xiv. 4, 4) but again given back to the Jews (ib. xiv. 10, 6) with an exemption from tax. St Peter for a while lodged at Joppa, where he restored the benevolent widow Tabitha to life, and had the vision which taught him the universality of the plan of Christianity.

According to Strabo (xvi. ii.), who makes the strange mistake of saying that Jerusalem is visible from Joppa, the place was a resort of pirates. It was destroyed by Vespasian in the Jewish War (68). Tradition connects the story of Andromeda and the sea-monster with the sea-coast of Joppa, and in early times her chains were shown as well as the skeleton of the monster itself (Jos. Wars, iii. 9, 3). The site seems to have been shown even to some medieval pilgrims, and curious traces of it have been detected in modern Moslem legends.

In the 5th and 11th centuries we hear from time to time of bishops of Joppa, under the metropolitan of Jerusalem. In 1126 the district was captured by the knights of St John, but lost to Saladin in 1187. Richard Cœur de Lion retook it in 1191, but it was finally retaken by Malek el ‘Adil in 1196. It languished for a time; in the 16th century it was an almost uninhabited ruin; but towards the end of the 17th century it began anew to develop as a seaport. In 1799 it was stormed by Napoleon; the fortifications were repaired and strengthened by the British.

The modern town of Joppa derives its importance, first, as a seaport for Jerusalem and the whole of southern Palestine, and secondly as a centre of the fruit-growing industry. During the latter part of the 19th century it greatly increased in size. The old city walls have been entirely removed. Its population is about 35,000 (Moslems 23,000, Christians 5000, Jews 7000; with the Christians are included the “Templars,” a semi-religious, semi-agricultural German colony of about 320 souls). The town, which rises over a rounded hillock on the coast, about 100 ft. high, has a very picturesque appearance from the sea. The harbour (so-called) is one of the worst existing, being simply a natural breakwater formed by a ledge of reefs, safe enough for small Oriental craft, but very dangerous for large vessels, which can only make use of the seaport in calm weather; these never come nearer than about a mile from the shore. A railway and a bad carriage-road connect Joppa with Jerusalem. The water of the town is derived from wells, many of which have a brackish taste. The export trade of the town consists of soap of olive oil, sesame, barley, water melons, wine and especially oranges (commonly known as Jaffa oranges), grown in the famous and ever-increasing gardens that lie north and east of the town. The chief imports are timber, cotton and other textile goods, tiles, iron, rice, coffee, sugar and petroleum. The value of the exports in 1900 was estimated at £264,950, the imports £382,405. Over 10,000 pilgrims, chiefly Russians, and some three or four thousand tourists land annually at Joppa. The town is the seat of a kaimakam or lieutenant-governor, subordinate to the governor of Jerusalem, and contains vice-consulates of Great Britain, France, Germany, America and other powers. There are Latin, Greek, Armenian and Coptic monasteries; and hospitals and schools under British, French and German auspices.

(R. A. S. M.)

JORDAENS, JACOB (1593-1678), Flemish painter, was born and died at Antwerp. He studied, like Rubens, under Adam van Noort, and his marriage with his master’s daughter in 1616, the year after his admission to the gild of painters, prevented him from visiting Rome. He was forced to content himself with studying such examples of the Italian masters as he found at home; but a far more potent influence was exerted upon his style by Rubens, who employed him sometimes to reproduce small sketches in large. Jordaens is second to Rubens alone in their special department of the Flemish school. In both there is the same warmth of colour, truth to nature, mastery of chiaroscuro and energy of expression; but Jordaens is wanting in dignity of conception, and is inferior in choice of forms, in the character of his heads, and in correctness of drawing. Not seldom he sins against good taste, and in some of his humorous pieces the coarseness is only atoned for by the animation. Of these last he seems in some cases to have painted several replicas. He employed his pencil also in biblical, mythological, historical and allegorical subjects, and is well-known as a portrait painter. He also etched some plates.

See the elaborate work on the painter, by Max Rooses (1908).

JORDAN, CAMILLE (1771-1821), French politician, was born in Lyons on the 11th of January 1771 of a well-to-do mercantile family. He was educated in Lyons, and from an early age was imbued with royalist principles. He actively supported by voice, pen and musket his native town in its resistance to the Convention; and when Lyons fell, in October 1793, Jordan fled. From Switzerland he passed in six months to England, where he formed acquaintances with other French exiles and with prominent British statesmen, and imbibed a lasting admiration for the English Constitution. In 1796 he returned to France, and next year he was sent by Lyons as a deputy to the Council of Five Hundred. There his eloquence won him consideration. He earnestly supported what he felt to be true freedom, especially in matters of religious worship, though the energetic appeal on behalf of church bells in his Rapport sur la liberté des cultes procured him the sobriquet of Jordan-Cloche. Proscribed at the coup d’état of the 18th Fructidor (4th of September 1797) he escaped to Basel. Thence he went to Germany, where he met Goethe. Back again in France by 1800, he boldly published in 1802 his Vrai sens du vote national pour le consulat à vie, in which he exposed the ambitious schemes of Bonaparte. He was unmolested, however, and during the First Empire lived in literary retirement at Lyons with his wife and family, producing for the Lyons academy occasional papers on the Influence réciproque de l’éloquence sur la Révolution et de la Révolution sur l’éloquence; Études sur Klopstock, &c. At the restoration in 1814 he again emerged into public life. By Louis XVIII. he was ennobled and named a councillor of state; and from 1816 he sat in the chamber of deputies as representative of Ain. At first he supported the ministry, but when they began to show signs of reaction he separated from them, and gradually came to be at the head of the constitutional opposition. His speeches in the chamber were always eloquent and powerful. Though warned by failing health to resign, Camille Jordan remained at his post till his death at Paris, on the 19th of May 1821.

To his pen we owe Lettre à M. Lamourette (1791); Histoire de la conversion d’une dame Parisienne (1792); La Loi et la religion vengées (1792); Adresse à ses commettants sur la révolution du 4 Septembre 1797 (1797); Sur les troubles de Lyon (1818); La Session de 1817 (1818). His Discours were collected in 1818. The “Fragments choisis,” and translations from the German, were published in L’Abeille française. Besides the various histories of the time, see further details vol. x. of the Revue encyclopédique; a paper on Jordan and Madame de Staël, by C. A. Sainte-Beuve, in the Revue des deux mondes for March 1868 and R. Boubée, “Camille Jordan à Weimar,” in the Correspondant (1901), ccv. 718-738 and 948-970.

JORDAN, DOROTHEA (1762-1816), Irish actress, was born near Waterford, Ireland, in 1762. Her mother, Grace Phillips, at one time known as Mrs Frances, was a Dublin actress. Her father, whose name was Bland, was according to one account an army captain, but more probably a stage hand. Dorothy Jordan made her first appearance on the stage in 1777 in Dublin as Phoebe in As You Like It. After acting elsewhere in Ireland she appeared in 1782 at Leeds, and subsequently at other Yorkshire towns, in a variety of parts, including Lady Teazle. It was at this time that she began calling herself Mrs Jordan. In 1785 she made her first London appearance at Drury Lane as Peggy in A Country Girl. Before the end of her first season she had become an established public favourite, her acting in comedy being declared second only to that of Kitty Clive. Her engagement at Drury Lane lasted till 1809, and she played a large variety of parts. But gradually it came to be recognized that her special talent lay in comedy, her Lady Teazle, Rosalind and Imogen being specially liked, and such “breeches” parts as William in Rosina. During the rebuilding of Drury Lane she played at the Haymarket; she transferred her services in 1811 to Covent Garden. Here, in 1814, she made her last appearance on the London stage, and the following year, at Margate, retired altogether. Mrs Jordan’s private life was one of the scandals of the period. She had a daughter by her first manager, in Ireland, and four children by Sir Richard Ford, whose name she bore for some years. In 1790 she became the mistress of the duke of Clarence (afterwards William IV.), and bore him ten children, who were ennobled under the name of Fitz Clarence, the eldest being created earl of Munster. In 1811 they separated by mutual consent, Mrs Jordan being granted a liberal allowance. In 1815 she went abroad. According to one story she was in danger of imprisonment for debt. If so, the debt must have been incurred on behalf of others—probably her relations, who appear to have been continually borrowing from her—for her own personal debts were very much more than covered by her savings. She is generally understood to have died at St Cloud, near Paris, on the 3rd of July 1816, but the story that under an assumed name she lived for seven years after that date in England finds some credence.

See James Boaden, Life of Mrs Jordan (1831); The Great Illegitimates (1830); John Genest, Account of the Stage; Tate Wilkinson, The Wandering Patentee; Memoirs and Amorous Adventures by Sea and Land of King William IV. (1830); The Georgian Era (1838).

JORDAN, THOMAS (1612?-1685), English poet and pamphleteer, was born in London and started life as an actor at the Red Bull theatre in Clerkenwell. He published in 1637 his first volume of poems, entitled Poeticall Varieties, and in the same year appeared A Pill to Purge Melancholy. In 1639 he recited one of his poems before King Charles I., and from this time forward Jordan’s output in verse and prose was continuous and prolific. He freely borrowed from other authors, and frequently re-issued his own writings under new names. During the troubles between the king and the parliament he wrote a number of Royalist pamphlets, the first of which, A Medicine for the Times, or an Antidote against Faction, appeared in 1641. Dedications, occasional verses, prologues and epilogues to plays poured from his pen. Many volumes of his poems bear no date, and they were probably written during the Commonwealth. At the Restoration he eulogized Monk, produced a masque at the entertainment of the general in the city of London and wrote pamphlets in his support. He then for some years devoted his chief attention to writing plays, in at least one of which, Money is an Ass, he himself played a part when it was produced in 1668. In 1671 he was appointed laureate to the city of London; from this date till his death in 1685 he annually composed a panegyric on the lord mayor, and arranged the pageantry of the lord mayor’s shows, which he celebrated in verse under such titles as London Triumphant, or the City in Jollity and Splendour (1672), or London in Luster, Projecting many Bright Beams of Triumph (1679). Many volumes of these curious productions are preserved in the British Museum.

In addition to his numerous printed works, of which perhaps A Royal Arbour of Loyall Poesie (1664) and A Nursery of Novelties in Variety of Poetry are most deserving of mention, several volumes of his poems exist in manuscript. W. C. Hazlitt and other 19th-century critics found more merit in Jordan’s writings than was allowed by his contemporaries, who for the most part scornfully referred to his voluminous productions as commonplace and dull.

See Gerard Langbaine, Account of the English Dramatic Poets (1691); David Erskine Baker, Biographia Dramatica (4 vols., 1812); W. C. Hazlitt, Handbook to the Popular, Poetical and Dramatic Literature of Great Britain (1867); F. W. Fairholt, Lord Mayors Pageants (Percy Society, 1843), containing a memoir of Thomas Jordan; John Gough Nichols, London Pageants (1831).

JORDAN, WILHELM (1819-1904), German poet and novelist, was born at Insterburg in East Prussia on the 8th of February 1819. He studied, first theology and then philosophy and natural science, at the universities of Konigsberg and Berlin. He settled in Leipzig as a journalist; but the democratic views expressed in some essays and the volumes of poems Glocke und Kanone (1481) and Irdische Phantasien (1842) led to his expulsion from Saxony in 1846. He next engaged in literary and tutorial work in Bremen, and on the outbreak of the revolution, in February 1848, was sent to Paris, as correspondent of the Bremer Zeitung. He almost immediately, however, returned to Germany and, throwing himself into the political fray in Berlin, was elected member for Freienwalde, in the first German parliament at Frankfort-on-Main. For a short while he sided with the Left, but soon joined the party of von Gagern. On a vote having been passed for the establishment of a German navy, he was appointed secretary of the committee to deal with the whole question, and was subsequently made ministerial councillor (Ministerialrat) in the naval department of the government. The naval project was abandoned, Jordan was pensioned and afterwards resided at Frankfort-on-Main until his death on the 25th of June 1904, devoting himself to literary work, acting as his own publisher, and producing numerous poems, novels, dramas and translations.

Among his best known works are: Demiurgos (3 vols., 1852-1854), a “Mysterium,” in which he attempted to deal with the problems of human existence, but the work found little favour; Nibelunge, an epic poem in alliterative verse, in two parts, (1) Sigfnedsage (1867-1868; 13th ed. 1889) and (2) Hildebrants Heimkehr (1874; 10th ed. 1892)—in the first part he is regarded as having been remarkably successful; a tragedy, Die Wittwe des Agis (1858); the comedies, Die Liebesleugner (1855) and Durchs Ohr (1870; 6th ed. 1885); and the novels Die Sebalds (1885) and Zwei Wiegen (1887). Jordan also published numerous translations, notably Homers Odyssee (1876; 2nd ed. 1889) and Homers Ilias (1881; 2nd ed. 1894); Die Edda (1889). He was also distinguished as a reciter, and on a visit to the United States in 1871 read extracts from his works before large audiences.

JORDAN (the down-comer; Arab. esh-Sheri’a, the watering-place), the only river of Palestine and one of the most remarkable in the world. It flows from north to south in a deep trough-like valley, the Aulon of the Greeks and Ghōr of the Arabs, which is usually believed to follow the line of a fault or fracture of the earth’s crust. Most geologists hold that the valley is part of an old sea-bed, traces of which remain in numerous shingle-banks and beach-levels. This, they say, once extended to the Red Sea and even over N.E. Africa. Shrinkage caused the pelagic limestone bottom to be upheaved in two ridges, between which occurred a long fracture, which can now be traced from Coelesyria down the Wadi Araba to the Gulf of Akaba. The Jordan valley in its lower part keeps about the old level of the sea-bottom and is therefore a remnant of the Miocene world. This theory, however, is not universally accepted, some authorities preferring to assume a succession of more strictly local elevations and depressions, connected with the recent volcanic activity of the Jaulan and Lija districts on the east bank, which brought the contours finally to their actual form. In any case the number of distinct sea-beaches seems to imply a succession of convulsive changes, more recent than the great Miocene upheaval, which are responsible for the shrinkage of the water into the three isolated pans now found. For more than two-thirds of its course the Jordan lies below the level of the sea. It has never been navigable, no important town has ever been built on its banks, and it runs into an inland sea which has no port and is destitute of aquatic life. Throughout history it has exerted a separatist influence, roughly dividing the settled from the nomadic populations; and the crossing of Jordan, one way or the other, was always an event in the history of Israel. In Hebrew times its valley was regarded as a “wilderness” and, except in the Roman era, seems always to have been as sparsely inhabited as now. From its sources to the Dead Sea it rushes down a continuous inclined plane, broken here and there by rapids and small falls; between the Sea of Galilee and the Dead Sea its sinuosity is so great that in a direct distance of 65 m. it traverses at least 200 m. The mean fall is about 9 ft. in the mile. The Jordan has two great sources, one in Tell el-Kadi (Dan) whence springs the Nahr Leddan, a stream 12 ft. broad at its birth; the other at Banias (anc. Paneas, Caesarea-Philippi), some 4 m. N., where the Nahr Banias issues from a cave, about 30 ft. broad. But two longer streams with less water contest their claim, the Nahr Barrighit from Coelesyria, which rises near the springs of the Litany, and the Nahr Hasbany from Hermon. The four streams unite below the fortress of Banias, which once held the gate of the valley, and flow into a marshy tract now called Huleh (Semechonitis, and perhaps Merom of Joshua). There the Jordan begins to fall below sea-level, rushing down 680 ft. in 9 m. to a delta, which opens into the Sea of Galilee. Thereafter it follows a valley which is usually not above 4 m. broad, but opens out twice into the small plains of Bethshan and Jericho. The river actually flows in a depression, the Zor, from a quarter to 2 m. wide, which it has hollowed out for itself in the bed of the Ghor. During the rainy season (January and February), when the Jordan overflows its banks, the Zor is flooded, but when the water falls it produces rich crops. The floor of the Ghor falls gently to the Zor, and is intersected by deep channels, which have been cut by the small streams and winter torrents that traverse it on their way to the Jordan. As far south as Kurn Surtabeh most of the valley is fertile, and even between that point and the Dead Sea there are several well-watered oases. In summer the heat in the Ghor is intense, 110° F. in the shade, but in winter the temperature falls to 40°, and sometimes to 32° at night. During the seasons of rain and melting snow the river is very full, and liable to freshets. After twelve hours’ rain it has been known to rise from 4 to 5 ft., and to fall as rapidly. In 1257 the Jordan was dammed up for several hours by a landslip, probably due to heavy rain. On leaving the Sea of Galilee the water is quite clear, but it soon assumes a tawny colour from the soft marl which it washes away from its banks and deposits in the Dead Sea. On the whole it is an unpleasant foul stream running between poisonous banks, and as such it seems to have been regarded by the Jews and other Syrians. The Hebrew poets did not sing its praises, and others compared it unfavourably with the clear rivers of Damascus. The clay of the valley was used for brickmaking, and Solomon established brass foundries there. From crusading times to this day it has grown sugar-cane. In Roman times it had extensive palm-groves and some small towns (e.g. Livias or Julias opposite Jericho) and villages. The Jordan is crossed by two stone bridges—one north of Lake Huleh, the other between that lake and the Sea of Galilee—and by a wooden bridge on the road from Jerusalem to Gilead and Moab. During the Roman period, and almost to the end of the Arab supremacy, there were bridges on all the great lines of communication between eastern and western Palestine, and ferries at other places. The depth of water varies greatly with the season. When not in flood the river is often fordable, and between the Sea of Galilee and the Dead Sea there are then more than fifty fords—some of them of historic interest. The only difficulty is occasioned by the erratic zigzag current. The natural products of the Jordan valley—a tropical oasis sunk in the temperate zone, and overhung by Alpine Hermon—are unique. Papyrus grows in Lake Huleh, and rice and cereals thrive on its shores, whilst below the Sea of Galilee the vegetation is almost tropical. The flora and fauna present a large infusion of Ethiopian types; and the fish, with which the river is abundantly stocked, have a great affinity with those of the rivers and lakes of east Africa. Ere the Jordan enters the Dead Sea, its valley has become very barren and forbidding. It reaches the lake at a minus level of 1290 ft., the depression continuing downwards to twice that depth in the bed of the Dead Sea. It receives two affluents, with perennial waters, on the left, the Yarmuk (Hieromax) which flows in from the volcanic Jaulan a little south of the Sea of Galilee, and the Zerka (Jabbok) which comes from the Belka district to a point more than half-way down the lower course. On the right the Jalud descends from the plain of Esdraelon to near Beisan, and the Far’a from near Nablus. Various salt springs rise in the lower valley. The rest of the tributaries are wadis, dry except after rains.

Such human life as may be found in the valley now is mainly migratory. The Samaritan villagers use it in winter as pasture-ground, and, with the Circassians and Arabs of the east bank, cultivate plots here and there. They retire on the approach of summer. Jericho is the only considerable settlement in the lower valley, and it lies some distance west of the stream on the lower slopes of the Judaean heights.

See W. F. Lynch, Narrative of the U.S. Expedition, &c. (1849); H. B. Tristram, Land of Israel (1865); J. Macgregor, Rob Roy on the Jordan (1870); A. Neubauer, La Géographie du Talmud (1868); E. Robinson, Physical Geography of the Holy Land (1865); E. Hull, Mount Seir, &c. (1885), and Memoir on the Geology of Arabia Petraea, &c. (1886); G. A. Smith, Hist. Geography of the Holy Land (1894); W. Libbey and F. E. Hoskins, The Jordan Valley, &c. (1905). See also Palestine.

(C. W. W.; D. G. H.)

JORDANES,1 the historian of the Gothic nation, flourished about the middle of the 6th century. All that we certainly know about his life is contained in three sentences of his history of the Goths (cap. 50), from which, among other particulars as to the history of his family, we learn that his grandfather Paria was notary to Candac, the chief of a confederation of Alans and other tribes settled during the latter half of the 5th century on the south of the Danube in the provinces which are now Bulgaria and the Dobrudscha. Jordanes himself was the notary of Candac’s nephew, the Gothic chief Gunthigis, until he took the vows of a monk. This, according to the manner of speaking of that day, is the meaning of his words ante conversionem meam, though it is quite possible that he may at the same time have renounced the Arian creed of his forefathers, which it is clear that he no longer held when he wrote his Gothic history. The Getica of Jordanes shows Gothic sympathies; but these are probably due to an imitation of the tone of Cassiodorus, from whom he draws practically all his material. He was not himself a Goth, belonging to a confederation of Germanic tribes, embracing Alans and Scyrians, which had come under the influence of the Ostrogoths settled on the lower Danube; and his own sympathies are those of a member of this confederation. He is accordingly friendly to the Goths, even apart from the influence of Cassiodorus; but he is also prepossessed in favour of the eastern emperors in whose territories this confederation lived and whose subject he himself was. This makes him an impartial authority on the last days of the Ostrogoths. At the same time, living in Moesia, he is restricted in his outlook to Danubian affairs. He has little to say of the inner history and policy of the kingdom of Theodoric: his interests lie, as Mommsen says, within a triangle of which the three points are Sirmium, Larissa and Constantinople. Finally, connected as he was with the Alans, he shows himself friendly to them, whenever they enter into his narrative.

We pass from the extremely shadowy personality of Jordanes to the more interesting question of his works.

1. The Romana, or, as he himself calls it, De summa temporum vel origine actibusque gentis Romanorum, was composed in 551. It was begun before, but published after, the Getica. It is a sketch of the history of the world from the creation, based on Jerome, the epitome of Florus, Orosius and the ecclesiastical history of Socrates. There is a curious reference to Iamblichus, apparently the neo-platonist philosopher, whose name Jordanes, being, as he says himself, agrammatus, inserts by way of a flourish. The work is only of any value for the century 450-550, when Jordanes is dealing with recent history. It is merely a hasty compilation intended to stand side by side with the Getica.2

2. The other work of Jordanes commonly called De rebus Geticis or Getica, was styled by himself De origine actibusque Getarum, and was also written in 551. He informs us that while he was engaged upon the Romana a friend named Castalius invited him to compress into one small treatise the twelve books—now lost—of the senator Cassiodorus, on The Origin and Actions of the Goths. Jordanes professes to have had the work of Cassiodorus in his hands for but three days, and to reproduce the sense not the words; but his book, short as it is, evidently contains long verbatim extracts from the earlier author, and it may be suspected that the story of the triduana lectio and the apology quamvis verba non recolo, possibly even the friendly invitation of Castalius, are mere blinds to cover his own entire want of originality. This suspicion is strengthened by the fact (discovered by von Sybel) that even the very preface to his book is taken almost word for word from Rufinus’s translation of Origen’s commentary on the epistle to the Romans. There is no doubt, even on Jordanes’ own statements, that his work is based upon that of Cassiodorus, and that any historical worth which it possesses is due to that fact. Cassiodorus was one of the very few men who, Roman by birth and sympathies, could yet appreciate the greatness of the barbarians by whom the empire was overthrown. The chief adviser of Theodoric, the East Gothic king in Italy, he accepted with ardour that monarch’s great scheme, if indeed, he did not himself originally suggest it, of welding Roman and Goth together into one harmonious state which should preserve the social refinement and the intellectual culture of the Latin-speaking races without losing the hardy virtues of their Teutonic conquerors. To this aim everything in the political life of Cassiodorus was subservient, and this aim he evidently kept before him in his Gothic history. But in writing that history Cassiodorus was himself indebted to the work of a certain Ablabius. It was Ablabius, apparently, who had first used the Gothic sagas (prisca carmina); it was he who had constructed the stem of the Amals. Whether he was a Greek, a Roman or a Goth we do not know; nor can we say when he wrote, though his work may be dated conjecturally in the early part of the reign of Theodoric the Great. We can only say that he wrote on the origin and history of the Goths, using both Gothic saga and Greek sources; and that if Jordanes used Cassiodorus, Cassiodorus used, if to a less extent, the work of Ablabius.

Cassiodorus began his work, at the request of Theodoric, and therefore before 526: it was finished by 533. At the root of the work lies a theory, whencesoever derived, which identified the Goths with the Scythians, whose country Darius Hystaspes invaded, and with the Getae of Dacia, whom Trajan conquered. This double identification enabled Cassiodorus to bring the favoured race into line with the peoples of classical antiquity, to interweave with their history stories about Hercules and the Amazons, to make them invade Egypt, to claim for them a share in the wisdom of the semi-mythical Scythian philosopher Zamolxis. He was thus able with some show of plausibility to represent the Goths as “wiser than all the other barbarians and almost like the Greeks” (Jord., De reb. Get., cap. v.), and to send a son of the Gothic king Telephus to fight at the siege of Troy, with the ancestors of the Romans. All this we can now perceive to have no relation to history, but at the time it may have made the subjugation of the Roman less bitter to feel that he was not after all bowing down before a race of barbarian upstarts, but that his Amal sovereign was as firmly rooted in classical antiquity as any Julius or Claudius who ever wore the purple. In the eighteen years which elapsed between 533 and the composition of the Getica of Jordanes, great events, most disastrous for the Romano-Gothic monarchy of Theodoric, had taken place. It was no longer possible to write as if the whole civilization of the Western world would sit down contentedly under the shadow of East Gothic dominion and Amal sovereignty. And, moreover, the instincts of Jordanes, as a subject of the Eastern Empire, predisposed him to flatter the sacred majesty of Justinian, by whose victorious arms the overthrow of the barbarian kingdom in Italy had been effected. Hence we perceive two currents of tendency in the Getica. On the one hand, as a transcriber of the philo-Goth Cassiodorus, he magnifies the race of Alaric and Theodoric, and claims for them their full share, perhaps more than their full share, of glory in the past. On the other hand he speaks of the great anti-Teuton emperor Justinian, and of his reversal of the German conquests of the 5th century, in language which would certainly have grated on the ears of Totila and his heroes. When Ravenna is taken, and Vitigis carried into captivity, Jordanes almost exults in the fact that “the nobility of the Amals and the illustrious offspring of so many mighty men have surrendered to a yet more illustrious prince and a yet mightier general, whose fame shall not grow dim through all the centuries.” (Getica, lx. § 315).

This laudation, both of the Goths and of their Byzantine conquerors, may perhaps help us to understand the motive with which the Getica was written. In the year 551 Germanus, nephew of Justinian, accompanied by his bride, Matasuntha, grand-daughter of Theodoric, set forth to reconquer Italy for the empire. His early death prevented any schemes for a revived Romano-Gothic kingdom which may have been based on his personality. His widow, however, bore a posthumous child, also named Germanus, of whom Jordanes speaks (cap. 60) as “blending the blood of the Anicii and the Amals, and furnishing a hope under the divine blessing of one day uniting their glories.” This younger Germanus did nothing in after life to realize these anticipations; but the somewhat pointed way in which his name and his mother’s name are mentioned by Jordanes lends some probability to the view that he hoped for the child’s succession to the Eastern Empire, and the final reconciliation of the Goths and Romans in the person of a Gotho-Roman emperor.

The De rebus Geticis falls naturally into four parts. The first (chs. i.-xiii.) commences with a geographical description of the three quarters of the world, and in more detail of Britain and Scanzia (Sweden), from which the Goths under their king Berig migrated to the southern coast of the Baltic. Their migration across what has since been called Lithuania to the shores of the Euxine, and their differentiation into Visigoths and Ostrogoths, are next described. Chs. v.-xiii. contain an account of the intrusive Geto-Scythian element before alluded to.

The second section (chs. xiv.-xxiv.) returns to the true history of the Gothic nation, sets forth the genealogy of the Amal kings, and describes the inroads of the Goths into the Roman Empire in the 3rd century, with the foundation and the overthrow of the great but somewhat shadowy kingdom of Hermanric.

The third section (chs. xxv.-xlvii.) traces the history of the West Goths from the Hunnish invasion to the downfall of the Gothic kingdom in Gaul under Alaric II. (376-507). The best part of this section, and indeed of the whole book, is the seven chapters devoted to Attila’s invasion of Gaul and the battle of the Mauriac plains. Here we have in all probability a verbatim extract from Cassiodorus, who (possibly resting on Ablabius) interwove with his narrative large portions of the Gothic sagas. The celebrated expression certaminis gaudia assuredly came at first neither from the suave minister Cassiodorus nor from the small-souled notary Jordanes, but is the translation of some thought which first found utterance through the lips of a Gothic minstrel.

The fourth section (chs. xlviii.-lx.) traces the history of the East Goths from the same Hunnish invasion to the first overthrow of the Gothic monarchy in Italy (376-539). In this fourth section are inserted, somewhat out of their proper place, some valuable details as to the Gothi Minores, “an immense people dwelling in the region of Nicopolis, with their high priest and primate Vulfilas, who is said also to have taught them letters.” The book closes with the allusion to Germanus and the panegyric on Justinian as the conqueror of the Goths referred to above.

Jordanes refers in the Getica to a number of authors besides Cassiodorus; but he owes his knowledge of them to Cassiodorus. It is perhaps only when he is using Orosius that we can hold Jordanes to have borrowed directly. Otherwise, as Mommsen says, the Getica is a mera epitome, laxata ea et perversa, historiae Gothicae Cassiodorianae.

As to the style and literary character of Jordanes, every author who has used him speaks in terms of severe censure. When he is left to himself and not merely transcribing, he is sometimes scarcely grammatical. There are awkward gaps in his narrative and statements inconsistent with each other. He quotes, as if he were familiarly acquainted with their writings, a number of Greek and Roman writers, of whom it is almost certain that he had not read more than one or two. At the same time he does not quote the chronicler Marcellinus, from whom he has copied verbatim the history of the deposition of Augustulus. All these faults make him a peculiarly unsatisfactory authority where we cannot check his statements by those of other authors. It may, however, be pleaded in extenuation that he is professedly a transcriber, and, if his story be correct, a transcriber in peculiarly unfavourable circumstances. He has also himself suffered much from the inaccuracy of copyists. But nothing has really been more unfortunate for the reputation of Jordanes as a writer than the extreme preciousness of the information which he has preserved to us. The Teutonic tribes whose dim origins he records have in the course of centuries attained to world-wide dominion. The battle in the Mauriac plains of which he is really the sole historian, is now seen to have had important bearings on the destinies of the world. And thus the hasty pamphlet of a half-educated Gothic monk has been forced into prominence, almost into rivalry with the finished productions of the great writers of classical antiquity. No wonder that it stands the comparison badly; but with all its faults the Getica of Jordanes will probably ever retain its place side by side with the De moribus Germanorum of Tacitus as a chief source of information respecting the history, institutions and modes of thought of our Teutonic forefathers.

Editions.—The classical edition is that of Mommsen (in Mon. Germ. hist. auct. antiq., v., ii.), which supersedes the older editions, such as that in the first volume of Muratori’s Scriptt. rer. Ital. The best MS. is the Heidelberg MS., written in Germany, probably in the 8th century; but this perished in the fire at Mommsen’s house. The next of the MSS. in value are the Vaticanus Palatinus of the 10th century, and the Valenciennes MS. of the 9th.

Authorities.—Von Sybel’s essay, De fontibus Jordanis (1838); Schirren’s De ratione quae inter Jordanem et Cassiodorum intercedat Commentatio (Dorpat, 1858); Kopke’s Die Anfänge des Königthums beiden Gothen (Berlin, 1859); Dahn’s Die Könige der Germanen, vol. ii. (Munich, 1861); Ebert’s Geschichte der Christlich-Lateinischen Literatur (Leipsic, 1874); Wattenbach’s Deutschlands Geschichtsquellen im Mittelalter (Berlin, 1877); and the introduction of Mommsen to his edition.

(T. H.; E. Br.)

1 The evidence of MSS. is overwhelming against the form Jornandes. The MSS. exhibit Jordanis or Jordannis; but these are only Vulgar-Latin spellings of Jordanes.

2 The terms of the dedication of this book to a certain Vigilius make it impossible that the pope (538-555) of that name is meant.

JORDANUS (Jordan Catalani) (fl. 1321-1330), French Dominican missionary and explorer in Asia, was perhaps born at Séverac in Aveyron, north-east of Toulouse. In 1302 he may have accompanied the famous Thomas of Tolentino, via Negropont, to the East; but it is only in 1321 that we definitely discover him in western India, in the company of the same Thomas and certain other Franciscan missionaries on their way to China. Ill-luck detained them at Tana in Salsette island, near Bombay; and here Jordanus’ companions (“the four martyrs of Tana”) fell victims to Moslem fanaticism (April 7, 1321). Jordanus, escaping, worked some time at Baruch in Gujarat, near the Nerbudda estuary, and at Suali (?) near Surat; to his fellow-Dominicans in north Persia he wrote two letters—the first from Gogo in Gujarat (October 12, 1321), the second from Tana (January 24, 1323/4)—describing the progress of this new mission. From these letters we learn that Roman attention had already been directed, not only to the Bombay region, but also to the extreme south of the Indian peninsula, especially to “Columbum,” Quilon, or Kulam in Travancore; Jordanus’ words may imply that he had already started a mission there before October 1321. From Catholic traders he had learnt that Ethiopia (i.e. Abyssinia and Nubia) was accessible to Western Europeans; at this very time, as we know from other sources, the earliest Latin missionaries penetrated thither. Finally, the Epistles of Jordanus, like the contemporary Secreta of Marino Sanuto (1306-1321), urge the pope to establish a Christian fleet upon the Indian seas. Jordanus, between 1324 and 1328 (if not earlier), probably visited Kulam and selected it as the best centre for his future work; it would also appear that he revisited Europe about 1328, passing through Persia, and perhaps touching at the great Crimean port of Soldaia or Sudak. He was appointed a bishop in 1328 and nominated by Pope John XXII. to the see of Columbum in 1330. Together with the new bishop of Samarkand, Thomas of Mancasola, Jordanus was commissioned to take the pall to John de Cora, archbishop of Sultaniyah in Persia, within whose province Kulam was reckoned; he was also commended to the Christians of south India, both east and west of Cape Comorin, by Pope John. Either before going out to Malabar as bishop, or during a later visit to the west, Jordanus probably wrote his Mirabilia, which from internal evidence can only be fixed within the period 1329-1338; in this work he furnished the best account of Indian regions, products, climate, manners, customs, fauna and flora given by any European in the Middle Ages—superior even to Marco Polo’s. In his triple division of the Indies, India Major comprises the shorelands from Malabar to Cochin China; while India Minor stretches from Sind (or perhaps from Baluchistan) to Malabar; and India Tertia (evidently dominated by African conceptions in his mind) includes a vast undefined coast-region west of Baluchistan, reaching into the neighbourhood of, but not including, Ethiopia and Prester John’s domain. Jordanus’ Mirabilia contains the earliest clear African identification of Prester John, and what is perhaps the first notice of the Black Sea under that name; it refers to the author’s residence in India Major and especially at Kulam, as well as to his travels in Armenia, north-west Persia, the Lake Van region, and Chaldaea; and it supplies excellent descriptions of Parsee doctrines and burial customs, of Hindu ox-worship, idol-ritual, and suttee, and of Indian fruits, birds, animals and insects. After the 8th of April 1330 we have no more knowledge of Bishop Jordanus.

Of Jordanus’ Epistles there is only one MS., viz. Paris, National Library, 5006 Lat., fol. 182, r. and v.; of the Mirabilia also one MS. only, viz. London, British Museum, Additional MSS., 19,513, fols. 3, r.-12 r. The text of the Epistles is in Quétif and Echard, Scriptores ordinis praedicatorum, i. 549-550 (Epistle I.); and in Wadding, Annales minorum, vi. 359-361 (Epistle II.); the text of the Mirabilia in the Paris Geog. Soc.’s Recueil de voyages, iv. 1-68 (1839). The Papal letters referring to Jordanus are in Raynaldus, Annales ecclesiastici, 1330, §§ lv. and lvii. (April 8; Feb. 14). See also Sir H. Yule’s Jordanus, a version of the Mirabilia with a commentary (Hakluyt Soc., 1863) and the same editor’s Cathay, giving a version of the Epistles, with a commentary, &c. (Hak. Soc., 1866) pp. 184-185, 192-196, 225-230; F. Kunstmann, “Die Mission in Meliapor und Tana” and “Die Mission in Columbo” in the Historisch-politische Blätter of Phillips and Görres, xxxvii. 25-38, 135-152 (Munich, 1856), &c.; C. R. Beazley, Dawn of Modern Geography, iii. 215-235.

(C. R. B.)

JORIS, DAVID, the common name of Jan Jorisz or Joriszoon (c. 1501-1556), Anabaptist heresiarch who called himself later Jan van Brugge; was born in 1501 or 1502, probably in Flanders, at Ghent or Bruges. His father, Georgius Joris de Koman, otherwise Joris van Amersfoordt, probably a native of Bruges, was a shopkeeper and amateur actor at Delft; from the circumstance that he played the part of King David, his son received the name of David, but probably not in baptism. His mother was Marytje, daughter of Jan de Gorter, of a good family in Delft. As a child he was clever and delicate. He seems then or later to have acquired some tincture of learning. His first known occupation was that of a glass-painter; in 1522 he painted windows for the church at Enkhuizen, North Holland (the birthplace of Paul Potter). In pursuit of his art he travelled, and is said to have reached England; ill-health drove him homewards in 1524, in which year he married Dirckgen Willems at Delft. In the same year the Lutheran reformation took hold of him, and he began to issue appeals in prose and verse against the Mass and against the pope as antichrist. On Ascension Day 1528 he committed an outrage on the sacrament carried in procession; he was placed in the pillory, had his tongue bored, and was banished from Delft for three years. He turned to the Anabaptists, was rebaptized in 1533, and for some years led a wandering life. He came into relations with John à Lasco, and with Menno Simons. Much influenced by Melchior Hofman, he had no sympathy with the fanatic violence of the Münster faction. At the Buckholdt conference in August 1536 he played a mediating part. His mother, in 1537, suffered martyrdom as an Anabaptist. Soon after he took up a rôle of his own, having visions and a gift of prophecy. He adapted in his own interest the theory (constantly recurrent among mystics and innovators, from the time of Abbot Joachim to the present day) of three dispensations, the old, with its revelation of the Father, the newer with its revelation of the Son, and the final or era of the Spirit. Of this newest revelation Christus David was the mouthpiece, supervening on Christus Jesus. From the 1st of April 1544, bringing with him some of his followers, he took up his abode in Basel, which was to be the New Jerusalem. Here he styled himself Jan van Brugge. His identity was unknown to the authorities of Basel, who had no suspicion of his heresies. By his writings he maintained his hold on his numerous followers in Holland and Friesland. These monotonous writings, all in Dutch, flowed in a continual stream from 1524 (though none is extant before 1529) and amounted to over 200 in number. His magnum opus was ’T Wonder Boeck (n.d. 1542, divided into two parts; 1551, handsomely reprinted, divided into four parts; both editions anonymous). Its chief claim to recognition is its use, in the latter part, of the phrase Restitutio Christi, which apparently suggested to Servetus his title Christianismi Restitutio (1553). In the 1st edition is a figure of the “new man,” signed with the author’s monogram, and probably drawn as a likeness of himself; it fairly corresponds with the alleged portrait, engraved in 1607, reproduced in the appendix to A. Ross’s Pansebeia (1655), and idealized by P. Burckhardt in 1900. Another work, Verklaringe der Scheppenissen (1553) treats mystically the book of Genesis, a favourite theme with Boehme, Swedenborg and others. His remaining writings exhibit all that easy dribble of triumphant muddiness which disciples take as depth. His wife died on the 22nd of August, and his own death followed on the 25th of August 1556. He was buried, with all religious honours, in the church of St Leonard, Basel. Three years later, Nicolas Blesdijk, who had married his eldest daughter Jannecke (Susanna), but had lost confidence in Jorisz some time before his death, denounced the dead man to the authorities of Basel. An investigation was begun in March 1559, and as the result of a conviction for heresy the exhumed body of Jorisz was burned, together with his portrait, on the 13th of May 1559. Blesdijk’s Historia (not printed till 1642) accuses Jorisz of having plures uxores. Of this there is no confirmation. Theoretically Jorisz regarded polygamy as lawful; there is no proof that his theory affected his own practice.

The first attempt at a true account of Jorisz was by Gottfried Arnold, in his anonymous Historia (1713), pursued with much fuller material in his Kirchen und Ketzer Historie (best ed. 1740-1742). See also F. Nippold, in Zeitschrift für die historische Theologie (1863, 1864, 1868); A. van der Linde, in Allgemeine Deutsche Biographie (1881); P. Burckhardt, Basler Biographien (1900); Hegler, in Hauck’s Realencyklopädie (1901), and the bibliography by A. van der Linde, 1867, supplemented by E. Weller, 1869.

(A. Go.*)

JORTIN, JOHN (1698-1770), English theologian, the son of a Protestant refugee from Brittany, was born in London on the 23rd of October 1698. He went to Charterhouse School, and in 1715 became a pensioner of Jesus College, Cambridge, where his reputation as a Greek scholar led to his being selected to translate certain passages from Eustathius for the notes to Pope’s Homer. In 1722 he published a small volume of Latin verse entitled Lusus poetici. Having taken orders in 1724, he was in 1726 presented by his college to the vicarage of Swavesey in Cambridgeshire, which he resigned in 1730 to become preacher at a chapel-of-ease in New Street, London. In 1731, along with some friends, he began a publication entitled Miscellaneous Observations on Authors Ancient and Modern, which appeared at intervals during two years. He was Boyle lecturer in 1749. Shortly after becoming chaplain to the bishop of London in 1762 he was appointed to a prebendal stall of St Paul’s and to the vicarage of Kensington, and in 1764 he was made archdeacon of London. He died at Kensington on the 5th of September 1770.

The principal works of Jortin are: Discussions Concerning the Truth of the Christian Religion (1746); Remarks on Ecclesiastical History (3 vols. 1751-2-4); Life of Erasmus (2 vols. 1750, 1760) founded on the Life by Jean Le Clerc; and Tracts Philological Critical and Miscellaneous (1790). A collection of his Various Works appeared in 1805-1810. All his writings display wide learning and acuteness. He writes on theological subjects with the detachment of a thoughtful layman, and is witty without being flippant. See John Disney’s Life of Jortin (1792).

JOSEPH, in the Old Testament, the son of the patriarch Jacob by Rachel; the name of a tribe of Israel. Two explanations of the name are given by the Biblical narrator (Gen. xxx. 23 [E], 24 [J]); a third, “He (God) increases,” seems preferable. Unlike the other “sons” of Jacob, Joseph is usually reckoned as two tribes (viz. his “sons” Ephraim and Manasseh), and closely associated with it is the small tribe of Benjamin (q.v.), which lay immediately to the south. These three constituted the “sons” of Rachel (the ewe), and with the “sons” of Leah (the antelope?) are thus on a higher level than the “sons” of Jacob’s concubines. The “house of Joseph” and its offshoots occupied the centre of Palestine from the plain of Esdraelon to the mountain country of Benjamin, with dependencies in Bashan and northern Gilead (see Manasseh). Practically it comprised the northern kingdom, and the name is used in this sense in 2 Sam. xix. 20; Amos v. 6; vi. 6 (note the prominence of Joseph in the blessings of Jacob and Moses, Gen. xlix., Deut. xxxiii.). Originally, however, “Joseph” was more restricted, possibly to the immediate neighbourhood of Shechem, its later extension being parallel to the development of the name Jacob. The dramatic story of the tribal ancestor is recounted in Gen. xxxvii.-l. (see Genesis). Joseph, the younger and envied son, is seized by his brothers at Dothan north of Shechem, and is sold to a party of Ishmaelites or Midianites, who carry him down to Egypt. After various vicissitudes he gains the favour of the king of Egypt by the interpretation of a dream, and obtains a high place in the kingdom.1 Forced by a famine his brothers come to buy food, and in the incidents that follow Joseph shows his preference for his young brother Benjamin (cf. the tribal data above). His father Jacob is invited to come to Goshen, where a settlement is provided for the family and their flocks. This is followed many years later by the exodus, the conquest of Palestine, and the burial of Joseph’s body in the grave at Shechem which his father had bought.

The history of Joseph in Egypt displays some familiarity with the circumstances and usages of that country; see Driver (Hastings’s D.B.) and Cheyne (Ency. Bib., col. 2589 seq.); although Abrech (xli. 43), possibly the Egyptian ib rk (Crum, in Hastings’s D.B., i. 665), has been otherwise connected with the Assyrian abarakku (a high officer). An interesting parallel to the story of Joseph in Gen. xxxix. is found in the Egyptian tale of The Two Brothers (Petrie, Eg. Tales, 2nd series, p. 36 seq., 1895), which dates from about 1500 B.C., but the differences are not inconsiderable compared with the points of resemblance, and the tale has features which are almost universal (Frazer, Golden Bough, 2nd ed., vol. iii. 351 seq.). On the theory that the historical elements of Joseph’s history refer to an official (Yanhamu) of the time of Amenophis III. and IV., see Cheyne, op. cit., and Hibbert Journal, October 1903. That the present form of the narrative has been influenced by current mythological lore is not improbable; on this question see (with caution) Winckler, Gesch. Israels, ii. 67-77 (1900); A. Jeremias, Alte Test., pp. 383 sqq. (1906). It may be added that the Egyptian names in the story of Joseph are characteristic of the XXII. and subsequent dynasties. See, also Meyer and Luther, Die Israeliten (1906), Index, s.v.

(S. A. C.)

1 Joseph’s marriage with the daughter of the priest of On might show that the tribes of Ephraim and Manasseh were believed to be half-Egyptian by descent, but it is notoriously difficult to determine how much is of ethnological value and how much belongs to romance (viz. that of the individual Joseph).

JOSEPH, in the New Testament, the husband of Mary, the mother of Jesus. He is represented as a descendant of the house of David, and his genealogy appears in two divergent forms in Matt. i. 1-17 and Luke iii. 23-38. The latter is probably much more complete and accurate in details. The former, obviously artificial in structure (notice 3 × 14 generations), traces the Davidic descent through kings, and is governed by an apologetic purpose. Of Joseph’s personal history practically nothing is recorded in the Bible. The facts concerning him common to the two birth-narratives (Matt. i.-ii.; Luke i.-ii.) are: (a) that he was a descendant of David, (b) that Mary was already betrothed to him when she was found with child of the Holy Ghost, and (c) that he lived at Nazareth after the birth of Christ; but these facts are handled differently in each case. It is noticeable that, in Matthew, Joseph is prominent (e.g. he receives an annunciation from an angel), while in Luke’s narrative he is completely subordinated. Bp Gore (The Incarnation, Bampton lecture for 1891, p. 78) points out that Matthew narrates everything from Joseph’s side, Luke from Mary’s, and infers that the narrative of the former may ultimately be based on Joseph’s account, that of the latter on Mary’s. The narratives seem to have been current (in a poetical form) among the early Jewish-Christian community of Palestine. At Nazareth Joseph followed the trade of a carpenter (Matt. xiii. 55). It is probable that he had died before the public ministry of Christ; for no mention is made of him in passages relating to this period where the mother and brethren of Jesus are introduced; and from John xix. 26 it is clear that he was not alive at the time of the Crucifixion.

Joseph was the father of several children (Matt. xiii. 55), but according to ecclesiastical tradition by a former marriage. The reading of Matt. i. 16, in the Sinaitic Palimpsest (Joseph ... begat Jesus, who is called the Christ) also makes him the natural father of Jesus, and this was the view of certain early heretical sects, but it seems never to have been held in orthodox Christian circles. According to various apocryphal gospels (conveniently collected in B. H. Cowper’s The Apocryphal Gospels, 1881), when married to Mary he was a widower already 80 years of age, and the father of four sons and two daughters; his first wife’s name was Salome and she was a connexion of the family of John the Baptist.

In the Roman Catholic Church the 19th of March has since 1642 been a feast in Joseph’s honour. Two other festivals in his honour have also been established (the Patronage of St Joseph, 3rd Sunday after Easter, and the Betrothal of Mary and Joseph, 23rd of January). In December 1870 St Joseph was proclaimed Patron of the whole Church.

(G. H. Bo.)

JOSEPH OF ARIMATHAEA,1 in the New Testament, a wealthy Jew who had been converted by Jesus Christ. He is mentioned by the Four Evangelists, who are in substantial agreement concerning him: after the Crucifixion he went to Pilate and asked for the body of Jesus, subsequently prepared it for burial and laid it in a tomb. There are, however, minor differences in the accounts, which have given rise to controversy. Matthew (xxvii. 60) says that the tomb was Joseph’s own; Mark (xv. 43 seq.), Luke (xxiii. 50 seq.) say nothing of this, while John (xix. 41) simply says that the body was laid in a sepulchre “nigh at hand.” Both Mark and Luke say that Joseph was a “councillor” (εὐσχήμων βουλευτής, Mark xv. 43), and the Gospel of Peter describes him as a “friend of Pilate and of the Lord.” This last statement is probably a late invention, and there is considerable difficulty as to “councillor.” That Joseph was a member of the Sanhedrin is improbable. Luke indeed, regarding him as such, says that he “had not consented to their counsel and deed,” but Mark (xiv. 64) says that all the Sanhedrin “condemned him to be worthy of death.” Perhaps the phrase “noble councillor” is intended to imply merely a man of wealth and position. Again Matthew says that Joseph was a disciple, while Mark implies that he was not yet among the definite adherents of Christ, and John describes him as an adherent “secretly for fear of the Jews.” Most likely he was a disciple, but belonged only to the wider circle of adherents. The account given in the Fourth Gospel suggests that the writer, faced with these various difficulties, assumed a double tradition: (1) that Joseph of Arimathaea, a wealthy disciple, buried the body of Christ; (2) that the person in question was Joseph of Arimathaea a “councillor,” and solved the problem by substituting Nicodemus as the councillor; hence he describes both Joseph and Nicodemus (xix. 39) as co-operating in the burial. Some critics (e.g. Strauss, New Life of Jesus, ch. 96) have thrown doubt upon the story, regarding some of the details as invented to suit the prophecy in Isa. liii. 9, “they made his grave with the wicked, and with the rich in his death” (for various translations, see Hastings’s Dict. Bible, ii. 778). But in the absence of any reference to this prophecy in the Gospels, this view is unconvincing, though the correspondence is remarkable.

The striking character of this single appearance of Joseph of Arimathaea led to the rise of numerous legends. Thus William of Malmesbury says that he was sent to Britain by St Philip, and, having received a small island in Somersetshire, there constructed “with twisted twigs” the first Christian church in Britain—afterwards to become the Abbey of Glastonbury. The legend says that his staff, planted in the ground, became a thorn flowering twice a year (see Glastonbury). This tradition—which is given only as such by Malmesbury himself—is not confirmed, and there is no mention of it in either Gildas or Bede. Joseph also plays a large part in the various versions of the Legend of the Holy Grail (see Grail, The Holy).