77 



JUSTINUS IL 



KAIN, LE, HENRI-LOUIS. 



073 



despatch of the official business of state on the quaestor Proclus, a 

 faithful servant, who was also the friend of Justiuian, Justin's nephew, 

 who himself had acquired a great ascendancy over his uncle. By Jus- 

 tinian's advice a reconciliation was effected between the Greek and 

 the Roman churches in 520. The murder of Vitalianus, who had 

 been raised to the consulship, but who, having excited the suspicion 

 and jealousy of the court, was stabbed at a banquet, casts a dark shade 

 upon the character of both Justin and Juttinian. In other respects 

 Justin is represented by the historians as honest and equitable, though 

 rude and distrustful. After a reign of nine year.?, being afflicted by 

 an incurable wound, and having become weak in body and mind, 

 Justin abdicated in favour of his nephew, and died soon after, in 527. 



Coin of Justinua I. or II. 

 British Museum. Actual size. 



JUSTINUS II., nephew of Justinian I., by his mother Vigilanlia, 

 was raised to the throne by the senators and the guards immediately 

 afVr the death of his uncle, on the 15th of November 565. Soon 

 after complaints reached Constantinople from the Romans against 

 Narses the conqueror of the Goths, and exarch of Ravenna, whose 

 great qualities were stained with avarice, and whose government had 

 become unpopular in Italy. A new exarch, Longinus, was appointed 

 to supersede Narses, and the empress Sophia, Justin's consort, added 

 to the letters of recal the insulting message, that the eunuch Narses 

 should leave to men the exercise of arms and the dignities of the state, 

 and return to his proper place among the maidens of the palace, where 

 a distal!' should be placed in his hand. To this insult Narses is said 

 to have replied, " I will spin hor such a thread as she will not easily 

 unravel ; " and he is said to have invited the Longobards, and their 

 king Alboin, to invade Italy. However this may bo, Alboiu invaded 

 Italy by the Julian Alps in 568, and in a few years all North Italy was 

 lost to the Byzantine emperor. The provinces of Asia were likewise 

 overrun by the Persians. Internal discontent prevailed in the capital 

 and provinces, owing to the malversations of the governors and magis- 

 trates, and Justin himself, deprived by infirmity of the use of his feet, 

 and confined to the palace, was not able to repress abuses and infuse 

 vigour into the administration. Feeling at last his impotence, ho 

 resolved on abdicating the crown, and as he had no sou, he chose 

 Tiberius, the captain of his guards, as his successor. The conduct of 

 Tiberius fully justified Justin's discernment Justin lived four years 

 after his abdication in quiet retirement, and died in the year 578. 



JU' VENAL. Of the personal history of this great poet scarcely 

 anything appears to be certainly known. His name is variously written, 

 Decius, or Decimus, Junius Juvenalis. Hi birthplace, on no very 

 sura ground, is said to have been Aquinum, a Volscian town ; and he 



is said to have been born somewhere about A.D. 40, under Caligula, 

 and to have died, turned of eighty, under Hadrian. He was of obscure 

 extraction, being the grandson of an enfranchised slave. Some of his 

 biographers say that he followed the profession of a pleader. He was 

 intimate with the poet Martial. (Martial, ' Kp.,' vii. 24, 91 ; xii. 18.) 

 It does not appear that he gained any reputation until the publication 

 of his Satires, which was late in life, after he was turned sixty, Still 

 later he was sent in cominaud of a cohort of infantry to Egypt, where 

 he died from vexation and weariness of this honourable exile, which 

 it is said was inflicted upon him as a punishment for satirising a 

 favourite of Hadrian under the person of Paris, the favourite actor of 

 Domitian : see 'Sat.,' vii. 88, where Paris is described as the bestower 

 of military patronage. 



The relative merits of Juvenal and Horace as satirists have been 

 warmly contested. It is a question on which men will form opposite 

 opinions, as their tempers are more fit to relish brilliancy and playful- 

 ness, or earnest and dignified declamation. Juvenal is said to have 

 spent much time in attendance in the schools of the rhetoricians, and 

 the effect of thw, in an age not remarkable for purity of taste, may be 

 observed perhaps in a tendency to hyperbolical inflation, both of thought 

 and style, which would soon betray a writer of less power into the 

 ridiculous. From this his wit, command of language, and force and 

 fulness of thought, completely preserve him : still perhaps he would 

 produce more effect if the effort to do his utmost were less apparent. 

 Dryden says, " Juvenal gives me as much pleasure as I can bear. He 

 fully satisfies expectation ; he treats his subject home. His spleen is 

 raised, and he raises mine : I have the pleasure of concernment in all 

 he says. He drives his reader along with him, and when he is at the 

 end of his way I willingly stop with him. If he went another stage 

 it would be too far, and turn delight into fatigue. When he gives over 

 'tis a sign the subject is exhausted, and the wit of man cau carry it 

 no farther. If a fault can justly be found in him, 'tis that he is some- 

 times too luxuriant, too redundant." His writings are addressed to 

 the encouragement of virtue no less than to the chastisement of vice; 

 and parts of them have been recommended by Christian divines as 

 admirable storehouses of moral precepts. Still they lie open to the 

 objection of descending so minutely into the details of vice as to 

 minister food as well as physic to the depraved mind. To the scholar 

 they are invaluable for the information which they supply concerning 

 private life among the Romans. The editions of Juvenal are very 

 numerous ; that of Ruperti has (in England at least) nearly superseded 

 others : it is attended by a copious body of explanatory notes, which 

 are much needed in reading this difficult author. Later and very 

 valuable editions are those of Webir, Weimar, 1825; and Heinrich, 

 Bonn, 1839. Juvenal has been translated into English by Holiday, 

 Dryden (who however only translated five satires of the edition which 

 bears his name), Gifford, and Hodgson. The French prose translation 

 of Dusaulx is highly praised. [DBTDEH j GIFFOUD.] 



(Premium to Ruperti's Juvenal ; Dedication to Dryden's Juveml. 



JUVENTIUS CELSUS. 



K 



T'AEMPFER, ENGELBERT, well known as a botanist, and still 

 *- more as a traveller, was born on the 16th of September 1651 at 

 Lemgo, in the principality of Lippe-Detniold, in Germany, where his 

 father wag rector of the church of St. Nicholas. He was sent succes- 

 sively to the schools of Hameln, Liineburg, Hamburg, and Lubeck, in 

 all which he was distinguished by his rapid progress in the ancient 

 languages, history, geography, and music. He was afterwards sent to 

 the gymnasium of Danzig, and he then studied at the University of 

 Cracow in Poland for three years, and at Konigsberg in Prussia for 

 four years more. At the last-mentioned place ho applied himself 

 closely to the study of physic and natural history. From Prussia he 

 went to Sweden, where the extent of his knowledge and his talents 

 procured him very advantageous offers on condition of settling at 

 Upsala; but his desire to see remote countries led him to decline the 

 proposals, and he solicited and obtained the place of secretary to an 

 embassy which was then going to Persia. The embassy passed through 

 Moscow, Kaan, and Astrakhan, where they embarked for Persia, and 

 landed at Nizabad, in Daghestan, on the western shores of the Caspian 

 Sea. While they were waiting for their passports in the town of 

 Shamaki, in Shirvan, Kaempfer made an excursion to the peninsula 

 of Abcheran : he was the first naturalist who visited this remarkable 

 spot, its wells of Naphtha and its ever-burning fire, which he described 

 in his ' Amccnitates Exotic;c.' In 1634 the embassy arrived at Ispahan, 

 then the capital of Persia. The information which Kaempfer collected 

 during a residence of two years at that place, respecting Persia and its 

 natural productioni", is embodied in his ' Amccnitates.' When the ; 

 embassy return-jd to Europe in 1685, Kaempftr entered as surgeon 

 into the service of the Dutch East India Company, and served in that ! 

 capacity in the nary then cruising in the Persian Gulf. After a long 

 illness at Bender Abassi, he sailed for Batavia in 1689, and in this 

 passage visited most of the countries on the western shores of Hin- 



dustan. At Batavia he occupied himself chiefly with the natural history 

 of the island of Java. In 1690 he set out from Batavia on his voyage 

 . to Japan, as physician to the embassy which the Dutch East India 

 Company annually sent to tbe Japanese court. He embarked in the 

 vessel which was to touch at the kingdom of Siam, and visited Judia, 

 | or Juthia, then the capital of that country. He remained at Nagasaki, 

 in Japan, from September 1690 to November 1692, and during this 

 time he accompanied two embassies to Yeddo. His observations on 

 j Siam and Japan ara given in his great work entitled ' The History of 

 Japan,' the original of which has never been published, but a trans- 

 lation was made from a copy in the possession of Sir Hans Sloane by 

 J. G. Scheuchzer, and published in England in 2 vols. folio, 1727. 

 Kaempfer returned from Japan to Batavia, which he left in 1693 for 

 Amsterdam. In April 1694 he took the degree of Doctor of Physic at 

 the University of Leyden, and iu the theses which he published on 

 that occasion he showed that the Angus Scythica, or Barometz, a pre- 

 tended plant-animal, was nothing but a fictiou ; he also described other 

 | remarkable objects, and among them the electrical eel. On his return 

 j to his native place his reputation soon procured him the honour of 

 being appointed physician to his sovereign, a circumstance which 

 | brought him into extensive practice. This however was a loss to 

 ! science. Of the various works which he designed to publish only his 

 'Amcenitates Exoticoe' appeared during his lifetime (in 1712). His 

 ' History of Japan,' as already observed, appeared much later, and 

 only in English, from which it was afterwards translated into German 

 and French. He died on the 2nd of November 171C, his health having 

 been much impaired by his travels and some domestic calamities. 



KAIN, LE, HENRI-LOUIS, a French actor, so often spoken of in 

 the memoirs of French literature in the middle of the 18th century, 

 that some account of him may be useful. He was born in 1728, and 

 died in 1778. He was a protege" of Voltaire, who observed the natural 



