ness: idly, lazily; foolishly; carelessly: idler, a sluggard; a lazy person.

A few sheep, spinning on the feld she kept; She woulde not ben idel til she slept.

Chaucer. The Clerkes Talc. And as for hire that crouned is in grene, It is Flora, of these floures goddesse. And all that hire, on hire awaiting, bene,— It are such folke that loved idelnesse, And not delite in no kind besinesse.

Id. The Floare and the Leafe. Suffice it then, thou money god, quoth he, That all thine idle offers I refuse; All that I need I have: what needeth me To covet more than I have cause to use?

Nor is excess the only thing by which sin breaks men in their health, and the comfortable enjoyment of themselves; but many are also brought to a very ill and languishing habit of body by mere idleness, and idleness is both itself a great sin, and the cause of many more. South's Sermons.

And modern Asgil, whose capricious thought
Is yet with stores of wilder notions fraught,
Too soon convinced shall yield that fleeting breath,
Which played so idly with the darts of death.

Yet free from this poetic madness,
Next page he says, in sober sadness,
That she, and all her fellow-gods,

Sit idling in their high abodes.

Prior

Id.

An idle reason lessens the weight of the good ones you gave before. Swift.

Now every splendid object of ambition
Which lately with their various glosses played
Upon my brain, and fooled my idle heart,
Are taken from me by a little mist

And all the world is vanished. Young's Busiris.
How various his employments, whom the world
Calls idle, and who justly in return
Esteems that busy world an idler too! Cowper.
For health and idleness to passion's flame are oil
and gunpowder.
Byron. Don Juan.

IDLENESS. In China it is a maxim, that if there be a man who does not work, or a woman that is idle, in the empire, somebody must suffer cold or hunger: the produce of the lands not being more than sufficient, with culture, to maintain the inhabitants: and therefore, though the idle person may shift off the want from himself, yet it must fall somewhere. The court of Areopagus at Athens punished idleness, and examined every citizen how he spent his time. The intention was that the Athenians, knowing they were to give an account of their occupations, should follow only such as were laudable, and that there might be no room left for such as lived by unlawful arts. The civil law expelled all vagrants from the city and, in the English law, all idle persons or vagabonds, whom our ancient statutes describe to be such as wake on the night, and sleep on the day, and haunt customable taverns and ale-houses, and routs about; and no man wot from whence they come, ne whither they go;' or such as are more particularly described by stat. 17 Geo. II. c. 5, and divided into three classes, idle and disorderly persons, rogues and vagabonds, and incorrigible rogues : all these are offenders against the good order, and blemishes in the government, of any kingdom. They are therefore all to be punished by the statute last mentioned. Persons harboring vagrants are liable to a fine of forty shillings and to pay all expenses brought upon the parish thereby in the same manner as, by the ancient laws, whoever harboured any stranger for more than two nights, was answerable to the public for any offence that such his inmate mig!.t commit.

an

IDOL, n. 5. Gr. dog, edwλov; Lat. IDOL'ATTR, n. s. idolum; Fr. idole. The IDOLATRIZE, v. a. primary meaning here is IDOL'AFROUS, adj. similitude: an idol is an IDOL A TROUSLY, adv. image; a counterfeit ; IDOLATRY, N. s. a representation; I'Do IST, n. 8. image worshipped as the I'DOLIZE, v. Ɑ. representative of Dety; one loved to adoration: idolater, one who pays divine honors to idols; one who worships for God that which is not God; this conduct is called idolatry, from Gr. adog and Aarpua, cultus: idolist is a poetic word signifying a worshipper of images: to idolize is to love supremely, tenderly, or to adoration; to reve

rence.

Woe to the idol shepherd that leaveth his flock. Zech. ii. 17.

They did sacrifice upon the idol altar, which was 1 Mac. i. 59. upon the altar of God. and open

Tho (then), shewed him Cecile, all plain,

That all idoles nis but a thing in vain,

For they ben dombe, and therto they ben deve;
And charged him his idoles for to leve.

Chaucer. The Nonnes Second Tale.
He was a lechour and an idolastre,
And in his elde he veray God forsoke.

Id. The Merchantes Tale.
Men beholding so great excellence,
And rare perfection in mortality,

Do her adore with sacred reverence,
As the idol of her maker's great magnificence.

Faerie Queene. The state of idolaters is two ways miserable: first, in that which they worship they find no succour; and secondly, at his hands, whom they ought to serve, there is no other thing to be looked for but the effects of most just displeasure, the withdrawing of grace, dereliction in this world, and in the world to come confusion.

Hooker.

Not therefore whatsoever idolaters have either thought or done; but let whatsoever they have either thought or done idolatrously, be so far forth abhorred.

up

Denham.

A nation from one faithful man to spring, Him on this side Euphrates yet residing, Bred in idol worship. Milton's Paradise Lost. I to God have brought Dishonour, obloquy, and oped the mouth3 Of idolists and atheists.

Id. Agonistes.
One who would change the worship of all climates,
And make a new religion whereso'er she comes,
Unite the differing faiths of all the world
To idolize her face.

Dryden's Love, Triumphant.
Never did art so well with nature strive,
Nor ever idol seemed so much alive;
So like the man, so golden to the sight;
So base within, so counterfeit and light.

Dryden. Idolatry is not only an accounting or worshipping that for God which is not God, but it is also a wor

So gracious is their idol, dear variety, That for another's love they would forego An angel's form, to mingle with a devil's. Rowe's Ambitious Stepmother. The kings were distinguished by judgments or blessings, according as they promoted idolatry, or the worship of the true God. Addison's Spectator.

The apostle is there arguing against the gnosticks, who joined in the idol feasts, and whom he therefore accuses of participating of the idol god. Atterbury.

An astrologer may be no Christian; he may be an idolater or a pagan; but I would hardly think astrology to be compatible with rank atheism.

Bentley's Sermons.

See there he comes, the exalted idol comes.

Somervile.

Like a coy maiden, ease, when courted most, Farthest retires-an idol at whose shrine Who oft'nest sacrifice are favored least. Cowper. Parties, with the greatest violation of Christian unity, denominate themselves, not from the grand author and finisher of our faith, but from the first broacher of their idolized opinions. Decay of Piety. For man, to man so oft unjust,

Is always so to women, one sole bond Awaits them, treachery is all their trust, Taught to conceal, their bursting hearts despond Over their idol. Byron. Don Juan. IDOLATRY may be distinguished into two kinds. By the first, men adore the works of God, the sun, the moon, the stars, angels, demons, men, and animals; by the second, men worship the work of their own hands, as statues, pictures, and the like. The celestial bodies were the first objects of idolatrous worship. Afterwards, as men became more corrupt, they began to form images, and to entertain the opinion, that by virtue of consecration, the gods were called down to inhabit their statues; though it is certain, that the wiser heathens considered them only as figures designed to recal to their minds the memory of their gods. But the people in general believed the statues themselves to be gods, and paid divine worship to stocks and stones. Soon after the flood, idolatry seems to have prevailed: for, so early as the time of Abraham, we scarcely find any other worship. And it appears, from Scripture, that Abraham's forefathers, and even Abraham himself, were for a time idolaters. The Hebrews were expressly forbidden to make any representation of God; they were not so much as to look upon an idol : and, from the time of the Maccabees to the destruction of Jerusalem, the Jews extended this precept to the making the figure of any man: by the law of Moses they were commanded to destroy all the images they found, and were forbidden to apply any of the gold or silver to their own use, that no one might receive the least profit from any thing belonging to an idol. The Jewish rabbies even asserted that it was unlawful to use any vessel that had been employed in sacrificing to a false god, to warm themselves with the wood of a grove after it was cut down, or to shelter themselves under its shade. But the Christian religion, wherever it prevailed, entirely rooted out the Pagan idolatry; as did also the Mahommedan, which is

men's!

That's noble, and bespeaks a nation proud And jealous of the blessing. Cowper's Task.

Byron.

I was not treacherous then-nor thou too dearBut he has said it-and the jealous well, Those tyrants, teasing tempting to rebel, Deserve the fate their fretting lips foretell. JEALOUSY, WATERS OF, under the Mosaic law, were a species of ordeal, which seem to have given rise to numerous similar appeals to a divine decision of doubtful cases. The rabbies comment on the text, Num. v., in the following manner:- -When any man, prompted by the spirit of jealousy, suspected his wife to have committed adultery, he brought her first before the judges, and accused her of the crime; but as she asserted her innocency, and refused to acknowledge herself guilty, and as he had no witnesses to produce, he required that she should be sentenced to drink the waters of bitterness, which the law had appointed; that God, by this means, might discover what she wished to conceal. After the judges had heard the accusation and the denial, the man and his wife were both sent to Jerusalem, to appear before the sanhedrim, who were the sole judges in such matters. The rabbies say, that the judges of the sanhedrim, at first, endeavoured, with threatenings, to confound the woman, and cause her to confess her crime— when she still persisted in her innocence, she was led to the eastern gate of the court of Israel, where she was stripped of the clothes she wore, and dressed in black, before a number of persons of her own sex. The priest then told her, that, if she knew herself to be innocent, she had no evil to apprehend; but, if she were guilty, she might expect to suffer all that the law threatened; to which she answered, Amen, Amen.

The priest then wrote the words of the law upon a piece of vellum, with ink that had no vitriol in it, that it might be the more easily blotted out. The words written on the vellum were, according to the rabbies, the following:'If a strange man have not come near thee, and thou art not polluted by forsaking the bed of thy husband, these bitter waters which I have cursed will not hurt thee: but, if thou have gone astray from thy husband, and have polluted thyself by coming near to another man, may thou be accursed of the Lord, and become an example for all his people; may thy thigh rot, and thy belly swell till it burst! may these cursed waters enter into thy belly, and, being swelled therewith, may thy thigh putrefy!'

After this the priest took a new pitcher, filled

it with water out of the brazen basin that was near the altar of burnt offer.ngs, cast some dust into it taken from the pavement of the temple, mingled something bitter, as wormwood, with it, and having read the curses above-mentioned to the woman, and received her answer of Amen, he scraped off the curses from the vellum into the pitcher of water. During this time another priest tore her clothes as low as her bosom, made her head bare, untied the tresses of her hair, fastened her torn clothes with a girdle below her breast, and presented her with the tenth part of an ephah, or about three pints of barley meal, which was in a frying pan, without oil or in

cense.

The other priest, who had prepared the waters of jealousy, then gave them to be drank by the accused person, and, as soon as she had swallowed them, he put the pan with the meal in it into hand. This was waved before the Lord, and a part of it thrown into the fire of the altar. If the woman were innocent she returned with her husband; and the waters, instead of incommoding her, made her more healthy and fruitful than ever; if, on the contrary, she were guilty, she was seen immediately to grow pale, her eyes started out of her head, and, lest the temple should be defiled with her death, she was carried out, and died instantly with all the ignominious circumstances related in the curses, which the rabbies say had the same effect on him with whom she had been criminal, though he were absent, and at a distance. They add, however, that if the husband himself had been guilty with another woman, then the waters had no bad effect even on his criminal wife; as in that case the transgression on the one part was, in a certain sense, balanced by the transgression on the other.

There is no instance in the Scriptures of this kind of ordeal having ever been resorted to; and probably it never was during the purer times of the Hebrew republic.

JEAN BON ST. ANDRE, baron, originally a French Protestant minister, and then a revolutionary statesman, was born at Montauban in 1749. At the commencement of the revolution in September, 1792, he was nominated deputy to the National Convention, from the department of Lot, and joined the party of the Mountain; voting for the death of the king, and contributing to the destruction of the Girondists. He was a member of the committee of public safety during the tyranny of Robespierre, and on board the French fleet in the battle with lord Howe, on the 1st of June, 1794, as a commissary of the convention. He subsequently became more moderate in his political conduct, and amnesty of October, 1795, having restored him to liberty, he was sent as consul to Algiers. After this he became prefect of Mayence, in which station he is said to have distinguished himself by his integrity and intelligence. Having held the post thirteen years, he died, much regretted, in December, 1815.

JEANNIN (Peter), in biography, was born in 1540, and brought up to the law. Becoming, at an early age, advocate in the parliament of Burgundy, and distinguished by his eloquence.

he was appointed agent for the affairs of the province. In this capacity, though a zealous Catholic, he resisted the order for perpetrating the massacre of the Protestants on St. Bartholomew's day, at Dijon; but joined the leaguers in support of the established religion. Being deputed by the duke of Mayenne to negociate with Philip of Spain, the protector of the league, he soon discovered the real design of that prince was to gain possession of some of the best provinces of France and, on his return, exerted himself to detach the duke from the Spaniards. Henry IV. made him a member of his council, and nothing was for a time undertaken without his advice. He died at the age of eighty-two, in the year 1622, having witnessed the succession of seven kings to the throne of France. His Memoirs and Negociations, published in 1659 at Paris in folio, have since been printed in 4 vols. 12mo. JEARS, or GEERS, in the sea-language, an assemblage of tackles, by which the lower yards of a ship are hoisted along the mast to their usual station, or lowered thence as occasion requires; the former of which operations is called swaying, and the latter striking.

JEBB (Samuel), M. D., a learned physician, born at Nottingham, and educated at Cambridge. He settled at Stratford-le-Bow, where he practised with great credit till his death. He published, 1. S. Justini Martyris cum Tryphone Dialogus; 1729, 8vo. 2. Bibliotheca Literaria, a learned compilation, of which only ten numbers were published, 1722. 3. De Vita et Rebus gestis Mariæ Scotorum regina; 8vo. 4. An edition of Aristides with notes; 2 vols. 4to. 1728. 5. An elegant edition of Caii de Canibus Britannicis, &c.; 8vo. 1729, 6. Another of Baconi Opus Majus; folio, 1733. 7. Another of Hodii de Græcis illustribus Linguæ Græcæ instauratoribus; 8vo. 1742. He died March the 9th, 1772.

JEBB (Sir Richard), Baronet, M. D., born at Stratford, in Essex, was educated at Oxford; but, being by principle a non-juror, he could not be matriculated, nor take any degree at that university. He afterwards studied medicine at London and Leyden; and obtained, from the latter university, the degree of doctor of medicine. Upon settling in London he became licentiate of the college of physicians; and, in the year 1768, was elected a fellow of that body. He was now for some time physician to St. George's Hospital, and to the Westminster infirmary. About 1777 he was made physician-extraordinary to the king; and in 1780 physician in ordinary to the prince of Wales. On the death of Sir Edward Wilmot, in 1768, he was appointed one of the physicians in ordinary to his majesty; but this office he did not enjoy many months; for, being in attendance on two of the princesses, who were affected with the measles, he was suddenly attacked with fever in their apartments at Windsor, and died, after a few days' illness, on the 4th day of July, 1787, in the fifty-eighth year of his

age.

JEBB (John), M. D., a modern divine, who seceded from the establishment, was born in London in 1736, and received his early education in Ireland; whence he removed to Peter

House, Cambridge, and took the degree of B. A. there in 1757. In 1761 he proceeded M. A., and obtained a fellowship, which he relinquished on being presented in 1764 to the rectory of Ovington, Norfolk. He published in 1765, in conjunction with the Rev. Messrs. Thorpe and Wollaston, Excerpta quædam e Newtoni Principiis Philosophia Naturalis, cum Notis Variorum, 4to. In 1766 he returned to Cambridge, and resumed the office of tutor; delivering in 1768 a course of lectures on the Greek Testament. Next year he obtained three livings in the county of Suffolk, and was appointed chaplain to the earl of Harborough, having married into that nobleman's family. About 1772 he warmly espoused the scheme of archdeacon Blackburne, to procure the abolition of clerical subscription, and, the freedom of his opinions having rendered his situation in the university and church unpleasant, he determined to relinquish both his clerical and university appointments. This he did in September, 1775, and immediately published a statement of his motives. He now took up his residence in the metropolis, and adopted the profession of physic. Having procured a diploma from the university of St. Andrew's, and being admitted a licentiate of the college of physicians, as well as a fellow of the Royal Society, he commenced practice in 1778. His practice was very successful. In the latter part of his life he actively engaged in the discussions relating to the American war, and was a frequent speaker in the popular assemblies of the metropolis. His death took place March 2d, 1786. The year following a collection of his works, theological, political, and medical, was published, with memoirs of his life, by Dr. Disney, 3 vols. 8vo.

JEBUSEI, JEBUSITES, one of the seven ancient nations of Canaan, descendants of Jebusi, a son of Canaan; so warlike and brave, as to have maintained their ground, especially in Jebus, afterwards called Jerusalem, to the time of David.

JECHONIAH, or JECHONIAS, king of Judah, succeeded his father Jehoiakim, A. A. C. 599, when he was only eight years old; and had reigned only three months and ten days when he was carried to Babylon by Nebuchadnezzar. He was afterwards promoted by Evil-Merodach, about A. A. C. 562.

JEDBURGH, a town of Scotland, capital of Roxburghshire, situated nearly in the middle of the county, on the banks of the river Jed, whence its name. It is well built and populous, and has a good market for corn and cattle. On the west side of the river, near its junction with the Teviot, stand the beautiful ruins of an abbey founded by David I., a part of which ancient pile still serves for a parish-church. Jedburgh is the seat of the sheriff's court and presbytery; and is a barony in the family of Lothian. The original name Gadborough is said to be derived from the Gadeni, a tribe who anciently inhabited the whole tract of country between Northumberland and the Teviot. In a charter granted by king William the Lion in 1165, to the abbot and monks of Jedburgh, the name is often spelt Jedwarth.