JOCASTE, the wife of Laius, king of Thebes, and mother of Oedipus; she afterwards married him not knowing that he was her son, and on discovery of the crime put an end to herself, though not till after she had become the mother of Eteocles, Polynices, Antigone, and Ismene.

JOCELIN DE BRAKELONDA, an old 12th-century St. Edmundsbury monk, who left behind him a “Chronical” of the Abbey from 1173 to 1202, and which, published in 1840 by the Camden Society, gave occasion to the “Past and Present” of Thomas Carlyle; he had been chaplain to the Abbot Samson, the hero of his book, living beside him night and day for the space of six years, “an ingenious and ingenuous, a cheery-hearted, innocent, yet withal shrewd, noticing, quick-witted man”; d. 1211.

JODHPUR (2,522), largest Rajputana State, under British protection since 1818; is backward in government, education, agriculture, and manufactures; tin, lead, and iron are found; salt is made at Sambhar Lake.  The state revolted at the Mutiny.  JODHPUR (62), the capital, is 350 m.  SW. of Delhi, and is connected by rail with Jeypore and Bombay.

JOE MILLER, an English actor, the author of a book of jests (1684-1738).

JOEL, a Hebrew prophet, author of a book of the Old Testament that bears his name, and which is of uncertain date, but is written on the great broad lines of all Hebrew prophecy, and reads us the same moral lesson, that from the judgments of God there is no outlet for the sinner except in repentance, and that in repentance lies the pledge of deliverance from all evil and of the enjoyment of all good.

JOHANNESBURG (40), the largest town in the Transvaal, 30 m.  S. of Pretoria, and 800 m.  NE. of Cape Town; is the centre of Witwatersrand gold-mining fields.  Until recently an ill-equipped town, it has made rapid progress.  Since 1892 railways connect it with Delagoa Bay, Durban, Port Elizabeth, and Cape Town.  Magnificent buildings and residential suburbs are springing up.  The water-supply is bad, and dust-storms are frequent, otherwise the climate is very healthy.  Johannesburg was the seat of the dissatisfaction among the Uitlanders in 1895, which led to Dr. Jameson’s raid.

JOHN, king of England from 1199 to 1216, was clever and vivacious, but the most vicious, profane, false, short-sighted, tyrannical, and unscrupulous of English monarchs; the son of Henry II., he married Hawisa of Gloucester, and succeeded his brother Richard I., being Richard’s nominee, and the tacitly elect of the people; his nephew, Arthur, claimed the French dominions, and was supported by the French king, Philip; in 1200 he divorced Hawisa, and married Isabel of Angouleme, a child-heiress; this provoked the French barons; in the war that ensued Arthur was captured, and subsequently murdered either by John himself or by his orders; Philip invaded Normandy, and with the fall of the Chateau-Gaillard in 1204, most of the French possessions were lost to the English crown;