wears a bonnet on a cushion. In brief, the fine portrait of this lady represents her in all beauty, sweetness, and true majesty, so well, that one becomes enamoured of her mere image."

Joanna was the grand-daughter of Robert king of Naples, who had originally seized the crowns of that kingdom and of Provence, in opposition to the right of his nephew Carobert, king of Hungary, the son of his elder brother. A politic decision of the papal court confirmed his usurpation; and after this sentence, the prudence if not the justice of which was proved by the result, his throne was not disturbed by the pretensions of Carobert. Robert, a wise and active prince, passed a long reign in maintaining the ascendancy of the Guelf or church party in Italy; but, in his declining years, he was unhappily deprived of the natural support of his throne, by the death of his only son. As the Duke of Calabria left but two infant daughters, the old monarch might just'y tremble for the future security of these helpless children, his only descendants. He laboured to avert the consequences of a disputed succession, by inducing his nephew Carobert of Hungary to betroth his second son, Andrew, at the age of only seven years, to Joanna, the eldest of his infant grandchildren; and the young prince was removed to the court of Naples, to receive his education as its future sovereign. This union, which, to the erring eye of human foresight, might seem to have been planned with singular wisdom, was destined to scatter the seeds of civil war and calamity for above a century and a half. As Andrew advanced towards manhood, he displayed a sullen and vicious temper; his habits were low and brutal, his capacity weak, and his manners barbarous. Acquiring none of the elegance of the polished court in which he had been educated, he associated only with rude Hungarians, whose gross propensities accorded with his taste.

The old king probably saw enough of his character to dread the consequences of entrusting the rights of his grand. daughter to his generosity; and one of his last acts was to assemble the states of his kingdom, and to impose on them a solemn oath of allegiance to their future queen Joanna. At the same time, changing his original purpose, he limited the succession of his kingdom to Joanna alone, and restricted Andrew to a matrimonial crown, and the reversion of the principality of Salerno, if his consort should die without issue. Joanna was but sixteen years of age when she succeeded to the throne of her grandfather, and her husband Andrew was only two years her senior. Young, beautiful, and inexperienced, the mistress, too, of a brilliant court, the splendour of which was enhanced by the presence of numerous princes of the blood, (sons of Robert's brothers,) Joanna found but too many temptations to plunge into a career of thoughtless and dissipated, perhaps of criminal gaiety. The aversion that she had acquired for her husband was increased by the jealousy of power which he evinced, and sedulously fomented by her advisers and confidantes, who desired to exclude Andrew from the direction of affairs, that, by immersing the queen in pleasure, they might themselves engross her authority. Andrew, on the other hand, was surrounded and ruled by Hungarians, and particularly by an artful and ambitious friar, his preceptor, who openly aspired to govern the kingdom in his name. By these men he was insidiously taught to despise a matrimonial crown and the shadow of power, while his own descent from the elder brother of king Robert gave him a better hereditary claim to the throne than his wife could derive from that monarch. He was, therefore, encouraged to solicit the papal court of Avignon to sanction his pretensions by authorising his immediate coronation. In this design, he had every prospect of success; and daily expecting a papal bull to legalize the ceremony, he already began to display his resentment against his enemies by threats of vengeance, and to betray his doubts of the fidelity of his youthful queen, who was generally indeed suspected of an intrigue with her cousin, Prince Louis of Tarento. The projects and menaces of Andrew were communicated to Joanna by her courtiers: among these was a female of low birth, Philippa the Catanian, who had been elevated by the royal family of Naples to wealth and distinction, and who was the principal favourite of the queen, and the confidante of her

most intimate secrets. By this woman, her family, and associates, a conspiracy was formed against Andrew.

Under pretext of a hunting party, the court was carried to the neighbourhood of Aversa; and, after the amusement, the king and queen, with a train, principally composed of the conspirators, repaired for the night to the solitary convent of San Pietro, not far from that town. After supping gaily together, the royal pair withdrew to the chamber prepared for them; but, just as Andrew was retiring to rest with the queen, one of the conspirators came to the door of the chamber, and stated that a messenger had arrived from Naples, with despatches of the utmost importance. The victim rose unsuspiciously at the summons; but he had no sooner passed the door of his apartment, than it was closed against him by the female attendants of the queen, and he was seized by the conspirators, who were waiting for him in the corridor. He was overpowered after a desperate resistance, in which he drew blood from several of the assassins. Stopping his mouth with their gloves, they dragged him towards an adjoining window, and, believing that a ring which his mother had given him was a talisman against death by sword or poison, they fastened a silken cord about his neck, and pushed him out of the window, which was near the ground. Some of their associates, who were in readiness in the gardens below, then pulled him down by the legs as he hung, and completed the work of strangulation. It was, probably, the intention of the murderers to have buried the body in the convent garden, but Isolda, a faithful Hungarian woman, who had nursed the infancy of Andrew, and watched over his manhood with undiminished solicitude, was roused by his cries, and rushing into his apartment, found the queen there alone, seated by the nuptial couch, with her face buried in her hands. The reply of Joanna to her agonized inquiry after her master increased the alarm of the woman; she ran with a flambeau to the window, and from thence saw by its light the corpse of the unhappy prince, extended on the grass, with the fatal cord still round his neck. Concealment was no longer possible; the assassins fled at the appearance of Isolda, and her shrieks immediately spread the alarm through the convent, and from thence to the neighbouring town.

Amidst the general indignation and horror which this foul tragedy excited, Joanna returned to Naples with the body of her husband, which was there privately interred Meanwhile, Charles, Duke of Durazzo, one of the princes of the blood, who had married the queen's sister, and who did not himself escape suspicion of having been concerned in the conspiracy, instigated the populace to avenge the murder of the king, probably with the hope of ascending the throne by the deposition of Joanna. The queen, on her part, with Louis of Tarento, now her avowed lo er, also assembled her partizans, and every thing threatened a furious civil war. But the intelligence of the fate of Andrew had, by this time, reached the court of Avignon; and Clement VI., the reigning pontiff, considering himself called upon as feudal superior of the Neapolitan crown, to punish the authors of the atrocity, directed a commission to Bertrand del Bazzo, grand justiciary of the kingdom of Naples, to institute a process for the discovery of the murderers, without respect of persons or regard to human dignities. Joanna was powerless against this mandate. The seneschal of the royal household, having been first arrested on suspicion, and put to the torture, disclosed his accomplices; and the justiciary, attended by the populace of the capital, bearing a standard, on which the murder of Andrew was depicted, presented himself before the queen's fort:fied palace, to demand the persons of the conspirators. After an ineffectual attempt to resist, Joanna was compelled to deliver up the accused, who were her most devoted servauts, and among them Philippa the Catanian; and these miserable wretches, of whose guilt there was no doubt, after being made to suffer the most frightful tortures, were burat alive. But it was remarked that, contrary to usage in these execrable proceedings by torture, the public were entirely excluded from hearing the confessions of the criminals.

This secrecy, however, could neither remove the conviction which the world entertained of the guilt of Joanna, nor shield her from the indignation of an avenger. It was in

vain that she wrote to Louis, king of Hungary, who had succeeded his father, Carobert, on the throne of that kingdom some years before, to exculpate herself from the crime with which she was publicly charged. Louis only replied by sternly pronouncing his reasons for believing her guilty, and immediately prepared both to avenge his brother, and to assert his own hereditary claim to the throne. In the mean time, Joanna strengthened the evidence against her by her marriage with her lover, Louis of Tarento, who was believed to have been engaged in the plot, and whose mother had certainly afforded an asylum to some of the conspirators, who fled before they were accused. At length, the king of Hungary entered the Neapolitan territories, where he was universally welcomed by the nobility and people. The queen and her second husband escaped to Provence; but Louis did not long preserve his conquests. Leaving garrisons in the strong places, he returned to Hungary, and the government of his generals became almost universally disagreeable to the fickle Neapolitans. Pope Clement VI. too, could not, without dissatisfaction, see the kingdom of Naples transferred to a powerful sovereign, who was not very likely to prove an obedient vassal to the Holy See. Receiving the queen in a solemn audience, in which she pleaded her cause in person, he declared his conviction of her innocence; and Joanna and her husband, encouraged by the disaffection of the Neapolitans against their foreign governors, and fortified by papal countenance, returned from Provence, and wrested great part of the kingdom from the Hungarians.

After some years of indecisive warfare, Louis became weary of hostilities to which there appeared no end, and listened to terms of accommodation. Joanna engaged again to submit the investigation of her guilt or innocence to the Pope, and to resign her crown to the king of Hungary, if his holiness should pronounce sentence against her; while Louis agreed, on his part, to withdraw his troops if the issue of the inquiry proved favourable to her. A solemn process was, accordingly, instituted at the court of Avignon, of which it was not difficult to foresee the result. Yet so evident appeared the guilt of the queen, that her ambassadors could adopt no better mode of defence than that of showing, by the deposition of witnesses, that sorcery had been practised upon her, and (as a necessary conclusion) that, if her participation in the conspiracy were proved, she must still stand absolved, as having yielded only to the resistless powers of hell! Upon this strange and ridiculous plea, the Pope and his cardinals annulled the accusation, and pronounced her clear of offence. The King of Hungary submitted with good faith to the decision, and even refused to receive an immense sum, which the Pope awarded to him as a remuneration for the charges of the war; declaring that he had not undertaken it to amass money, but to avenge the death of his brother.

For thirty years after the peace with the king of Hungary, Joanna reigned undisturbed, and, after the premature death of Louis of Tarento, married successively a third and a fourth husband, neither of whom would she suffer to share her throne. Her children died in infancy, and her life was at length hurried to its close by the revolting ingratitude of a second Charles of Durazzo, whom she had united to her niece and destined for her successor. Offended at the last marriage of the queen, he procured the assistance of Louis of Hungary, at whose court he had been invited to reside, for an invasion of the kingdom of Naples, and was seconded in the enterprise by Urban VI. against whom Joanna had sided, with the antipope Clement VII., in the great schism of the church. The ill-fated queen fell into the hands of her adopted heir, and was by him required to execute a solemn deed of abdication in his favour. But in her extremity, and with the certainty of death before her, Joanna displayed a heroism worthy of her descent from a long line of illustrious ancestors. She pretended compliance with the demands of Durazzo, and he accordingly introduced some Provençal barons to her prison to hear her transfer their allegiance to his person; but they were no sooner admitted, than she solemnly enjoined them never to acknowledge for their lord the ungrateful robber, who from a queen had made her a captive slave; if ever it should be told them that she had constituted him her heir,

to believe it not; and to hold any deed that might be shown to that effect, as forged, or enforced upon her. She added her will that they should own for their lord Louis of Anjou, whom she appointed her successor and champion to revenge the treason and violence committed against her; and she bade them take no more thought for her, but to perform her funeral obsequies and to pray for her soul. She was shortly afterwards put to death in prison, by command of Durazzo; in what manner is differently related. The common story is that she was smothered with a pillow; but there seems strong reason for believing the account of the secretary of Urban VI., who was at Naples at the time, that four Hungarian soldiers were secretly introduced into the castle of Muro, where she was confined, and eutering its chapel while she was kneeling before the altar, strangled her with a silken cord.

During the long interval between the murder of Andrew and her own death, the history of Joanna is very barren of important transactions, nor are there any minute records of authentic character to supply this poverty of circumstance. Perhaps, the greatest attraction which Joanna's story possesses for the British reader is the similarity between it and that of Mary, Queen of Scots, which has often been observed. The coincidence is certainly very curious. The resemblance in character and temper between Andrew and Darnley; the mystery in which the murder of both was involved; the youth, the beauty, the subsequent misfortunes of the two queens; the contempt and detestation of their husbands, which appear to have been common to both; their indecent marriages with men who were suspected accomplices in the death of their lords; the parallel between the Duke of Durazzo and the Earl of Murray: all these and a thousand minor circumstances, even to the standards on which the murders were depicted to animate the populace of Naples and Edinburgh to vengeance, will naturally occur to the mind in comparing these historical problems.

THE SOLAR ECLIPSE OF JULY 8, 1842.

THE total Eclipse of the Sun, on Friday next, is exciting much attention among the scientific, not only in England, and on the Continent, but in America, as appears from documents known to be preparing, or now just issued. Thus, in the Royal Astronomical Society's notice for the last month, there occurs a paper by Lieutenant W. S. Stratford, R.N., on the path of the moon's shadow over the southern part of France, the north of Italy, and part of Germany, during the total eclipse of the sun, on July 8, 1842. To induce travellers and others in those countries, to prepare for the observation of the important phenomena, Lieutenant Stratford furnishes a table "computed to enable them to trace the path of the moon's shadow on a large scale, and with very considerable accuracy." It is a very ingenious production, containing for each minute, from 17 h. 34 m. 19 s., to 17 h. 46 m. 39 s., mean astronomical time at Greenwich, the geographical positions (the longitude being reckoned from Greenwich,) of points on the earth's surface, where the several phenomena occur of first, contact of the upper limbs of the moon and sun; second, contact of the centre of the moon and sun; and third, contact of the lower limb of the moon and sun.

Lieutenant Stratford, after various details, observes, should the darkness be sufficiently intense, as has been sometimes the case during the total eclipse of the sun, to render some of the planets and brighter stars visible, the planet Mercury may be looked for about 5 deg. south of the sun and moon. The planet Mars about west by north, Mars being 15 min. of right ascension to the west, and 1 deg. 16 sec. of declination to the north of the sun and moon, &c. The sun and moon will be in the constellation Gemini, and will have Castor and Pollux not far distant, in a N.N.E. direction, &c. Next there is, very recently arrived from America, Professor Silliman's Journal of Sciences and Arts for January, 1842. containing an article on "the Solar Eclipse of July, 1842,” which observes: “as the approaching eclipse will excite great interest throughout Europe, and especially in those places where it will be total, it is earnestly hoped that particular attention will be paid by

No. 80. NEW SERIES.]

JOHN BULL.

Ar what period this national sobriquet was first conferred upon the Englishman is not quite so well established as its origin from his national dish-Roast Beef. Both are matters of the mouth; and this borrowing of a name from the kitchen is by no means peculiar to England. Thus, we identify the Irishman with his potato; the Scotchman with his haggis; the Frenchman with his fricassee; the German with his sauer-kraut; the Italian with his macaroni, &c.: and, it is not too much to add, that so far as the material can bespeak the immaterial, each of these national dishes conveys the characteristic of the people by whom it has been adopted. The assumption, moreover, is from a leaf of the Abernethian code, which insists upon the indissoluble sympathy of head and stomach; just as people who drink beer think beer.

If our bovine cognomen be contemporary with Roast Beef, then is John Bull not more than two centuries old. We find the sobriquet of Front-de-Bœuf, (forehead of an ox), in the roll of Battle Abbey ; but, the earliest occurrence of Bull we must leave to be taken by the horns by Sylvanus Urban, (be he sturdy enough for such an enterprise,) or to Mr. Moule, should he be hereafter disposed to write the Heraldry of Quadrupeds as cleverly as he has accomplished "the Heraldry of Fish," and in his notices of five or six hundred families, and their intermarriages, to illustrate the antiquity of giving a sprat to catch a herring.

Beef may have been a luxury of the monastic kitchen long before it appeared at the royal table in England; for the monks appear to have been alike indefatigable in their anxiety for our welfare, temporal as well as spiritual; and their vinum theologicum speaks wonders for their cure of bodies, as their illuminated missals do for that of souls. If venison was their grand piece de resistance, beef may, probably, have been with them irresistible; and King Henry's trick upon the surfeit-sick abbot of Reading, by which he restored him to his appetite for beef, appears to have been but a waggish piece of tantalization; whilst the king's disguise as a yeoman of the guard has been perpetuated to our day in the name of beef-eaters, and the obvious looks and living of the men themselves." Again, a very small proportion of the 160 gallons of mus tard, that it seemed good to the Earl of Northumberland and his council to make and eat per annum, was consumed with beef, for a boiled chine was only allowed on flesh days. In the boon days, or rather nights, of Charles II, we find a roasted chine of beef a supper dish; for Charles's cabinet dinners were shabby-genteel in the extreme only think of a leg of mutton, fowls, pullets, and larks, all in a dish; anchovies and prawns to make up; and the prime minister picking a marrow-bone, or at most regaling himself with "the best universal sauce in the world"-parsley, toast, vinegar, salt and pepper, beat up in a mortar! It is thus pretty plain that royalty kept his best meals for his mistresses.

It is worth remarking, that Roast Beef and "God save the King" are about of the same date; and the music of this impressive anthem was composed by Dr. John Bull, of the choir of the royal chapel, in the reign of James II.

Whether John Bull can be referred to the once

VOL. IV.

66 LITERARY World."

[PRICE TWOPENCE.

popular pastime of Bull-baiting in England, is hard to tell. Although it was one of our national sports for nearly seven centuries, it was by no means peculiar to this country; since the Spaniards borrowed this pastime from their Roman conquerors.

However obtained, John Bull appears to have passed into a standing characteristic of our countrymen. Arbuthnot, if we mistake not, identifies John's humour with the rise and fall of the weather-glass; and the variableness of his temper is probably a consequence of "skiey influences." And, as there are more days in the year in which one can enjoy one's self in the open air in England than in any other portion of the known world," so the character of John Bull beams brighter with benevolence than any other variety of human kind: his heart is ever warm with the sunshine of unaffected love; and although his finer affections may be coated with a rough exterior, it enshrines a pearl of inestimable price, in his universal sympathy with the weak, and his generous exercise of the virtues of the strong.

John Bull exhibits some very bold and marked features, perhaps a greater number than any other national character. Of these, the most prominent is his love of liberty, which includes the right of thinking, saying, writing, and doing most things which opinion may dictate and inclination prompt. It is true that this right has often run riot into lawless passion; and the pages of John's history are not unstained with blood shed in civil strife, when the physical has usurped the moral: but happily, such displays of weakness, or rather waste of strength, are becoming few and far between; and John is, at all events, less inclined for tumult than his neighbours.

John's most estimable quality-his love of justice," the source of all honourable dealing among the higher classes, and of what is emphatically called fair play in the transactions of humble life"-coupled with his love of plainspeaking, has been well typified in one of his newspapers, bearing his own name-the John Bull. This was a happy thought, which has been happily carried out; and the patronymic is one of the best successes of the journalism of the present century.

Our admiration of John's love of liberty must, however, be qualified in a spirit of contradiction, ludicrous to all except those who suffer by it, he allows a man to get into his debt, and if he cannot pay him, he locks him up, and thus deprives him of the opportunity of ever doing so. To heal this legislative sore, John has passed laws for stripping a debtor of all he possesses, and turning him into the world to begin again: this is certainly better than branding the debtor as a criminal by imprisonment; but, what can be said of John's anomalous law for taking a man's property, locking him up for a time, placing him at a bar, alike publishing his faults and misfortunes to the world, and then turning him into it with a reputation little fairer than that of a swindler? Bankrupts are the aristocracy of debtors; insolvents the very canaille; and one of the former, in comparison with the latter, is a creditable character. John, these are anomalies which you ought to correct: they may be safety-valves for prisonwalls, but they are clanking fetters about men's hearts.

John's feeling of independence often so elevates his temper as to impel him into extremes, both of good and

D