At sixteen years of age she undertook the office of governess in the family of the marquis of Winchester, and later in that of Mr Littleton, afterwards Lord Hatherton. Between these two engagements she accompanied a young pupil, one of a party of travellers, to Italy, a tour which gave rise to a narrative of what she saw and did, written in an imaginary character. This, her first literary production, the merits of which she little appreciated, did not make its appearance until after her marriage with Mr Robert Jameson, a barrister, in 1825, when it was advertised by a friend under the title of a Ladfs Diary, and ultimately published by Mr Colburn as The Diary of an Ennuyée. Mrs Jameson’s marriage was not a happy one; but, if not more unfortunate than many of her sex in this form of trial, she set the example of a rare discretion under it. Her marriage troubles were made no excuse for appealing against the laws of the land or the usages of society. The Diary of an Ennuyée attracted much attention. Italy was no such beaten ground then, nor ∙a traveller with ardent feelings for art and nature so common, as both have become since. The authoress has been blamed for assuming the disguise of an invalid, who dies on her way back; but such a tinge of romance made no difference in the truth of her descriptions, while it procured them more readers.

In 1829 Mr Jameson was appointed puisne judge in the island of Dominica. It was decided to be impracticable for her to accompany him, and meanwhile Mrs Jameson visited the Continent again with her father. Traces of this journey appear in Visits and Sketches at Home and Abl·oad. Hitherto the subjects she had treated had been limited to impressions of outer scenes and passing things, or to abridgments of history, as in her good schoolbook Female Sovereigns. The first work in which her powers of original thought became embodied were her Characteristics of Shakespeare's Women, which appeared in 1832. These analyses of the great poet’s heroines are unsurpassed for delicacy of critical insight and fineness of literary touch. They are the result of a penetrating but essentially feminine mind, applied to the study of individuals of its own sex, detecting characteristics and defining differences not perceived by the ordinary critic, and entirely overlooked by the general reader.

In 1833 Mrs Jameson paid her first visit to Germany, the literature and art of which country may be said to have then first roused the curiosity of English minds. Dresden and Tieck and Retsch, Frankfort and Dannecker, Weimar and, if not Goethe, who had died the year before, yet the homage which more than restored him to life, successively occupied her. Nor was she proof to the spell of the modem German art which the late King Louis of Bavaria had evoked in his capital. Those conglomerations of hard lines, cold colours, and pedantic subjects which decorated Munich were new to the world, and Mrs Jameson’s enthusiasm first gave them the reputation which has long since faded away.

It was in 1836 that Mrs Jameson was summoned by her husband to join him in Canada. She started with many a regret for the life she was leaving, and was not long left in doubt as to the fruitlessness of the step. He failed to meet her, even by a letter, at New York, and she was left to make her way alone at the worst of seasons to Toronto. After six months’ experiment she felt it useless to prolong a life far from all ties of family happiness and Opportunities of usefulness. Before leaving, she undertook a journey to the depths of the Indian settlements in Canada; she explored Lake Huron, and saw much of emigrant and aborigines life unknown to travellers, which she afterwards embodied in her Winter Studies and Summer Rambles. She returned to England in 1838. It was at this period that Mrs Jameson first devoted her attention to the subject of art. She began by making careful notes of the chief private collections in and near London which had hitherto received no systematic description. This Companion to the Private Galleries was soon followed by the Handbook to the Public Galleries. These works were useful compilations, and had a certain circulation; but the authoress laid claim to no powers of real discrimination, and many of her verdicts, in which she only followed those that went before her, have been since superseded by exacter knowledge. These works, however, led on to those by which her literary career has been specially distinguished,—her series of Sacred and Legendary Art. The time was ripe for such contributions to the traveller’s library. The Acta Sanctorum and the Rook of the Golden Legend had had their readers, but no one had ever pointed out the connexion between these tales and the works of Christian art. The painters employed by convent or church had introduced the local or family saints according to contract, and the faithful had retained the tradition of their names; but foi' the modern Protestant traveller the whole was a terra incognita. The way to these studies had been pointed out in the preface to Kugler’s Handbook of Italian Painting by Sir Charles Eastlake, who had intended pursuing the subject himself. Eventually he made over to Mrs Jameson the materials and references he had collected. They could not have been placed in better hands. She recognized the extent of the ground before her as a mingled sphere of poetry, history, devotion, and art. She directed the taste of her readers with judgment and even enthusiasm; and, with the same penetration that had guided her in her literary tasks, she threw many a light on a master’s intentions which had escaped both artists and critics.

Another service Mrs Jameson rendered to the English public, and that the most valuable of all, has still to be noticed. She began her literary career by analysing books, she proceeded to analyse works of art, and she ended by analysing society. It was a natural supplement to a course of varied personal experience and no little struggle that her attention should be directed to the great moral questions of the day, and especially to those affecting the education, occupations, and maintenance of her own sex. Her early essay on The Relative Social Position of Mothers and Governesses is a masterpiece. She knew both sides; and in no respect does she more clearly prove the falseness of the position she describes than in the certainty with which she predicts its eventual reform.

To Mrs Jameson we owe the first popular enunciation of the principle of male and female cooperation in works of mercy and education. Her mind was peculiarly to be trusted with the advocacy of such tenets—it had become as clear and judicious by experience as it was ardent and vigorous by nature. In her later years she took up a succession of subjects all bearing on the same principles of active benevolence, and the best ways of carrying them into practice. Sisters of charity, hospitals, penitentiaries, prisons, and workhouses all claimed her interest—all more or less included under those definitions of “the communion of love and communion of labour” which are inseparably connected with her memory. To the clear and temperate forms in which she brought the results of her convictions before her friends in the shape of private lectures, subsequently printed, may be traced the source whence living reformers and philanthropists took counsel and courage.

Mrs Jameson died in March 1860. She left the last of her Sacred and Legendary Art series in preparation. It was completed, under the title of The History of our Lord in Art, by Lady Eastlake. (e. e.)

JAMESON, or Jamesone, George (c. 1587-1644), a Scotch portrait painter, was born, probably in 1587, at Aberdeen, where his father was architect and a member of the guild. After studying painting under Rubens at Antwerp, with Vandyck as a fellow pupil, he returned in 1620 to Aberdeen, where he was married in 1624 and remained at least until 1630, after which he took up his residence in Edinburgh. The department of painting which he chiefly practised was portraiture in oil, but he also painted a few historical subjects and landscapes. His portraits are generally less than life size. According to Walpole they are characterized by “delicacy and softness, with a clear and beautiful colouring”; but, although undoubtedly the instructions of Rubens had left their influence on his style, he has no claim to the title of the Vandyck of Scotland by which he is often known, and perhaps owed even his exceptional fame in Scotland as much to chance as to his own merits. Having been employed by the magistrates of Edinburgh to copy several portraits of the Scottish kings for presentation to Charles I. on his first visit to Scotland in 1633, the king rewarded him with a diamond ring from his own finger. This circumstance appears to have at once established his fame, and he soon found constant though not very remunerative employment in painting the portraits of the nobility and gentry of his native land. He also painted a portrait of Charles, which he declined to sell to the magistrates of Aberdeen for the price they offered. The largest collection of the works of Jameson is said to be that in Taymouth castle, and, besides those in the houses of several of the gentry of Scotland, there are a few in the colleges of Aberdeen. He died at Edinburgh in 1644.

JAMESON, Robert (1774-1854), regius professor of natural history in the university of Edinburgh, was born at Leith July 11, 1774. After an education at Leith grammar school and Edinburgh university, he became assistant to a surgeon in his native town; but, having studied natural history under Dr Walker in 1792 and 1793, he felt that his true province lay in that science, for which indeed he had had a predilection from boyhood. The course of his studies during the next few years is to be traced in his scientific papers and books. He went in 1800 to Freiberg to study for nearly two years under the learned Werner, and spent other two in Continental travel. On his return to Edinburgh in 1804, when he succeeded Dr Walker in the chair of natural history, he became, in lectures, writings, and controversy, perhaps the first great exponent in England of the Wernerian geological system; and it is to his credit that, when he found that theory untenable, he frankly and honestly announced his conversion to the views of Hutton. As a teacher, Professor Jameson was no less remarkable than Wernet for his power of imparting his own enthusiasm to his students, and from his classroom there radiated an influence which gave a marked impetus to the study of geology in Britain. It was his energy also that, by means of Government aid, private donation, and personal outlay, amassed the greater part of the splendid collection which now occupies the natural history department of the Edinburgh Museum of Science and Art. In 1808 Jameson founded the Wernerian Natural History Society, and in 1819, along with Sir David Brewster, he originated the Edinburgh Philosophical Journal, which after the tenth volume remained under his sole conduct till his death, which took place April 19, 1854. His bust, presented by the Wernerian Society to the museum some years before his death, now stands in the university library hall.

Professor Jameson was the author of Mineralogy of Arran and the Shetland Islands, 1798, incorporated with Mineralogy of the Scottish Isles, 2 vols. 4to, 1800; Mineralogical Description of Scotland, vol. i. pt. 1, “Dumfriesshire,” 1804 (this was to have been the first of a series embracing all Scotland); System of Mineralogy, 1804; Characters of Minerals, 1804; Elements of Geognosy, 1809; and Manned of Minerals and Mountain Rocks, 1821; besides a number of occasional papers, of which a list will be found in the Edinburgh New Philosophical Journal for April 1854, along with a biographical sketch of the author.