accuracy, and that familiarity with the commerce of the country, which distinguished his public career. In 1781 he married Manon Jeanne Phlipon (1754-1793), and the name of MADAME ROLAND is famous in history. She was the daughter of Gratien Phlipon, a Paris engraver, who was ambitious, speculative and nearly always poor. From her early years she showed great aptitude for study, an ardent and enthusiastic spirit, and unquestionable talent. She was to a considerable extent selftaught; and her love of reading made her acquainted first with Plutarch-a passion for which author she continued to cherish throughout her life-thereafter with Bossuet, Massillon, and authors of a like stamp, and finally with Montesquieu, Voltaire and Rousseau. These studies marked stages of her development, and as her mind matured she abandoned the idea of a convent which for a year or two she had entertained, and added to the enthusiasm for a republic which she had imbibed from her earlier studies not a little of the cynicism and the daring which the later authors inspired. She almost equalled her husband in knowledge, and infinitely excelled him in talent and in tact. Through and with him she exercised a singularly powerful influence over the destinies of France from the outbreak of the Revolution till her death. For four years after their marriage Roland lived at Amiens, he being still an inspector of manufactures; but his knowledge of commercial affairs enabled him to contribute articles to the Encyclopédie Nouvelle, in which, as in all his literary work, he was assisted by his wife. On their removal to Lyons the influence of both became wider and more powerful. Their fervent political aspirations could not be concealed, and from the beginning of the Revolution they threw in their lot with the party of advance. The Courrier de Lyon contained articles the success of which reached even to the capital and attracted the attention of the Parisian press. They were from the pen of Madame Roland and were signed by her husband. A correspondence sprang up with Brissot and other friends of the Revolution at headquarters. In Lyons their views were publicly known; Roland was elected a member of the municipality, and when the depression of trade in the south demanded representation in Paris he was deputed by the council of Lyons to ask the Constituent Assembly that the municipal debt of Lyons, which had been contracted for the benefit of the state, should be regarded as national debt. Accompanied by his wife, he appeared in the capital in February 1791. He remained there until September, frequenting the Society of the Friends of the Constitution, and entertaining deputies of the most advanced opinions, especially those who later became the leading Girondists. Madame Roland took an active part in the political discussions in these reunions. In September 1791, Roland's mission being executed, they returned to Lyons. Meanwhile the inspectorships of manufactures had been abolished; he was thus free; and they could no longer remain absent from the centre of affairs. In December they again reached Paris. Roland became a member of the Jacobin Club. They had made many and influential friends in advance, and Madame Roland's salon soon became the rendezvous of Brissot, Pétion, Robespierre and other leaders of the popular movement, above all of Buzot, whom she loved with platonic enthusiasm. In person Madame Roland was attractive though not beautiful; her ideas were clear and far-reaching, her manner calm, and her power of observation extremely acute. It was almost inevitable that she should find herself in the centre of political aspirations and presiding over a company of the most talented men of progress. The rupture had not yet been made evident between the Girondist party and that section still more extreme, that of the Mountain. For a time the whole left united in forcing the resignation of the ministers. When the crisis came the Girondists were ready, and on the 23rd of March 1792 Roland found himself appointed minister of the interior. As a minister of the crown Roland exhibited a bourgeois brusqueness of manner and a remarkable combination of political prejudice with administrative ability. While his wife's influence could not increase the latter, it was successfully exerted to foment and embitter the former. He was ex officio excluded from the Legislative Assembly, and his declarations of policy were thus in writing-that is, in the form in which she could most readily exert her power. A great occasion was invented. The decrees against the emigrants and the non-juring clergy still remained under the veto of the king. A letter was penned by Madame Roland and addressed by her husband to Louis. It remained unanswered. Thereupon, in full council and in the king's presence, Roland read his letter aloud. It contained many and terrible truths as to the royal refusal to sanction the decrees and as to the king's position in the state; but it was inconsistent with a minister's position, disrespectful if not insolent in tone. Roland's dismissal followed. Then he completed the plan: he read the letter to the Assembly; it was ordered to be printed, became the manifesto of disaffection, and was circulated everywhere. In the demand for the reinstatement of the dismissed ministers were found the means of humiliation, and the prelude to the dethronement, of the king. After the insurrection of the 10th of August, Roland was recalled to power, one of his colleagues being Danton. But now he was dismayed by the progress of the Revolution. He was above all a provincial, and was soon in opposition to the party of the Mountain, which aimed at supremacy not only in Paris but in the government as well. His hostility to the insurrectional commune of Paris, which led him to propose transferring the government to Blois, and his attacks upon Robespierre and his friends rendered him very unpopular. His neglect to seal the iron chest discovered in the Tuileries, which contained the proofs of Louis XVI.'s relations with the enemies of France, led to the accusation that he had destroyed a part of these documents. Finally, in the trial of the king he demanded, with the Girondists, that the sentence should be pronounced by a vote of the whole people, and not simply by the Convention. He resigned office on the 23rd of January 1793, two days after the king's execution. Although now extremely unpopular, the Rolands remained in Paris, suffering abuse and calumny, especially from Marat. Once Madame Roland appeared personally in the Assembly to repel the falsehoods of an accuser, and her ease and dignity evoked enthusiasm and compelled acquittal. But violence succeeded violence, and early on the morning of the 1st of June she was arrested and thrown into the prison of the Abbaye. Roland himself escaped secretly to shelter in Rouen. Released for an hour from the Abbaye, she was again arrested and thrown among the horrors of Sainte-Pélagie. Finally, she was transferred to the Conciergerie. In prison she won the affections of the guards, and was allowed the privilege of writing materials and the occasional visits of devoted friends. She there wrote her Appel à l'impartiale postérité, those memoirs which display a strange alternation between self-laudation and patriotism, between the trivial and the sublime. On the 8th of November 1793 she was conveyed to the guillotine. Before yielding her head to the block, she bowed before the clay statue of Liberty erected in the Place de la Révolution, uttering her famous apostrophe "O Liberty! what crimes are committed in thy name!" When Roland heard of his wife's condemnation, he wandered some miles from his refuge in Rouen; maddened by despair and grief, he wrote a few words expressive of his horror at those massacres which could only be inspired by the enemies of France, protesting that "from the moment when I learned that they had murdered my wife I would no longer remain in a world stained with enemies." He affixed the paper to his breast, and unsheathing a sword-stick fell upon the weapon, which pierced his heart, on the roth of November 1793. Madame Roland's Mémoires, first printed in 1820, have been (Paris, 1864), by J. Claretie (Paris, 1884), and by C. Perroud (Paris, edited among others by P. Faugère (Paris, 1864), by C. A. Dauban 1905). Some of her Lettres inédites have been published by C. A. Dauban (Paris, 1867), and a critical edition of her Lettres by C. Perroud (Paris, 1900-2). See also C. A. Dauban, Étude sur Madame Roland et son temps (Paris, 1864); V. Lamy, Deux femmes célèbres, Madame Roland et Charlotte Corday (Paris, 1884); C. Bader, Madame Roland, d'après des lettres et des manuscrits inédits (Paris, 1892); A. J. Lambert, Le mariage de Madame Roland, trois années de correspondance amoureuse (Paris, 1896); Austin Dobson, Four Frenchwomen (London, 1890); and articles by C. Perroud in the review La Révolution française (1896–99). ROLAND, LEGEND OF. The legend of the French epic hero Roland (transferred to Italian romance as Orlando) is based on authentic history. Charlemagne invaded Spain in 778, and had captured Pampeluna, but failed before Saragossa, when the news of a Saxon revolt recalled him to the banks of the Rhine. On his retreat to France through the defiles of the Pyrenees, part of his army was cut off from the main body by the Basques, who had ambushed in a narrow defile, and now drove the rearguard into a valley where it was surrounded and entirely destroyed. The Basques, after plundering the baggage, made good their escape, favoured by the darkness and by their knowledge of the ground. The incident is related in the Annales (Pertz i. 159) commonly ascribed to Einhard, and with more detail in Einhard's Vita Karoli (cap. ix.; Pertz ii. 448), where the names of the leaders are given. "In this battle were slain Eggihard, praepositus of the royal table; Anselm, count of the palace; and Hruodland, praefect of the Breton march. . . ." The scene of the disaster is fixed by tradition at Roncevaux, on the road from Pampeluna to Saint Jean Pied de Port. There is no foundation in this story for the fiction of the twelve peers, which may possibly arise from a still earlier tradition. In 636-37, according to the Chronicles of Fredegarius (ed. Krusch p. 159), twelve chiefs, whose names are given, were sent by Dagobert against the Basques. The expedition was successful, but in an engagement fought in the valley of Subola, or Robola, identified with Mauléon, which is not far from Roncevaux, the Duke Harembert, with other Frankish chiefs, was slain. Later fights in the same neighbourhood and under similar circumstances are related in 813 (Vita Hludowici; Pertz ii. 616), and especially in 824 (Einhard's Annales; Pertz i. 213). These incidents no doubt served to strengthen the tradition of the disaster to Charlemagne's rear-guard in 778, the importance of which was perhaps underrated by the Frankish historians and was certainly magnified in popular story. The author of the Vita Hludowici, writing sixty years after the battle of Roncevaux, thought it superfluous to give the names of the fallen chiefs, as being matter of common report. Growth of the Legend.-The choice of Roland or Hruodland as the hero of the story probably points to the borders of French Brittany as the home of the legend. The, exaggeration of a rear-guard action into a national defeat; the substitution of a vast army of Saracens, the enemies of the Frankish nation and the Christian faith, for the border tribe mentioned by Einhard; and the vengeance inflicted by Charlemagne, where in fact the enemy escaped with complete impunity-all are in keeping with the general laws of romance. Charlemagne himself appears as the ancient epic monarch, not as the young man he really was in 778. The earliest version of the legend which we possess dates no earlier than the 11th century, but there is abundant evidence of the existence of a continuous tradition dating from the original event, although its methods of transmission remain a vexed question. Roncevaux lay on the route to Compostella, and the many pilgrims who must have passed the site from the middle of the 9th century onwards may have helped to spread the story. Whether the actual cantilena Rollandi chanted by Taillefer at the battle of Hastings (William of Malmesbury, De gestis regum angl. iii. 242, and Wace, Brut. ii. 11, 8035 seq.) was any part of the existing Chanson de Roland cannot be stated, but the choice of the legend on this occasion by the trouvère is proof of its popularity. The oldest extant forms of the legend are: (a) chapters xix.-xxx. of the Latin chronicle, known as the Pseudo-Turpin, 1 It is noteworthy, however, that an Arab historian, Ibn-al-Athir, states that Charles's assailants were the Arabs of Saragossa, by whom he had been originally invited to interfere in Spain. which purports to be the work of Turpin, archbishop of Reims, who died about 800, but probably dates from the 12th century; (b) Carmen de proditione Guenonis, a poem in Latin distichs; and (c) the Chanson de Roland, a French chanson de geste of about 4000 lines, the oldest recension of which is in the Bodleian Library, Oxford (MS. Digby 23). It is in assonanced tirades, of unequal length, many of them terminated with the refrain Aoi. This MS. was written by an Anglo-Norman, scribe about the end of the 12th century, and is a corrupt copy of a text by a French trouvère of the middle of the 11th century. It concludes with the words: "Ci falt la geste, que Turoldus declinet." There was a Turold (d. 1098) who was abbot of Peterborough; another was tutor to William the Conqueror and died in 1035. Even if we could identify this personage, we cannot tell whether he was the poet, the minstrel or the scribe of the MS., but it seems likely that he was merely the scribe. The poem, which was first printed by Francisque Michel (Oxford, 1837), is the finest monument of the heroic age of French epic. In its fundamental features it evidently dates back to the reign of Charlemagne, who is not represented as the capricious despot of the later chansons de geste, but as governing in accordance with Frankish custom, accepting the counsel of his barons, and carrying out the curious procedure of Frankish law. Roland represents the monarchical idea, and was evidently, in its primitive form, written before the feudal revolts which weakened the power of Charlemagne's successors. Its unity of conception, the severity and conciseness of the language, the directness, vividness and sobriety of the narrative, place it far above the chansons of later trouvères, with their wordiness and their loose, episodic construction. With the exception of the small place allotted to Alde, women have practically no place in the story, and the romantic element is thus absent. Roland's master-passions are daring and an exaggerated conception of honour, the extravagance of which is the cause of the disaster. His address to Oliver before the battle is typical of the warlike spirit of the poem : "Notre empereur qui ses Francs nous laissa, Tels vingt mille hommes a pour nous mis à part, (tr. Petit de Julleville xi. 1114 seq.) The Story as related in the Chanson de Roland.-Charlemagne, after fighting for seven years in Spain, had conquered the whole country with the exception of Saragossa, the seat of the Saracen king Marsile. He was encamped before Cordova when he received envoys from the Saracen king, sent to procure the evacuation of Spain by the Franks through false offers of submission. Charlemagne held a council of his barons, Naimes of Bavaria, Roland, Oliver, Turpin, Ogier, Ganelon and the rest. Roland, the emperor's nephew, was eager for war; the peace party was headed by Ganelon of Mayence.2 The Franks were weary of campaigning, and Ganelon's counsels won the day. At the suggestion of Roland, Ganelon, who was his stepfather, was entrusted with the embassy to Marsile-a sufficiently perilous errand, since two former envoys had been beheaded by the Saracens. Ganelon, inspired by hatred of Roland and Oliver, agreed with Marsile to betray Roland and his comrades for ten mule-loads of gold. He then returned to Charlemagne bearing Marsile's supposed assent to the Frankish terms. The retreat began. Roland, at Ganelon's instigation, was placed in command of the rear-guard. With him were the rest of the famous twelve peers, his companions-in-arms, Oliver, Gérin, Gérier, Oton, Bérengier, Samson, Anséis, Girard 3 de Roussillon, Engelier the Gascon, Ivon and Ivoire, and th flower of the Frankish army. They had nearly reached the summit of the pass when Oliver, who had mounted a high rock, saw the advancing army of the Saracens, 400,000 strong. In vain Oliver begged Roland to sound his horn and summon Charlemagne to his aid. A description of the battle, a series. of single combats, follows. Oliver, with his sword Hauteclère, rivalled Roland with Durendal. After the first fight, a second division of the pagan army appears, then a third. Roland's army was reduced to sixty men before he consented to sound his horn. Presently all were slain but Roland and Oliver, Turpin and another. Finally, when the Saracens, warned of the return of Charlemagne, had retreated, Roland alone survived on the field of battle. With a last effort he blew his horn once more, and heard before he died the sound of Charlemagne's battlecry of "Montjoie." Charlemagne pursued the enemy, and destroyed their army. The raising of a second army by Baligant, the emir of Babylon, and its defeat by the emperor, who slays Baligant in single combat, is obviously an interpolation in the original narrative. The trouvère then relates the return of the Franks, the burial of the heroes of Roncevaux, and, at great length, the trial of Ganelon at Aix, his execution, and that of his thirty kinsmen, and the death of Alde, Roland's betrothed and Oliver's sister, when she heard the news of Roland's death. The trial of Ganelon is one of the most curious parts of the story, providing, as it does, a full account of the Frankish criminal procedure. Relations between the Earlier Forms of the Legend.-The PseudoTurpin represents a different recension of the story, and is throughout clerical in tone. It was the trouvère of the Chanson de Roland who developed the characters into epic types; he invented the heroic friendship of Roland and Oliver, the motives of Ganelon's treachery, and many other details. The famous fight between Roland and the giant Ferragus appears in the Pseudo-Turpin (chapter xviii.), but not in the poem. The Chanson de Roland presupposes the existence of a whole cycle of epic poetry, probably in episodic form; it contains allusions to many events outside the narrative, some of which can be explained from other existing chansons, while others refer to narratives which are lost. In lines 590-603 of the poem Roland gives a list of the countries he has conquered for Charles, from Constantinople and Hungary on the east to Scotland on the west. Of most of these exploits no trace remains in extant poems, but his capture of Bordeaux, of Nobles, of Carcassonne, occur in various compilations. Roland was variously represented by the romancers as the son of Charlemagne's sister Gilles or Berte and the knight Milon d'Anglers. The romantic episode of the reconciliation of the pair with Charlemagne through Roland's childish prattle (Berte et Milon) is probably foreign to the original legend. In the Scandinavian versions Roland is the son of Charlemagne and his sister, a recital probably borrowed from mythology. His enfances, or youthful exploits, were, according to Aspremont, performed in Italy against the giant Eaumont, but in Girais de Viane his first taste of battle is under the walls of Vienne, where Oliver, at first his adversary, becomes his brother-in-arms. Other Versions. Most closely allied to the Oxford Roland are (a) a version in Italianized French preserved in a 13th or 14th century MS. in the library of St Mark, Venice (MS. Fr. iv.); (b) the Ruolantes Liet (ed. W. Grimm, Göttingen, 1838) of the Swabian priest Konrad (fl. 1130), who gave, however, a pious tone to the whole; (c) the 8th branch of the Karlamagnus-saga (ed. C. Unger, Christiania, 1860), and the Danish version of that compilation. In the 12th century the Chanson de Roland was modernized by replacing the assonance by rhyme, and by amplifications and 1 A proof of the popularity of the legend in Germany is supplied by the so-called Roland statues, of which perhaps the most famous example is that of Bremen. Mention of a statua Rolandi is made in a privilegium granted by Henry V. to the town of Bremen in IIII. The Rolands-säule were probably symbolic of the judicial rights possessed by the towns where they are found, and it has been suggested that the word arises from false etymology with Rothland-säule, red-land-pillar, the symbol of the possession of the power of life and death. additions. Several MSS. of this rhymed recension, sometimes known as Roncevaux, are preserved. In the prose compilations of Galien and in David Aubert's Conquêtes de Charlemagne (1458) the story kept its popularity for many centuries. In England the story was understood in the original French, and the English romances of Charlemagne (q.v.) are mostly derived from late and inferior sources. In Spain the legend underwent a curious transformation. Carpio, to be the rival and victor of Roland. It was in Italy that Spanish patriotism created a Spanish ally of Marsile, Bernard del the Roland legend had its greatest fortune: Charlemagne and Roland appear in the Paradiso (canto xviii.) of Dante; the statues of Roland and Oliver appear on the doorway of the cathedral of Verona; and the French chansons de geste regularly appeared in a corrupt Italianized French. The Roland legend passed through a succession of revisions, and, as the Spagna, forming the 8th book of the great compilation of Carolingian romance, the Reali di Francia, kept its popularity down to the Renaissance. The story of Roland (Orlando) in a greatly modified form is the subject of the poems of Luigi Pulci (Morgante Maggiore, 1481), of Matteo Boiardo (Orlando innamorato, 1486), of Ariosto (Orlando furioso, 1516), and of Francesco Berni (Orlando, 1541). AUTHORITIES.For a complete bibliography of the editions of the various MSS. of the Chanson de Roland, of the foreign versions, and of the enormous literature of the subject, see Léon Gautier, Les Épopées françaises (2nd ed., vol. iii., 1880), and the same author's Bibliographie des chansons de geste (1897). Among critical editions of the Chanson are those by Wendelin Foerster in the Altfranz. Bibliotek, vols. vi. and vii. (Heilbronn, 1883-86), and by E. Stengel, Das altfranzösische Rolandslied (Leipzig, 1900, &c.). The most popular edition is La Chanson de Roland (Tours, 1872, and numerous subsequent editions), by Léon Gautier, with text, translation, introduction, notes, variants and glossary. L. Petit de Julleville published in 1878 an edition with the old French text, and a modern French translation in assonanced verse. There are various other translations in French; in English prose by I. Butler (Boston, Mass., 1904); and a partial English verse translation by A. Way and F. Spencer (London, 1895). Consult further G. Paris, Hist. poét. de Charlemagne (reprint, 1905), and De Pseudo Turpino (Paris, 1865); P. Rajna, Le Origini dell' epopea francese (Florence, 1884) and Le Fonti dell' Orlando Furioso (2nd ed., Florence, 1900); F. Picco, Rolando nella storia e nella poesia (Turin, 1901); G. Paris, Roncevaux," in Légendes du moyen age (1903), on the topography of the battlefield. " ROLANDSECK, a village of Germany, in the Prussian Rhine province, delightfully situated on the left bank of the Rhine, 8 m. above Bonn, with a station on the railway Cologne-Coblenz. The place consists almost entirely of villas and is a favourite summer resort. Crowning the vine-clad hills behind it lie the ruins of the castle, a picturesque ivy-covered arch, whence a fine view is obtained of the Siebengebirge and the Rhine valley as far as Bonn. Immediately below Rolandseck in mid-river is the island of Nonnenwerth, on which is a nursing school under the conduct of Franciscan nuns, established in 1850. The convent which formerly stood here was founded in 1122 and secularized in 1802. Tradition assigns the foundation of the castle of Rolandseck to Charlemagne's paladin, Roland. It was certainly built at a very early date, as it was restored by Frederick, archbishop of Cologne, in 1120, and it was a fortress until the end of the 15th century. ROLL, ALFRED PHILIPPE (1846- ), French painter, was born in Paris on the 1st of March 1846. Pupil of Gérôme and Bonnat at the École des Beaux Arts, he made his début at the Salon in 1870 with "Environs of Baccarat " and Evening," and attracted the widest attention in 1875 by his colossal painting of The Flood at Toulouse " (now at the Havre Museum). All his early work is imbued with the spirit of romanticism under the influence of Géricault, whilst his colour tended to Bolognese heaviness with a strong leaning towards dark shadows in the flesh painting. in which he closely followed Courbet. In 1877 he showed at the Salon the "Fête vivid colour and exuberant life that it recalls the work of of Silenus " (now at the Ghent Museum), a painting of such realistic rendering of modern life, especially among the working Jordaens. About this time he began to devote himself to the classes, and together with romantic subjects he abandoned his earlier heavy colouring, and devoted himself to the study of free light. His "Miners' Strike" of 1880 (now at the Valenciennes Museum) placed him in the front rank of modern French painters, and from that date his career was one of continuous and brilliant success. He became official painter" to the French government, and was entrusted with numerous commissions for the decoration of public buildings and for commemorative pictures, like the "President Carnot at Versailles at the Centenary of the États Généraux " (now at Versailles Palace), and "The Tzar and President Faure laying the Foundation Stone of the Alexandre III. Bridge." For the Hôtel de Ville he executed "The Pleasures of Life" and "The Rosetime of Youth." Besides the pictures already mentioned, a vast number of his works are to be found in the public galleries of France. The museum of the Hôtel de Ville in Paris owns his National Fête at Paris in 1880"; the Cognac Museum, "Labour, Works at Suresnes"; the Luxembourg, his "War and Manda Lametrie, farm-hand." At Avignon Museum is the "Don Juan and Haidee"; at Laval Museum, "Halt!"; at Fontainebleau Palace, "In Normandy"; at Pau Museum, "Roubey, cementer"; and at the Museum of Geneva," Marianne Offrey, crieuse de vert." In portraiture he is known by his "Yves Guyot," Coquelin cadet," Jules Simon," &c., but his greatest success was the group of "Fritz Thaulow and his Wife." In 1905 he replaced Carolus-Duran as president of the Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts, of which he was one of the founders. ROLL (O. Fr. rolle, roulle, mod. rôle, Lat. rotulus, dim. of rota, wheel), something rolled or wound up in a cylindrical form on an axis, or something which "rolls," that is, moves or is moved along a service by a turning motion. Primarily the word is used of a piece of writing material, such as parchment or paper, rolled up for the purpose of convenient storage, handling, &c. This is the meaning of the Med. Lat. rotulus, defined by Du Cange as "Scheda, charta in speciem rotulae seu rotae convoluta." It was thus the convenient name for any document kept in this form as an official record, and hence for any register, record, catalogue or official list. The Rolls was the name of the building where the records of the Chancery Court were kept, the keeper of which was the Master (q.v.) of the Rolls, now the title of the third member of the English Supreme Court of Judicature. Other familiar examples of the use of the word in this sense are the list of those admitted as qualified solicitors, whence the phrase "to strike off the rolls," of removal by the court of a solicitor for offences or delinquencies. There are numerous applications of the word to other objects packed in a cylindrical form, such as tobacco, cloth, &c., and particularly to a small loaf of bread rolled over before baking, the crust being thin and crisp and the crumb spongy. In architecture a roll" or "scroll" moulding is a moulding resembling a section of a roll or scroll of parchment with the end overlapping; a "roll and fillet" moulding is a section of a cylindrical moulding with a square fillet running along the centre of the face (see LABEL). For the sense of an object that rolls, the word "roller" is more general, but "roll" is frequent in technical usage for revolving cylinders, especially when working in fixed bearings. For the rolling of steel see ROLLING MILL. ROLLAND, JOHN (fl. 1560), Scottish poet, appears to have been a priest of the diocese of Glasgow, and to have been known in Dalkeith in 1555. He is the author of two poems, the Court of Venus and a translation of the Seven Sages. The former, which was printed by John Ros in 1575, may have been written before 1560. The latter was translated from a Scots prose version at the suggestion of an aunt ("ane proper wenche"), who had found his treatment of the courtly allegory involved and uninteresting. The Court of Venus was edited by Walter Gregor for the S.T.S. in 1884. See W. A. Craigie's long list of corrections of that edition in the Modern Language Quarterly (March 1898). The Seven Sages was printed in 1578, and frequently during the earlier decades of the 17th century. It was reprinted by David Laing for the Bannatyne Club (1837). Sibbald, in his Chronicle of Scottish Poetry (iii. 287), hinted that Rolland may be the author of the Thrie Priestis of Peblis. There is not a scrap of evidence in support of this; and there are many strong reasons against the ascription. ROLLE DE HAMPOLE, RICHARD (d. 1349), English hermit and author, was born near the end of the 13th century, at Thornton (now Thornton Dale), near Pickering, Yorkshire. His father, William Rolle, was perhaps a dependant of the Neville family. Richard was sent to Oxford at the expense of Thomas de Neville, afterwards archdeacon of Durham. At Oxford he gave himself to the study of religion rather than to the subtleties of scholastic philosophy, for which he professed a strong distaste. At the age of nineteen he returned to his father's house, and, making a rough attempt at a hermit's dress out of two kirtles of his sister's and a hood belonging to his father, he ran away to follow the religious vocation. At Dalton, near Rotherham, he was recognized by John de Dalton, who had been at Oxford with him. After satisfying himself of Rolle's sanity, Dalton's father provided him with food and shelter and a hermit's dress. Rolle then entered on the contemplative life, passing through the preliminary stages of purification and illumination, which lasted for nearly three years, and then entering the stage of sight, the full revelation of the divine vision. He is very exact in his dates, and attained, he says, the highest stage of his ecstasy four years and three months after the beginning of his conversion. Richard belonged to no order and acknowledged no rule. He left the Daltons, and wandered from place to place, resting when he found friends to provide for his wants. He seems to have desired to form a rule of hermits, but met with much opposition. The pious compilers of his office" evidently thought it necessary to defend him against the charge of mere vagrancy. He nowhere says himself that his preaching made many converts, but his example was followed by many recluses in the north of England. After some years of wandering he gave up his more energetic propaganda, contenting himself with advising those who sought him out. He began also to write the songs and treatises by which he was to exert his widest influence. He settled in Richmondshire, twelve miles from the recluse Margaret Kirkby, whom he had cured of a violent seizure. To her some of his works are dedicated. Finally he removed to Hampole, near Doncaster, invited by an inmate of the Cistercian nunnery of St Mary. There he died on the 29th of September 1349. Many miracles were wrought at his shrine, and, in view of an expected canonization, an office was drawn up giving an account of his life and the legends connected with it. Richard Rolle had a great influence on his own and the next generation. In his exaltation of the spiritual side of religion over its forms, his enthusiastic celebration of the love of Christ, and his assertion of the individualist principle, he represented the best side of the influences that led to the Lollard movement. He was himself a faithful son of the church, and the political activity of the Lollards was quite foreign to his teaching. The popularity of his devotional writings is attested by the numerous existing editions and by the many close imitations of them. A very full list of his Latin and English works is given (pp. 36-43) in Dr Carl Horstmann's edition (1895-96) of his works in the Library of Early English Writers. Some of his works exist in both English and Latin, and it is often not easy to say which is the original version. The most considerable of them are The Pricke of Conscience and his Commentary on the Psalter. The Pricke of Conscience is a long religious poem, in rhyming couplets, dealing with the beginning of man's life, the instability of the world, why death is to be dreaded, of doomsday, of the pains of hell, and the joys of heaven, the two latter subjects being treated with uncompromising realism. Rolle wrote in the northern dialect, but southern transcripts are also found, and the poem exists in a Latin version (Stimulus conscientiae). The sources of this work included the De Contemptu Mundi sive de miseria humanae conditionis of Pope Innocent III., and Rolle also showed a knowledge of Bartholomew Glanville, Thomas Aquinas and Honorius of Awtun. His English devotional commentary on the Psalms follows very closely his Latin Expositio Psalterii, which he based partly on Peter Lombard's Catena. It often agrees with the English metrical Psalter preserved in three MSS. in the British Museum (Cotton Vesp. D vii., Egerton 614, and Harl. 1770). Dr R. F. Littledale in his edition (1873) of J. M. Neale's Commentary on the Psalms called it a terse mystical paraphrase, which often comes very little short in beauty and depth of Dionysius the Carthusian himself." There is no complete and accessible edition of his works. The best collection is by C. Horstmann, Yorkshire Writers: Richard Rolle of Hampole; An English Father of the Church and his Followers (2 vols., 1895-96), in the "Library of Early English Writers." This includes many English prose treatises by Rolle, some beautiful examples of his lyric poems, and other treatises in prose and verse from northern MSS., some of which are attributed to Rolle, and others to his followers. Wynkyn de Worde printed in one volume, in 1506, Rycharde Rolle Hermyte of Hampull in his contemplacyons of the drede and love of God and the Remedy ayenst the troubles of temptacyons. Neither of these are accepted by Dr Horstmann as Rolle's work. His Latin treatises, De emendatione vitae and De incendio amoris, the latter one of the most interesting of his works, because it is obviously largely autobiographical, were translated (1434-35) by Richard Misyn (ed. R. Harvey, Early English Text Soc., 1896). The Pricke of Conscience was edited (1863) by Richard Morris for the Philological Society. His Commentary on the Psalms was edited by the Rev. H. R. Bramley (Oxford, 1884). Ten prose treatises by Richard Rolle from the Thornton MS. (c. 1440, Lincoln Cathedral Library) were edited by Canon George Perry for the Early English Text Society in 1866. Partial editions of his Latin works are dated Paris (1510), Antwerp (1533), Cologne (1535-36), Paris (1618); and in vol. xxvi. of the Bibliotheca Patrum Maxima (Lyons, 1677). The office, which forms the chief authority for Rolle's life, was printed in the York Breviary, vol. ii. (Surtees Soc., 1882), and in Canon Perry's edition referred to above. " See also Percy Andreae, who collated eighteen MSS. in the British Museum in his Handschriften des Pricke of Conscience (Berlin, 1888); Studien über Richard Rolle von Hampole unter besonderer Berücksichtigung seiner Psalmen commentare, by H. Middendorff (Magdeburg, 1888), with a list of MSS., sources, &c.; J. Zupitza in Englische Studien (Heilbronn, vols. vii. and xii.); A. Hahn, Quellenuntersuchungen zu Richard Rolle's Englischen Schriften (Halle, 1900); and for his prosody, G. Saintsbury, Hist. of English Prosody, vol. i. ROLLER, a very beautiful bird, so called from its way of occasionally rolling or turning over in its flight, somewhat after the fashion of a tumbler-pigeon. It is the Coracias garrulus of ornithology, and is widely though not very numerously spread over Europe and Western Asia in summer, breeding so far to the northward as the middle of Sweden, but retiring to winter in Africa. It occurs almost every year in some part or other of the British Islands, from Cornwall to the Shetlands, while it has visited Ireland several times, and is even recorded from St Kilda. But it is only as a wanderer that it comes, since there is no evidence of its having ever attempted to breed in Great Britain; and indeed its conspicuous appearance for it is nearly as big as a daw and very brightly coloured —would forbid its being ever allowed to escape a gun. Except the back, scapulars and tertials, which are bright reddishbrown, the plumage of both sexes is almost entirely blueof various shades, from pale turquoise to dark ultramarinetinted in parts with green. The bird seems to be purely insectivorous. The genus Coracias, for a long while placed by systematists among the crows, has really no affinity whatever to them, and is now properly considered to belong to the heterogeneous group of birds now associated as Coraciiformes, in which it forms the type of the family Coraciidae; and its alliance to the bee-eaters (Meropidae) and king-fishers (Alcedinidae) (q.v.) is very evident. Some eight other species of Some eight other species of the genus have been recognized, one of which, C. leucocephalus or C. abyssinicus, is said to have occurred in Scotland. India has two species, C. indicus and C. affinis, of which thousands upon thousands used to be annually destroyed to supply the demand for gaudy feathers to bedizen ladies' dresses. One species, C. temmincki, seems to be peculiar to Celebes and the neighbouring islands, but otherwise the rest are natives of the Ethiopian or Indian regions. Allied to Coracias is the genus Eurystomus with some half-dozen species, of similar distribution, but one of them, E. pacificus, has a wider range, for it inhabits Australia and reaches Tasmania. Madagascar has four or five very remarkable forms which have often been considered to belong to the family Coraciidae; and, according to A. Milne-Edwards, no doubt should exist on that point. Yet if any may be entertained it is in regard to one of them, 1 Gesner in 1555 said that the bird was thus called, and for this reason, near Strassburg, but the name seems not to be generally used in Germany, where the bird is commonly called Rake, apparently from its harsh note. The French have kept the name Rollier. is a curious fact that the roller, notwithstanding its occurrence in It the Levant, cannot be identified with any species mentioned by Aristotle. Leptosomus discolor, which, on account of its zygodactylous feet, some authorities place among the Cuculidae, while others have considered it the type of a distinct family Leptosomatidae. The genera Brachypteracias and Atelornis present fewer structural differences from the rollers, and perhaps may be rightly placed with them; but the species of the latter have long tarsi, and are believed to be of terrestrial habit, which rollers generally certainly are not. These very curious and in some respects very interesting forms, which are peculiar to Madagascar, are admirably described and illustrated by a series of twenty plates in the great work of A. Grandidier and A. Milne-Edwards on that island (Oiseaux, pp. 223250), while the whole family Coraciidae is the subject of a monograph by H. E. Dresser, as a companion volume to his monograph on the Meropidae. (A. N.) ROLLER. For agricultural purposes the roller formerly consisted of a solid cylinder of timber or stone attached to a frame and shafts, but to facilitate turning two or more iron cylinders revolving on an axle are now generally used. The simplest form has a smooth surface. The diameter of the drum should be as great as possible-30 in. being a good size-because the larger this is the more easily it is pulled (within certain limits), while rollers of small diameter are heavier of draught and do their work less efficiently. The implement is used in spring and summer as an aid in pulverizing and cleaning the soil, by bruising clods and lumps of tangled roots and earth which the cultivator or other implement has brought to the surface; in smoothing the surface for the reception of small seeds or the better operation of the mower or reaper; in consolidating soil that is too loose in texture and pressing it down about the roots of young plants. In the case of young plants the roots are close to the surface, which must therefore be kept moist. This end is attained by the compression by the roller of the top-soil of which the capillarity, i.e. the power of drawing water from the sub-soil is thereby increased. On the other hand, when it is desired to conserve the soil-moisture, the roller may be followed by the harrow, which, by pulverizing the surface-soil, breaks the capillarity. Of the variations on the common smooth roller, the clod-crusher and the Cambridge roller are the most important. The clod-crusher combines weight with breaking power. The best-known form was patented about 1841 by Crosskill, and consists of a number of disks with serrated edges threaded loosely on an axle round which they revolve. The Cambridge roller carries on its axle a number of closely packed wheels, the rims of which narrow down to a wedge shape. The tubular roller, instead of drums, has tubes arranged longitudinally, producing a corrugated surface which is reproduced in the condition of the soil after it has been rolled. ROLLER-SKATING, a pastime which, by the use of small wheels instead of a blade on the skate, has provided some of the pleasures of skating on ice without having ice as the surface (see SKATING). Wheeled skates were used on the roads of Holland as far back as the 18th century, but it was the invention of the four-wheeled skate, working on rubber springs, by Plimpton of New York, in 1863, that made the amusement popular. Still greater advance was made by the Raymond skate with ball and cone bearings. The wheels or rollers were first of turned boxwood, but the wearing of the edges was a fault which has been surmounted by making them of a hard composition or of steel. The floor of the rink on which the skating takes place is either of asphalt or of wood. The latter is that always used in newly made rinks. The best floors are of long narrow strips of maple. Figure-skating on roller-skates is in some respects easier to learn than on ice-skates, the four points of contact given by the wheels rendering easier the holding of an edge; but some figures, such as loops, are more difficult. ROLLIN, CHARLES (1661-1741), French historian and educationist, was born at Paris on the 30th of January 1661. He was the son of a cutler, and at the age of twenty-two was made a master in the Collège du Plessis. In 1694 he was rector of the university of Paris, rendering great service among other things by reviving the study of Greek. He held that post for two years instead of one, and in 1699 was appointed principal of the Collège de Beauvais. Rollin held Jansenist |