Julie, ou La Nouvelle Héloïse, is a novel written in letters describing the loves of a man of low position and a girl of rank, her subsequent marriage to a respectable freethinker of her own station, the mental agonies of her lover, and the partial appeasing of the distresses of the lovers by the influence of noble sentiment and the good offices of a philanthropic Englishman. It is too long, the sentiment is overstrained, and severe moralists have accused it of a certain complaisance in dealing with amatory errors; but it is full of pathos and knowledge of the human heart. The Contrat Social, as its title implies, endeavours to base all government on the consent, direct or implied, of the governed, and indulges in much ingenious argument to get rid of the practical inconveniences of such a suggestion. Emile, the second title of which is De l'Education, is much more of a treatise than of a novel, though a certain amount of narrative interest is kept up throughout.

Rousseau's reputation was now higher than ever, but the term of the comparative prosperity which he had enjoyed for nearly ten years was at hand. The Contrat Social was obviously anti-monarchic; the Nouvelle Héloïse was said to be immoral; the sentimental deism of the "Profession du vicaire Savoyard" in Emile irritated equally the philosophe party and the church. On June 11, 1662, Emile was condemned by the parlement of Paris, and two days previously Madame de Luxembourg and the Prince de Conti gave the author information that he would be arrested if he did not fly. They also furnished him with means of flight, and he made for Yverdun in the territory of Bern, whence he transferred himself to Motiers in Neuchâtel, which then belonged to Prussia. Frederick II. was not indisposed to protect the persecuted when it cost him nothing and might bring him fame, and in Marshal Keith, the governor of Neuchâtel, Rousseau found a true and firm friend. He was, however, unable to be quiet or to practise any of those more or less pious frauds which were customary at the time with the unorthodox. The archbishop of Paris had published a pastoral against him, and Rousseau did not let the year pass without a Lettre à M. de Beaumont. The council of Geneva had joined in the condemnation of Emile, and Rousseau first solemnly renounced his citizenship, and then, in the Lettres de la Montagne (1763), attacked the council and the Genevan constitution unsparingly. All this excited public opinion against him, and gradually he grew unpopular in his own neighbourhood. This unpopularity is said on very uncertain authority to have culminated in a nocturnal attack on his house, which reminds the reader remarkably of an incident in the life of the greatest French man of letters of the present century. At any rate he thought he was menaced if he was not, and migrated to the Île St Pierre in the Lake of Bienne, where he once more for a short, and the last, time enjoyed that idyllic existence

Here,

to go, and thought of Corsica (to join Paoli) and Berlin. But finally David Hume offered him, late in 1765, an asylum in England, and he accepted. He passed through Paris, where his presence was tolerated for a time, and landed in England on January 13, 1766. Thérèse travelled separately, and was entrusted to the charge of James Boswell, who had already made Rousseau's acquaintance. Here he had once more a chance of settling peaceably. Severe English moralists like Johnson thought but ill of him, but the public generally was not unwilling to testify against French intolerance, and regarded his sentimentalism with favour. He was lionized in London to his heart's content and discontent, for it may truly be said of Rousseau that he was equally indignant at neglect and intolerant of attention. When, after not a few displays of his strange bumour, he professed himself tired of the capital, Hume procured him a country abode in the house of Mr Davenport at Wootton in Derbyshire. though the place was bleak and lonely, he might have been happy enough, and he actually employed himself in writing the greater part of his Confessions. But his habit of self-tormenting and tormenting others never left him. His own caprices interposed some delay in the conferring of a pension which George III. was induced to grant him, and he took this as a crime of Hume's. publication of a spiteful letter (really by Horace Walpole, one of whose worst deeds it was) in the name of the king of Prussia made Rousseau believe that plots of the most terrible kind were on foot against him. Finally he quarrelled with Hume because the latter would not acknowledge all his own friends and Rousseau's supposed enemies of the philosophe circle to be rascals. mained, however, at Wootton during the year and through the winter. In May 1767 he fled to France, addressing letters to the lord chancellor and to General Conway, which can only be described as the letters of a lunatic. He was received in France by the Marquis de Mirabeau (father of the great Mirabeau), of whom he soon had enough, then by the Prince de Conti at Trye. From this place he again fled and wandered about for some time in a wretched fashion, still writing the Confessions, constantly receiving generous help, and always quarrelling with, or at least suspecting, the helpers. In the summer of 1770 he returned to Paris, resumed music copying, and was on the whole happier than he had been since he had to leave Montlouis. He had by this time married Thérèse le Vasseur, or had at least gone through some form of marriage with her.

The

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Many of the best-known stories of Rousseau's life date from this last time, when he was tolerably accessible to visitors, though clearly half-insane. He finished his Confessions, wrote his Dialogues (the interest of which is not quite equal to the promise of their curious sub-title Rousseau juge de Jean Jacques), and began his Rêveries du Promeneur Solitaire, intended as a sequel and complement to the Confessions, and one of the best of all his books. It should be said that besides these, which complete the list of his principal works, he has left a very large number of minor works and a considerable correspondence. During this time he lived in the Rue Platière, which is now named after him. But his suspicions of secret enemies grew stronger rather than weaker, and at the beginning of 1778 he was glad to accept the offer of M. de Girardin, a rich financier, and occupy a cottage at Ermenonville. The country was beautiful; but his old terrors revived, and his woes were complicated by the alleged inclination of Therese for one of M. de Girardin's stable boys. On July 2d he died in a manner which has been much discussed, sus

picions of suicide having at the time and since been frequent. On the whole the theory of a natural death due to a fit of apoplexy and perhaps to injuries inflicted accidentally during that fit seems most probable. He had always suffered from internal and constitutional ailments not unlikely to bring about such an end.

Rousseau's character, the history of his reputation, and the intrinsic value of his literary work are all subjects of much interest. There is little doubt that for the last ten or fifteen years of his life, if not from the time of his quarrel with Diderot and Madame d'Épinay, he was not wholly sane-the combined influence of late and unexpected literary fame and of constant solitude and discomfort acting upon his excitable temperament so as to overthrow the balance, never very stable, of his fine and acute but unrobust intellect. He was by no means the only man of letters of his time who had to submit to something like persecution. Fréron on the orthodox side had his share of it, as well as Voltaire, Helvétius, Diderot, and Montesquieu on that of the innovators. But Rousseau had not, like Montesquieu, a position which guaranteed him from serious danger; he was not wealthy like Helvétius; he had not the wonderful suppleness and trickiness which even without his wealth would probably have defended Voltaire himself; and he lacked entirely the "bottom" of Fréron and Diderot. When he was molested he could only shriek at his enemies and suspect his friends, and, being more given than any man whom history mentions to this latter weakness, he suffered intensely from it. His moral character was undoubtedly weak in other ways than this, but it is fair to remember that but for his astounding Confessions the more disgusting parts of it would not have been known, and that these Confessions were written, if not under hallucination, at any rate in circumstances entitling the self-condemned criminal to the benefit of very considerable doubt. If Rousseau had held his tongue, he might have stood lower as a man of letters; he would pretty certainly have stood higher as a man. He was, moreover, really sinned against, if still more sinning. The conduct of Grimm to him was certainly very bad; and, though Walpole was not his personal friend, a worse action than his famous letter, considering the well-known idiosyncrasy of the subject, would be difficult to find. It was his own fault that he saddled himself with the Le Vasseurs, but their conduct was probably if not certainly ungrateful in the extreme. Only excuses can be made for him; but the excuses for a man born, as Hume after the quarrel said of him, "without a skin" are numerous and strong.

It was to be expected that his peculiar reputation would increase rather than diminish after his death; and it did so. During his life his personal peculiarities and the fact that his opinions were nearly as obnoxious to the one party as to the other worked against him, but it was not so after his death. The men of the Revolution regarded him with something like idolatry, and his literary merits conciliated many who were very far from idolizing him as a revolutionist. His style was taken up by Bernardin de Saint Pierre and by Chateaubriand. It was employed for purposes quite different from those to which he had himself applied it, and the reaction triumphed by the very arms which had been most powerful in the hands of the Revolution. Byron's fervid panegyric enlisted on his side all who admired Byron-that is to say, the majority of the younger men and women of Europe between 1820 and 1850-and thus different sides of his tradition were continued for a full century after the publication of his chief books. His religious unorthodoxy was condoned because he never scoffed; his political heresies, after their first effect was over, seemed harmless from the very want of logic and practical spirit in them, while part at least of his literary secret was the common property of almost everyone who attempted literature. At the present day persons as different as M. Renan and Mr Ruskin are children of Rousseau.

It is therefore important to characterize this influence which was and is so powerful, and there are three points of view-those of religion, politics, and literature-which it is necessary to take in doing this. In religion Rousseau was undoubtedly what he has been called above-a sentimental deist; but no one who reads him with the smallest attention can fail to see that sentimentalism was the essence, deism the accident of his creed. In his time orthodoxy at once generous and intelligent hardly existed in France. There were ignorant persons who were sincerely orthodox; there were intelligent persons who pretended to be so. But between the time of Massillon and D'Aguesseau and the time of Lamennais and Joseph de Maistre the class of men of whom in England Berkeley, Butler, and Johnson were representatives simply did not exist in France. Little inclined by nature to any but the emotional side of religion, and utterly undisciplined in any other by education, course of life, or the general tendency of public opinion, Rousseau naturally took refuge in the nebulous kind of natural religion which was at once fashionable and convenient. If his practice fell very far short even of his own very arbitrary standard of morality as much may be said of persons far more dogmatically orthodox..

In politics, on the other hand, there is no doubt that Rousseau was a sincere and, as far as in him lay, a convinced republican. He logician, and he was impulsive and emotional in the extremehad no great tincture of learning, he was by no means a profound. characteristics which in political matters undoubtedly predispose the subject to the preference of equality above all political requisites. He saw that under the French monarchy the actual result was the greatest misery of the greatest number, and he did not look much further. The Contrat Social is for the political student one of the most curious and interesting books existing. Historically it is null; logically it is full of gaping flaws; practically its manipulations of the volonté de tous and the volonté générale are clearly insufficient to obviate anarchy. But its mixture of real eloquence and apparent cogency is exactly such as always carries a multitude with it, if only for a time. Moreover, in some minor branches of politics and economics Rousseau was a real reformer. Visionary as his educational schemes (chiefly promulgated in Emile) are in parts, they are admirable in others, and his protest against mothers refusing to nurse their children hit a blot in French life which is not removed yet, and has always been a source of weakness to the nation.

But it is as a literary man pure and simple that is to say, as an exponent rather than as an originator of ideas-that Rousseau is most noteworthy, and that he has exercised most influence. The first thing noticeable about him is that he defies all customary and mechanical classification. He is not a dramatist-his work as such is insignificant-nor a novelist, for, though his two chief works except the Confessions are called novels, Emile is one only in name, and La Nouvelle Heloise is as a story diffuse, prosy, and awkward to a degree. He was perfectly without command of poetic form, and he could only be called a philosopher in an age when the term was used with such meaningless laxity as was customary in the 18th century. If he must be classed, he was before all things a describer -a describer of the passions of the human heart and of the beauties of nature. In the first part of his vocation the novelists of his own youth, such as Marivaux, Richardson, and Prévost, may be said to have shown him the way, though he improved greatly upon them; in the second he was almost a creator. In combining the two and expressing the effect of nature on the feelings and of the feelings on the aspect of nature he was absolutely without a forerunner or a model. And, as literature since his time has been chiefly differentiated from literature before it by the colour and tone resulting from this combination, Rousseau may be said to hold, as an influence, a place almost unrivalled in literary history. The defects of all sentimental writing-occasional triviality and exaggeration of trivial things, diffuseness, overstrained emotion, false sentiment, disregard of the intellectual and the practical-are of course noticeable in him, but they are excused and palliated by his wonderful feeling, and by what may be called the passionate sincerity even of his insincere passages. Some cavils have been made against his French, but none of much weight or importance. And in such passages as the famous "Voilà de la pervenche" of the Confessions, as the description of the isle of St Pierre in the Rêveries, as some of the letters in the Nouvelle Héloïse and others, he has achieved the greatest success possible-that of absolute perfection in doing what he intended to do. The reader, as it has been said, may think he might have done something else with advantage, but he can hardly think that he could have done this thing better.

The dates of most of Rousseau's works published during his lifetime have been given above. The Confessions and Reveries, which, read in private, had given much umbrage to persons concerned, and which the author did not intend to be published until the end of the century, appeared at Geneva in 1782. In the sume year and the following appeared a complete edition in forty-seven small volumes. There have been many since, the most important of them being that of MussetPathay (Paris, 1823). Some unpublished works, chiefly letters, were added by Bosscha (Paris, 1858) and Streckeisen Moulton (Paris, 1861). The most convenient edition is perhaps that of Didot in 4 vols. large 8vo, but a handsome and well-edited collection is still something of a desideratum. Works on Rousseau are innumerable. The chief are-in French that of Saint, Marc Girardin (1874), in English the excellent book of Mr John Morley. (G. SA.)

ROUSSEAU, THÉODORE (1812-1867), a distinguished landscape painter, was born at Paris, and studied in the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, after which he spent some time in travelling and making studies of landscape and sky effects. He first exhibited at the Salon in 1834, obtained gold medals in 1849, and 1854, and in 1852 received the Legion of Honour. His paintings became very popular in France, and Rousseau grew to be the acknowledged founder of the modern realistic school of landscape. He was largely influenced in style by Constable and Turner, the former of whom was perhaps more thoroughly appreciated in France than in England. The influence of Turner is clearly seen in some of Rousseau's pictures, with striking effects of cloud or storm,-as, for example, in his Effet de Soleil and Après la Pluie (1852), in the Matinée

good export trade, especially in olive-oil and a cement manufactured in the little island of Sant' Andrea. The. population was 9564 in 1869 and 9522 in 1880.

According to tradition Rovigno was originally built on an island, Cissa by name, which disappeared during the earthquakes about 737. In the 6th century, as the local legend has it, the body of St Euphemia of Chalcedon was miraculously conveyed to the island; and at a later date it was transported to the summit of the promontory, Monte di Sant' Eufemia, whither it was restored by the Venetians in 1410 after being in the possession of the Genoese from 1380. The diocese of Rovigno was merged in 1008 in the bishopric of Parenzo; but its church continued to have the title of cathedral. Rovigno passed definitively into the hands of the Venetians in 1830, and it remained true to the republic till the treaty of Campo Formio (1797).

ROVIGO, a city of Italy, the chief town of a province, and the seat of the bishop of Adria, lies between the Po and the Adige, and is traversed by the Adigetto, a navigable branch of the Adige. By rail it is 27 miles southsouth-west of Padua. The architecture bears the stamp both of Venetian and Ferrarese influence. The cathedral church of Santo Stefano (1696) is of less interest than La Madonna del Soccorso, an octagon (with a fine campanile), begun in 1594. The town-hall contains a library of 80,000 volumes belonging to the Accademia de' Concordi, founded in 1580, and a picture gallery enriched with the spoils of the monasteries. Wool, silk, linen, and leather the local manufactures. The population of the city proper was 7452 in 1871 and 7272 in 1881; the commune in 1881 had 11,460 inhabitants.

are among

Rovigo (Neo-Latin Rhodigium) appears to be mentioned as Rudigo in 838. It was selected as his residence by the bishop of Adria on the destruction of his city by the Huns. From the 11th to the 14th century the Este family was usually in authority; but the Venetians who obtained the town and castle in pledge between 1390 and 1400 took the place by siege in 1482, and, though the Este more than once recovered it, the Venetians, returning in 1514, retained possession till the French Revolution. In 1808 the city was made a duchy in favour of General Savary. The Austrians in 1815 created it a royal city.

ROVIGO, DUKE OF. See SAVARY.

ROWE, NICHOLAS (1674-1718), the descendant of a family long resident at Lamerton in Devon, was born at Little Barford in Bedfordshire, June 30, 1674. The house in which he was born is close to the Great North Road, and a small stone to his memory has been erected in the centre of the garden. His father, John Rowe, took to the law as his profession, and at his death in 1692 (by which time he had attained to the dignity of being a serjeant at law) had amassed sufficient property to leave to his son an income of £300 a year. Nicholas Rowe passed some time in a private school at Highgate, and then proceeded to Westminster School, at that time under the charge of the celebrated master Dr Busby. In 1688 he became a king's scholar in this foundation, but three years later he was called away from school and entered as a student at the Middle Temple. The study of the law had little attraction for a young man of good person and lively manners, and at his father's death in the following year he devoted himself to society and to literature. His first play, The Ambitious Stepmother, was produced when he was twenty-five years old. It was followed by Tamerlane, a patriotic composition in which the virtues of William III. were lauded under the disguise of Tamerlane and the vices of the French king, Louis XIV., were denounced in the person of Bajazet. The popularity of this production soon declined, but for many years it was acted once every year, on the anniversary of the landing at Torbay of the Dutch prince.. His next play, The Fair Penitent, long retained the favourable reception which marked its first appearance, and was pronounced by the great critic of the 18th century one of the most pleasing tragedies which had ever been written. Through its suc

cess the name of the principal male character Lothario became.identified in popular language as the embodiment of the manners and habits of a fashionable rake. After the production of two more tragedies, Ulysses and The Royal Convert, of slight account at the time and long since forgotten, Rowe tried, his hand on a comedy, The Biter. Much to the author's surprise his attempt in this new direction proved a failure, but Rowe recognized the justice of the verdict of the audience sufficiently to abstain from risking a second disappointment. His two last dramatic works were entitled Jane Shore and Lady Jane Grey, and the former of them, from the popularity of its subject and the elegance of its language, kept its position on the stage longer than any other of his works. Rowe excelled most of his contemporaries in the knowledge of languages. He was acquainted more or less thoroughly with Greek, Latin, French, Italian, and Spanish. The latter tongue he is said to have acquired on the recommendation of Harley and with the expectation that he would afterwards be rewarded by some high office. When, however, he reported his new acquisition to the new minister he was met with the dry remark from Harley-"How I envy you the pleasure of reading Don Quixote in the original!" Notwithstanding this disappointment, Rowe enjoyed many lucrative posts during his short life. When the duke of Queensberry was principal secretary of state for Scotland (1708-10), Rowe acted as his under-secretary. On the accession of George I. he was made a surveyor of customs, and on the death of Tate he became poet laureate. He was also appointed clerk of the council to the prince of Wales, and the list of preferments was closed by his nomination by LordChancellor Parker (5th May 1718) as secretary of presentations in Chancery. He died 6th December 1718, and was buried in the south cross of Westminster Abbey. By his first wife, a daughter of Mr Parsons, one of the auditors of the revenue, he left a son John; and by his second wife, Anne, the daughter of Joseph Devenish of a Dorsetshire family, he had an only daughter, Charlotte, born in 1718, who married Henry Fane, a younger brother of Thomas, eighth earl of Westmoreland. The burials of mother and daughter are recorded in Colonel Chester's Registers of Westminster Abbey.

Rowe's tragedies were marked by passionate feeling set off by a graceful diction, and were well adapted for stage effect. If The Fair Penitent and Jane Shore have been expelled from the stage, their historic reputation and their style will repay perusal.

Among Rowe's other literary efforts may be mentioned an edition of the works of Shakespeare (1709), for which he received from Lintot the bookseller the sum of £36, 10s., a rate of pay not out of proportion to the labour which was bestowed upon the task. At Pharsalia, a work then much praised and not yet superseded by the time of his death he had also finished a translation of Lucan's any competitor. Rowe's minor poems were beneath the level of his age. An edition of his works was published in 1720 under the care of Mr (afterwards Bishop) Newton. His translation of Lucan was edited by Dr Welwood.

ROWING is the act of driving forward or propelling a boat along the surface of the water by means of oars. It is remarkable how scanty, until quite recent times, are the records of this art, which at certain epochs has played no insignificant part in the world's history. It was the oar that brought Phoenician letters and civilization to Greece; it was the oar that propelled the Hellenic fleet to Troy; it was the oar that saved Europe from Persian despotism; it was the skilful use of the oar by free citizens which was the glory of Athens in her prime. It is to be regretted that so little is known of the details connected with it, or of the disposal of the rowers on board the splendid fleet which started in its pride for Sicily, when 17,000 oars at a given signal smote the brine, and 100 long ships raced as far as Ægina. The vessels of the ancient Greeks and

1

Romans the biremes, quadriremes, quinquiremes, and hexiremes-owed their pace to the exertions of men who plied the oar rather than to the sails with which they were fitted, and which were only used when the wind was favourable. Professor Gardner has shown that boat racing was not uncommon among the Greeks; and that it was practised among the Romans Virgil testifies in the wellknown passage in the fifth book of the Eneid. And the Venetian galleys which were subsequently used on the shores of the Mediterranean in medieval times were only a modified form of the older kind of craft. These were for the most part manned by slaves and criminals, and were in constant employment in most European countries. Rowing was understood by the ancient Britons, as they trusted themselves to the mercy of the waves in coracles composed of wicker-work covered with leather, similar no doubt in many respects to those now used in Wales; but these frail vessels were propelled by paddles and not by oars. The Saxons seem to bave been expert in the management of the oar, as well as the Danes and Norwegians,, as it is recorded that the highest nobles in the land devoted themselves to it. Alfred the Great introduced long galleys from the Mediterranean, which were propelled by forty or sixty oars on each side, and for some time these vessels were used for war purposes. It is stated by William of Malmesbury that Edgar the Peaceable was rowed in state on the river Dee from his palace, in the city of West Chester, to the church of St John and back again, by eight tributary kings, himself acting as Coxswain.

Boat quintain, or tilting at one another on the water, was first brought into England by the Normans as an amusement for the spring and summer season, and probably much of the success of the champions depended upon the skill of those who managed the boats. Before the beginning of the 12th century the rivers were commonly used for conveying passengers and merchandise on board barges and boats, and until the introduction of coaches they were almost the only means of transit for royalty, and for the nobility and gentry who had mansions and watergates on the banks of the Thames. It is, however, impossible to trace the first employment of bargemen, wherrymen, or watermen, but they seem to have been well established by that time, and were engaged in ferrying and other waterside duties. During the long frosts of the early. part of the 13th century, frequent mention is made in the chronicles of the distress among the watermen, from which we may assume that their numbers were large. They were employed in conveying the nobles and their retinues to Runnymede, where they met King John and where Magna Charta was signed. Towards the close of this century the watermen of Greenwich were frequently fined for overcharging at the established ferries, and about the same time, some of the city companies established barges for water processions. We learn from Fabian and Middleton that in 1454 "Sir John Norman, then lord mayor of London, built a noble barge at his own expense, and was rowed by watermen with silver oars, attended by such of the city companies as possessed barges, in a splendid manner," and further "that he made the barge he sat in burn on the water"; but there is no explanation of this statement. Sir John Norman was highly commended for this action by the members of the craft, as no doubt it helped to popularize the fashion then coming into vogue of being rowed on the Thames by the watermen who plied for hire in their wherries. The lord mayor's procession by water to Westminster, which figures on the front page of the Illustrated London News, was made annually until the year 1856, when it was discontinued. The lord 1 Journal of Hellenic Studies, 1881.

mayor's state barge was a magnificent species of shallop rowed by watermen; and the city companies had for the most part barges of their own, all rowed double-banked with oars in the fore half, the after part consisting of a cabin something like that of a gondola. The watermen became by degrees so large and numerous a body that in the sixth year of the reign of Henry VIII. (1514) an Act was passed making regulations for them. This Act has from time to time been amended by various statutes, and the last we passed in 1858. Much time seems to have been spent in pleasuring on the water in the 15th and 16th centuries, and no doubt competitions among the watermen were not uncommon, though there is no record of them. The principal occupation of watermen, who were obliged to serve an apprenticeship, used to be ferrying and rowing fares on the Thames, but in process of time the introduction of bridges and steamers drove them from this employment, and the majority of them now work as bargemen, lightermen, and steamboat hands, having still to serve an apprenticeship. For many years matches for money stakes were frequent (1831 to 1880), but the old race of watermen, of which Phelps, the senior Kelley, Campbell, Coombes, Newell, the MacKinneys, Messenger, Pocock, and Henry Kelley were prominent members, has almost died out, and some of the best English scullers during the last fifteen years have been landsmen.

The

Apart from the reference already made to the ancients, we do not find any records of boat-racing before the establishment in England of the coat and badge, instituted by the celebrated comedian Thomas Doggett in 1715, in honour of the house of Hanover,. to commemorate the anniversary of "King George I.'s happy accession to the throne of Great Britain." The prize was a red coat with a large silver badge on the arm, bearing the white horse of Hanover, and the race had to be rowed on the 1st of August annually on the Thames, by six young watermen who were not to have exceeded the time of their apprenticeship by twelve months. Although the first contest took place in the year above mentioned, the names of the winners have only been preserved since 1791. The racc continues at the present day, but under slight modifications. The first regatta appears to have occurred about sixty years later, for we learn from the Annual Register of the year 1775 that an entertainment called by that name (Ital., regata), introduced from Venice into England, was exhibited on the Thames off Ranelagh Gardens, and a lengthy account of it is given at the end of the work. lord mayor's and several of the city companies' pleasure barges were conspicuous, and, although we learn very little indeed of the competing wager boats, it seems clear they were rowed by watermen. We find from Strutt's Sports and Pastimes (first published in 1801) that the proprietor of Vauxhall Gardens had for some years given a new wherry to be rowed for by watermen, two in a boat, which is perhaps the first pair-oared race on record. Similar prizes were also given by Astley, the celebrated horseman and circus proprietor of the Westminster Bridge Road, about the same period; but thus far rowing was apparently viewed as a laborious exercise, and the rowers were paid. At the commencement of the present century, however, rowing as sociations were formed, and the "Star," "Arrow," "Shark," and "Siren " Clubs had races amongst themselves, generally over long courses and in heavy six-oared boats. The Star and Arrow Clubs ceased to exist in the early years of this century, and were merged in the newly formed Leander Club. The date of its establishment cannot be fixed exactly, but it was probably about 1818 or 1819. It ranked high, because the majority of its members had frequently distinguished themselves in matches with the oar and sculls. They were the first to patronize and lend