to see how far he could be trained as an artist. We may suppose this to have been towards 1533, when Titian was already fifty-six years of age. Ridolfi is our authority for saying that Tintoret had only been ten days in the studio when Titian sent him home once and for all. The reason, according to the same writer, is that the great master observed some very spirited drawings, which he learned to be the production of Tintoret; and it is inferred that he became at once jealous of so promising a scholar. This, however, is mere conjecture; and perhaps it may be fairer to suppose that the drawings exhibited so much independence of manner that Titian judged that young Robusti, although he might become a painter, would never be properly a pupil. From this time forward the two always remained upon distant terms,--Robusti being indeed a professed and ardent admirer of Titian, but never a friend, and Titian and his adherents turning the cold shoulder to Robusti. Active disparagement also was not wanting, but it passed disdainfully unnoticed by Tintoret. The latter sought for no further teaching, but studied on his own account with laborious zeal; he lived poorly, collecting casts, bas-reliefs, &c., and practising by their aid. His noble conception of art and his high personal ambition were evidenced in the inscription which he placed over his studio,-"Il disegno di Michelangelo ed il colorito di Tiziano" (Michelangelo's design and Titian's colour). He studied more especially from models of Buonarroti's Dawn, Noon, Twilight, and Night, and became expert in modelling in wax and clay, a method (practised likewise by Titian) which afterwards stood him in good stead in working out the arrangement of his pictures. The models were sometimes taken from dead subjects dissected or studied in anatomy schools; some were draped, others nude, and Robusti was wont to suspend them in a wooden or cardboard box, with an aperture for a candle. Now and afterwards he very frequently worked by night as well as by day. The young painter Schiavone, four years Robusti's junior, was much in his company. Tintoret helped Schiavone gratis in wall-paintings; and in many subsequent instances he worked also for nothing, and thus succeeded in obtaining commissions. The two earliest mural paintings of Robusti-done, like others, for next to no pay are said to have been Belshazzar's Feast and a Cavalry Fight, both long since perished. Such, indeed, may be said to have been the fate of all his frescos, early or later. The first work of his which attracted some considerable notice was a portrait-group of himself and his brother-the latter playing a guitar-with a nocturnal effect; this also is lost. It was followed by some historical subject, which Titian was candid enough to praise. One of Tintoret's early pictures still extant is in the church of the Carmine in Venice, the Presentation of Jesus in the Temple; also in S. Benedetto are the Annunciation and Christ with the Woman of Samaria. For the Scuola della Trinità (the scuole or schools of Venice were more in the nature of hospitals or charitable foundations than of educational institutions) he painted four subjects from Genesis. Two of these, now in the Venetian Academy, are Adam and Eve and the Death of Abel, both noble works of high mastery, which leave us in no doubt that Robusti was by this time a consummate painter,- -one of the few who have attained to the highest eminence by dire study of their own, unseconded by any training from some senior proficient.

Towards 1546 Robusti painted for the church of S. Maria dell' Orto three of his leading works-the Worship of the Golden Calf, the Presentation of the Virgin in the Temple, and the Last Judgment-now shamefully repainted; and he settled down in a house hard by the church. It is a Gothic edifice, looking over the lagoon of Murano to the Alps, built in the Fondamenta de' Mori,

still standing, but let out cheap to artisans. In 1548 he was commissioned for four pictures in the Scuola di S. Marco-the Finding of the Body of St Mark in Alexandria (now in the church of the Angeli, Murano), the Saint's Body brought to Venice, a Votary of the Saint delivered by invoking him from an Unclean Spirit (these two are in the library of the royal palace, Venice), and the highly and justly celebrated Miracle of the Slave. This last, which forms at present one of the chief glories of the Venetian Academy, represents the legend of a Christian slave or captive who was to be tortured as a punishment for some acts of devotion to the evangelist, but was saved by the miraculous intervention of the latter, who shattered the bone-breaking and blinding implements which were about to be applied. These four works were greeted with signal and general applause, including that of Titian's intimate, the too potent Pietro Aretino, with whom Tintoret, one of the few men who scorned to curry favour with him, was mostly in disrepute. It is said, however, that Tintoret at one time painted a ceiling in Pietro's house; at another time, being invited to do his portrait, he attended, and at once proceeded to take his sitter's measure with a pistol (or else a stiletto), as a significant hint that he was not exactly the man to be trifled with. The painter having now executed the four works in the Scuola di S. Marco, his straits and obscure endurances were over. He married Faustina de' Vescovi, daughter of a Venetian nobleman, She appears to have been a careful housewife, and one who both would and could have her way with her not too tractable husband. Faustina bore him several children, probably two sons and five daughters.

The next conspicuous event in the professional life of Tintoret is his enormous labour and profuse self-development on the walls and ceilings of the Scuola di S. Rocco, a building which may now almost be regarded as a shrine reared by Robusti to his own genius. The building had been begun in 1525 by the Lombardi, and was very deficient in light, so as to be particularly ill-suited for any great scheme of pictorial adornment. The painting of its interior was commenced in 1560. In that year five principal painters, including Tintoret and Paul Veronese, were invited to send in trial-designs for the centre-piece in the smaller hall, named Sala dell' Albergo, the subject being S. Rocco received into Heaven. Tintoret produced not a sketch but a picture, and got it inserted into its oval. The competitors remonstrated, not unnaturally; but the artist, who knew how to play his own game, made a free gift of the picture to the saint, and, as a bye-law of the foundation prohibited the rejection of any gift, it was retained in situ,-Tintoret furnishing gratis the other decorations of the same ceiling. In 1565 he resumed work at the scuola, painting the magnificent Crucifixion, for which a sum of 250 ducats was paid. In 1576 he presented gratis another centre-piece, that for the ceiling of the great hall, representing the Plague of Serpents; and in the following year he completed this ceiling with pictures of the Paschal Feast and Moses striking the Rock,-accepting whatever pittance the confraternity chose to pay. Robusti next launched out into the painting of the entire scuola and of the adjacent church of S. Rocco. He offered in November 1577 to execute the works at the rate of 100 ducats per annum, three pictures being due in each year. This proposal was accepted and was punctually fulfilled, the painter's death alone preventing the execution of some of the ceiling-subjects. The whole sum paid for the scuola throughout was 2447 ducats. Disregarding some minor performances, the scuola and church contain fifty-two memorable paintings, which may be described as vast suggestive sketches, with the mastery, but not the deliberate precision, of finished pictures, and adapted for being

XX.

them of his own invention, and designed theatrical costumes and properties, was versed in mechanics and mechanical devices, and was a very agreeable companion. For the sake of his work he lived in a most retired fashion, and even when not painting was wont to remain in his working room surrounded by casts. Here he hardly admitted any, even intimate friends, and he kept his modes of work secret, save as regards his assistants. He abounded in pleasant witty sayings whether to great personages or to others, but no smile hovered on his lips. Out of doors his wife made him wear the robe of a Venetian citizen; if it rained she tried to indue him with an outer garment, but this he resisted. She would also when he left the house wrap up money for him in a handkerchief, and on his return expected an account of it; Tintoret's accustomed reply was he obtained the reversion of the first vacant broker's patent in a fondaco, with power to bequeath it,-an advantage granted from time to time to pre-eminent painters. For his phenomenal energy in painting he was termed "Il Furioso." An agreement is extant showing that ho undertook to finish in two months two historical pictures each containing twenty figures, seven being portraits. The number of his portraits is enormous; their merit is unequal, but the really fine ones cannot be surpassed. Sebastian del Piombo remarked that Robusti could paint in two days as much as himself in two years; Annibale Caracci that Tintoret was in many pictures equal to Titian, in others inferior to Tintoret. This was the general opinion of the Venetians, who said that he had three pencils-one of gold, the second of silver, and the third of iron. The only pictures (if we except his own portrait) on which he inscribed his name are the Miracle of Cana in the church of the Salute (painted originally for the brotherhood of the Crociferi), the Miracle of the Slave, and the Crucifixion in the Scuola di S. Rocco; the last was engraved in 1589 by Agostino Caracci. Generally he painted at once on to the canvas without any preliminary. Some of his dicta on art have been recorded as follows by Ridolfi :-"the art of painting remains increasingly difficult"; "painters in youth should adhere to the best masters, these being Michelangelo and Titian, and should be strict in representing the natural forms"; "the first glance at a picture is the crucial one"; "black and white, as developing form, are the best of colours"; "drawing is the foundation of a painter's work, but drawing from life in the nude should only be essayed by well-practised men, as the real is often wanting in beauty.

that he had spent it in alms to the poor or to prisoners. In 1574

Of pupils Robusti had very few; his two sons and Martin de Vos of Antwerp were among them. Domenico Robusti (1562-1637), whom we have already had occasion to mention, frequently assisted his father in the groundwork of great pictures. He himself painted a multitude of works, many of them on a very largo scale; they would at best bo mediocre, and, coming from the son of Tintoret, are exasperating; still, he must be regarded as a considerable sort of pictorial practitioner in his way.

We conclude by naming a few of the more striking of Tintoret's very numerous works not already specified in the course of the article. In Venice (S. Giorgio Maggiore), a series of his later works, the Gathering of the Manna, Last Supper, Descent from the Cross, Resurrection, Martyrdom of St Stephen, Coronation of the Virgin, Martyrdom of St Damian; (S. Francesco della Vigna) the Entombment; (the Frari) the Massacre of the Innocents; (S. Cassiano) a Crucifixion, the figures seen from behind along the hill slope; (St Mark's) a mosaic of the Baptism of Christ, the oil-painting of this composition is in Verona. In Milan (the Brera), St Helena and other saints. In Florence (Pitti Gallery), Venus, Vulcan, and Cupid. In Cologne (Wallraff-Richarts Museum), Ovid and Corinna. In Augsburg (the town-hall), some historical pictures, which biographers and tourists alike have unaccountably neglected,- one of the siege of a fortified town is astonishingly fine. In England-(Hampton Court), Esther and Ahasuerus, and the Nine Muses; (the National Gallery) Christ washing Peter's Feet, a grand piece of colour and execution, not greatly interesting in other respects, also a spirited smallish work, St George and the Dragon.

.

The writer who has done by far the most to establish the fame of Tintoret at the height which it ought to occupy is Professor Ruskin in his Stones of Venice and other books; the depth and scope of the master's power had never before been adequately brought out, although his extraordinarily and somewhat arbitrarily used executive gift was acknowledged. Ridolfi (Meraviglie dell Arte) gives interesting personal details; the article by Dr Janitschek in Kunst und Künstler (1876) is a solid account. For an English reader the most handy narrative is that of Mr W. R. Osler (Tintoretto, 1879), in the series entitled "The Great Artists." Here the biographical facts are clearly presented; the resthetic criticism is enthusiastic but not perspicuous. (W. M. R.) ROC, or more correctly RUKH, a fabulous bird of enormous size which carries off elephants to feed its young. The legend of the roc, familiar to every one from the Arabian Nights, was widely spread in the East; and in later times the home of the monster was sought in the direction of Madagascar, whence gigantic fronds of the Raphia palm very like a quill in form appear to have been brought under the name of roc's feathers (see Yule's

Marco Polo, bk. iii. ch. 33, and Academy, 1884, No. 620). Such a feather was brought to the Great Khan, and we read also of a gigantic stump of a roc's quill being brought to Spain by a merchant from the China seas (Abu Ḥámid of Spain, in Damírí, s.v.). The roc is hardly different from the Arabian 'anká, already mentioned under PHOENIX ; it is also identified with the Persian símurgh, the bird which figures in Firdausi's epic as the foster-father of the hero Zal, father of Rustam. When we go farther back into Persian antiquity we find an immortal bird, amru, or (in the Minói-khiradh) sínamrú, which shakes the ripe fruit from the mythical tree that bears the seed of all useful things. Sínamrú and símurgh seem to be the same word. In Indian legend the garuda on which Vishnu rides is the king of birds (Benfey, Pantschatantra, ii. 98). In the Pahlavi translation of the Indian story as represented by the Syrian Kalilag and Damnag (ed. Bickell, 1876), the símurgh takes the place of the garuda, while Ibn al-Mokaffa (Calila et Dimna, ed. De Sacy, p. 126) speaks instead of the 'anka. The later Syriac, curiously enough, has behmoth,-apparently the behemoth of Job transformed into a bird.

For a collection of legends about the roc, see Lane's Arabian Nights, chap. xx. notes 22, 62, and Yule, ut supra. Also see Bochart, Hieroz., bk. vi. ch. xiv.; Damírí, i. 414, ii. 177 sq.; Kazwíní, i. 419 sq.; Ibn Batuta, iv. 305 sq.; Spiegel, Eran. Alterthumsk.,

ii. 118.

ROCH, ST (Lat. Rochus; Ital. Rocco; Span. Roque; Fr. Roch or Roque), according to the Roman Breviary, was a native of Montpellier, France. The name of his father was John and that of his mother Franca or Libera. He was born with the mark of a red cross upon his person, and this was at once interpreted as signifying his future eminence. In his twelfth year he began to manifest strict asceticism and great devoutness, and on the death of his parents in his twentieth year he gave all his substance to the poor and joined the Franciscan Tertiaries. Coming to Italy during an epidemic of plague, he was very diligent in tending the sick in the public hospitals at Aquapendente, Cesena, and Rome, and effected many miraculous cures by prayer and simple contact. After similar ministries at Piacenza he himself fell ill, and would have perished as he passed through the forest had not the dog of a certain nobleman daily supplied him with bread. On his return to Montpellier he was arrested as a spy and thrown into prison, where he died, having previously obtained from God this favour, that all plague-stricken persons invoking him should be healed. The date of his death was 16th August 1327, in the thirty-second year of his age. During the sittings of the council of Constance in 1414, when the city was visited with the plague, the efficacy of St Roch's intercession was "most manifestly" experienced. remains were removed in 1385 to Venice, where they now lie. He is commemorated, chiefly in Italy and France, as the patron of the sick, and especially of the plague-stricken.

His

ROCHDALE, a municipal and parliamentary borough of south-east Lancashire, is situated on the river Roch and on the Lancashire and Yorkshire railway, 11 miles north-north-east of Manchester and 12 east of Bolton. By means of the Rochdale Canal, extending from the duke of Bridgewater's canal, Manchester, to the Calder and Hebble navigation at Sowerby Bridge, it has water communication with the most important towns in the north of England. Within recent years the town has largely increased. Though inhabited chiefly by the working classes, the streets generally are spacious and regular. The sanitary arrangements are very satisfactory, the main drainage having been executed on a very large scale. The gasworks and waterworks are in the hands of the corporation, which also erected public baths in 1868. There is a public cemetery belonging to the corporation, and also a public

park 12 acres in extent. The parish church of St Chad, occupying the high grounds overlooking the town, is built on the site of a church which was erected in the 12th century. The town-hall is a very extensive and elaborate structure in the Decorated Gothic style, and had originally a tower surmounted by a gilded spire 140 feet in height, which was destroyed by fire in 1883. The building, completed in 1871 at a cost of £150,000, includes a large hall for public meetings and various municipal rooms. For the free public library, with about 40,000 volumes, a new building was opened in 1884. Of the educational charities the principal are the Archbishop Parker free grammar-school, founded in 1565, and the free English school. Among the other public institutions are the infirmary (lately much enlarged), the literary and scientific society, and the art society. The staple manufactures are those of woollens and cottons. There are, besides, foundries, iron-works, and machine-factories. Coal and stone are obtained extensively in the neighbourhood of the town. Rochdale was the birthplace of the co-operative movement. The town was first incorporated in 1856 and divided into three wards, but when the area of the municipal borough was extended and made coextensive with the parliamentary borough it was divided into ten wards, governed by a mayor, ten aldermen, and thirty councilmen. Rochdale has returned one member to the House of Commons since the Reform Act of 1832. The population of the borough (area, 4172 acres) in 1871 was 63,485, and in 1881 it was 68,866.

In early times Rochdale was situated entirely in the township of Castleton, where at one time stood the castle which gave its name to the township. Near the town are the remains of a Roman road leading over the Blackstone Edge Hills, which separate Lancashire and Yorkshire. The name Rochdale appears in Domesday Book as Recedam, and it was subsequent to the Norman Conquest that the town began to spread into the valley of the Roch. From the time of William the Conqueror the manor and estates were held by the De Lacys, but after some centuries they became merged in the crown. By Elizabeth they were bestowed on Sir John Byron, and in 1823 they were sold by Lord Byron the poet to James Dearden, in whose family they now remain. The town obtained a charter for a market in the reign of Richard I.; this charter was confirmed by Henry III., who added the privilege of holding an annual fair.

ROCHEFORT, a town of France, the chef-lieu of an arrondissement of the department of Charente Inférieure and of the fourth maritime prefecture, lies on the right bank of the Charente, 9 miles from the Atlantic, and is built partly on the side of a rocky hill and partly on old marshland, which renders the position unhealthy. The town is laid out with great regularity in chess-board fashion. The fortifications are sufficient merely to prevent it being taken by surprise. By rail it is connected with La Rochelle (18 miles north-north-west), Niort, and Saintes. There are both a naval and a commercial harbour. The former has the advantage of deep anchorage well protected by batteries at the mouth of the river, and the roadstead is perfectly safe. The windings of the channel, however, between Rochefort and the sea, and the bar at the entrance render navigation dangerous. This harbour and arsenal, which are separated from the town by a line of fortifications with three gates, contain large covered building yards (where eighteen vessels of the first class may be the stocks at once), eleven slips, three repairing docks, and on the right bank of the Charente in the Gardette meadows a large timber basin capable of floating 1,766,000 cubic feet of timber. Besides the various establishments implied in the name, the arsenal is the seat of a ropewalk dating from, 1666, a school of navigation and pilotage, a signal-tower 98 feet high (once attached to a church), the offices of the maritime prefecture, the navy commissariat, a park of artillery, and various boards of direction connected with the navy. About 5000 or 6000

upon

men are usually employed in the arsenal. Other Government establishments at Rochefort are barracks for infantry, artillery, and marines, a provision factory, and the naval hospital (800 beds) and school of medicine. In the grounds of this last institution is an artesian well, sunk in 1862-66 to a depth of 2800 feet and yielding water at a temperature of 107° Fahr. The commercial harbour, higher up the river than the naval harbour, has two basins with an aggregate area of 5 acres and 3400 feet of quays, and a third basin is being constructed (1885) 25 acres in extent with 3800 feet of quays, capable of admitting large vessels on every day of the year. The town has good public and botanic gardens, and the Place Colbert contains an allegorical group representing the ocean and the Charente mingling their waters. Besides shipbuilding, which forms the staple industry of Rochefort, sailcloth and furniture are the local manufactures, and hemp for cordage is grown in the vicinity. Along with Tonnay-Charente, 4 miles higher up, Rochefort-has a trade in brandies, salt, grain, flour, cattle, horses, fish, colonial wares, timber, and coal. There is regular steamboat communication with the United Kingdom. In 1882 285 vessels (128,570 tons) entered and 270 (123,501) cleared. The population of the town was 26,022 in 1881 (27,854 in the commune).

The lordship of Rochefort, held by powerful nobles as early as the 11th century, was united to the French crown by Philip the Fair in 1303; but it was alternately seized in the course of the Hundred Years' War by the English and the French, and in the wars of religion by the Catholics and Protestants. Colbert having in 1665 chosen Rochefort as the seat of a repairing port between Brest and the Gironde, the town rapidly increased in importance: by 1674 it had 20,000 inhabitants; and, when the Dutch admiral Tromp appeared at the mouth of the river with seventy-two vessels for the purpose of destroying the new arsenal, he found the approaches so well defended that he gave up his enterprise. It was at Rochefort that the naval school now transferred to Brest was

originally founded. The town continued to flourish in the later part of the 17th century. In 1690 and in 1703 it escaped from the attempts made by the English to destroy it. Its fleet under the command of La Galissonnière, a native of the place, did distinguished service in the wars of American independence, the republic, and the empire. But the destruction of the French fleet by the English in 1809 in the roadstead of Île d'Aix, the preference accorded to the harbours of Brest and Toulon, and the unhealthiness of its climate have seriously interfered with the prosperity of the place. The convict establishment founded at Rochefort in 1777 was suppressed in 1852.

ROCHEFOUCAULD. See LA ROCHEFOUCAULD.

ROCHELLE, LA, a town and seaport of France, the cheflieu of the department of Charente-Inférieure, is situated on the Atlantic coast in 46° 9′ N. lat., 296 miles by rail south-west of Paris. Its fortifications, which were constructed by Vauban, have a circuit of 3 miles with seven gates. In population (20,028 in 1881; 22,464 in the commune) it ranks after Rochefort. The harbour, one of the safest and most accessible on the coast, comprises an outer harbour, a tidal basin, a wet dock, and a graving dock. The outer harbour is still protected by the dry stone mole, about a mile long, constructed by Richelieu. The wet dock (7 acres) is capable of receiving ships of 1000 tons. Behind these is the Maubec basin, the water of which along with that of the Niort Canal helps to scour the port and navigable channel. On the fortifications towards the sea are three towers, of which the oldest (1384) is that of St Nicholas. The apartment in the first story was formerly used as a chapel. The chain tower (1476) was at one time connected with that of St Nicholas by a great pointed arch. The lantern tower (1475-76), seven stories high, affords a fine view of the town, the roadstead, and the surrounding islands, and at present is used as a military prison. Of the ancient gateways only one has been preserved in its entirety, that of the " loge," a huge square tower of the 14th or 15th century,

the corner turrets of which have been surmounted with trophies since 1746. The cathedral of La Rochelle (St Louis or St Bartholomew) is a heavy Grecian building (1742-1862) with a dome above the transept, erected on the site of the old church of St Bartholomew, destroyed in the 16th century and now represented by a solitary tower dating from the 14th century. Externally the town-house (1486-1607) has the appearance of a fortress in the Gothic style and internally that of a Renaissance palace. The belfries are beautifully decorated with carved work, and the council-chamber, where the mayor Guiton presided during the siege, is now adorned by his statue. In the old episcopal palace (which was in turn the residence of Sully, the prince of Condé, Louis XIII., and Anne of Austria, and the scene of the marriage of Alphonso VI. of Portugal with a princess of Savoy) accommodation has been provided for a library of 25,000 volumes, a collection of records going back to the 13th century, and a museum founded in 1842 by the society of the Friends of the Arts. Other buildings of note are an arsenal, an artillery museum, a large hospital, a special Protestant hospital, a military hospital, and a lunatic asylum for the department. In the public gardens there is a museum of natural history. Medieval and Renaissance houses still give a peculiar character to certain districts of the town: several have French, Latin, or Greek inscriptions of a moral or religious turn and in general of Protestant origin. Of these old houses the most interesting is that of Henry II. or Diana of Poitiers. The parade-ground, which forms the principal public square, occupies the site of the castle, demolished in 1590. Some of the streets have side-arcades; the public wells are fed from a large reservoir in the Champ de Mars; among the promenades are the Cours des Dames with the statue of Admiral Duperré (1869), and, outside, the tree-planted ramparts and the Mail, a beautiful piece of greensward. In this direction are the sea-bathing establishments. La Rochelle, besides a celebrated manufactory of barrels, contains saw-mills, copper and iron foundries, and factories for patent fuel made out of coal dross. In 1882 465 vessels (225,449 tons) entered and 431 (215,820) cleared. Coals from England and iron-ore from Spain are among the staple imports. In the neighbourhood the principal industries are getting salt from the marshes and rearing oysters and mussels.

and

La Rochelle existed at the close of the 10th century under the name of Rupella. In 1199 it received a communal charter from Eleanor, duchess of Guienne, and it was in its harbour that John Lackland disembarked when he came to try to recover the domains seized by Philip Augustus. Captured by Louis VIII. in 1224, it was restored to the English in 1360 by the treaty of Brétigny, but it shook off the yoke of the foreigner when Duguesclin recovered Saintonge. During the 14th, 15th, and 16th centuries La Rochelle, then an almost independent commune, was one of the great maritime cities of France. From its harbour in 1402 Jean de Béthencourt set out for the conquest of the Canaries, and its seamen were the first to turn to account the discovery of the New World. The salttax provoked a rebellion at Rochelle which Francis I. had to come to repress in person; in 1568 the town secured exemption by the payment of a large sum. At the Reformation La Rochelle early became one of the chief centres of Calvinism, and during the religious wars it armed privateers which preyed on Catholic vessels in the Channel and the high seas. In 1571 a synod of the Protestant churches of France was held within its walls under the presidency of Beza for the purpose of drawing up a confession of faith. After the massacre of St Bartholomew, La Rochelle held out for six and a half months against the Catholic army, which was ultimately obliged to raise the siege after losing more than 20,000 men. The peace of 24th June 1573, signed by the people of La Rochelle in the name of all the Protestant party, granted the Calvinists full liberty of worship in several places of safety. Under Henry IV. the town remained quiet, but under Louis XIII. it put itself again at the head of the Huguenot party. Its vessels blockaded the mouth of the Gironde and stopped the commerce of Bordeaux, and also seized the islands of Ré and Oléron and several vessels of the royal fleet. It was then that Richelieu resolved to subdue the town once for all. In spite of the assistance rendered by the English

troops under Buckingham and in spite of the fierce energy of their mayor Guiton, the people of La Rochelle were obliged to capitulate after eight months' siege (October 1628). During this investment Richelieu raised the celebrated mole which cut off the town from the open sea. La Rochelle then became the principal port for the trade between the mother-country of France and the colony of Canada. But the revocation of the Edict of Nantes deprived it of 3000 of its most industrious inhabitants, and the loss of Canada by France completed the ruin of its commerce. Its privateers, however, still maintained a vigorous struggle with the English during the republic and the empire.

Among the men of mark born at La Rochelle may be mentioned Jean Guiton, Tallemant des Réaux, Réaumur the physicist, Admiral Duperré, Bonpland the botanist, and the painters Fromentin and Bouguereau.

ROCHELLE SALT. See TARTARIC ACID.

ROCHESTER, an episcopal city and municipal and parliamentary borough of Mid-Kent, is situated on the Medway, on the Medway Canal, and on the London, Chatham, and Dover and the South-Eastern railway lines, 33 miles east of London, contiguous to Chatham and Strood. Here the river is crossed by a railway bridge and by an iron swing bridge for carriage traffic, erected to take the place of a stone bridge destroyed in 1856. The present bridge occupies the site of that which spanned the Medway before the Conquest. On the eminence overlooking the right bank of the river and commanding a wide view of the surrounding country are the extensive remains of the Norman castle which is generally supposed to have been built by Gundulph, bishop of Rochester, towards the close of the 11th century, and which was besieged by King John, by Simon de Montfort in the reign of Henry III., and in the reign of Richard II. by a party of rebels during the insurrection of Wat Tyler. It was repaired by Edward IV., but soon afterwards fell into decay, although the massive keep is still in good preservation. The cathedral was originally founded by Augustine in 604, but was partially destroyed by the Danes, and was rebuilt by Bishop Gundulph in the beginning of the 12th century. Though a comparatively small building, being only 310 feet in length and 68 in breadth at the nave, it is of considerable architectural interest, the most remarkable feature being the Norman west front with a richly sculptured door. There is a large number of monuments of great antiquity. In the garden of the deanery there are portions of the wall of St Andrew's priory, founded about the same time as the cathedral. Among the principal public buildings of a secular character are the town-hall (1687), the corn exchange (1871), the county court offices (1862), the working men's institute (1880), and the Richard Watts's almshouses, in the Tudor Besides these almshouses there are a number of style. other charities. The principal schools are the cathedral grammar-school, founded in the reign of Henry VIII., and the Williamson mathematical school, formerly for the sons of freemen, but now open to all. The oyster fishing is of some importance, and there is a considerable shipping trade, a quay and landing-place having been erected by the corporation at great expense. In 1883 the number of vessels that entered the port was 5969 of 855,019 tons burden, and the number that cleared 5496 of 709,040 tons. There is a large steam-engine manufactory. Rochester returned two members to parliament down to 1885, when it was deprived of one. The population of the borough (area,1 2909 acres) in 1871 was 18,352, and in 1881 it was 21,307; this includes 5395 persons in the town of Strood, situated on the opposite side of the Medway.

Rochester was the Durobrica of the Romans, and was intersected by the Roman Watling Street from Canterbury. It was formerly surrounded with walls, of which there are still a few remains. It was the foundation of the cathedral by Ethelbert that first raised it to importance. By the Saxons it was named Hrofe-ccastre, which was gradually corrupted into the present name. In 676 it

The parliamentary borough also includes 11,768 acres of tidal water and foreshore along the river Medway.