Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 20.djvu/625

R O B R O B 601 History of Charles F., or even the first book -of the History of Scotland, showed that he had a wider and more synthetic conception of history than either the author of the Decline and Fall or the author of the History of England. These two portions of Robertson's work, with all their short- comings in the eye of modern criticism, have a distinctive value which time cannot take away. He was one of the first to see the importance of general ideas in history. He saw that the immediate narrative of events with which he was occupied needed a background of broad and con- nected generalizations, referring to the social state of which the detailed history formed a part. But he did more than this. In the appendix to the view of Europe called " Proofs and Illustrations " he enters into the difficult and obscure question of land tenure in Frankish times, and of the origin of the feudal system, with a sagacity and knowledge which distinctly advanced the comprehension of this period beyond the point at which it had been left by Du Bos, Montesquieu, and Mably. He was fully acquainted with the original documents, many of them, we may conjecture, not easy to procure in Scotland. It must have been a genuine aptitude for historical research of a scientific kind which led Robertson to undertake the labour of these austere disquisitions of which there were not many in his day who saw the importance. Gibbon, so superior to him for wide reading and scholarship, has pointedly avoided them. It need hardly be said that many, perhaps the majority, of Robertson's views on this thorny topic are out of date now. But he deserves the honour of a pioneer in one of the most obscure if also important lines of inquiry connected with European history. On the other hand, it must be admitted that he showed himself only too tame a follower of Voltaire in his general appreciation of the Middle Ages, which he regarded with the mingled ignorance and prejudice common in the 18th century. In this particular he was not at all in advance of his age. The neglect and gradual oblivion which are now over- taking the greater part of Robertson's historical work are owing to no fault of his. He had not and could not have the requisite materials : they were not published or access- ible. Justice requires that we should estimate his per- formance in view of the means at his command, and few critics would hesitate to subscribe to the verdict of Buckle, " that what he effected with his materials was wonderful." His style, whether of narrative or disquisition, is singularly clear, harmonious, and persuasive. The most serious re- proach made against it is that it is correct to a fault and lacks idiomatic vigour, and the charge is not without foundation. But there can be no doubt that, if Robertson's writings are less read than they formerly were, the fact is to be attributed to no defects of style but to the growth of knowledge and to the immense extension of historical research which has inevitably superseded his initiatory and meritorious labours. (j. c. MO.) ROBERVAL, GILLES PERSONNE DE (1602-1675), French mathematician, was born at the village of Roberval near Beauvais in 1602. His name was originally Gilles Per- sonne, that of Roberval, by which he is known, being taken from the place of his birth. Like Descartes, he was present at the siege of La Rochelle in 1627. In the same year he went to Paris, where he was appointed to the chair of philosophy in the Gervais College in 1631, and after- wards to the chair of mathematics in the Royal College of France. A condition of tenure attached to this chair was that the holder should propose mathematical questions for solution, and should resign in favour of any person who solved them better than himself ; but, notwithstanding this, Roberval was able to keep the chair till his death, which occurred at Paris in 1675. Roberval was one of those mathematicians who, just before the invention of the calculus, occupied their attention with problems which are only soluble, or can be most easily solved, by some method involving limits or infinitesimals, and in the solution of which accordingly the calculus is always now employed. Thus he devoted some attention to the quadrature of curves and the cuba- ture of surfaces, which he accomplished, in some of the simpler cases, by a method of his own, called by himself the " Method of Indivisibles " ; but he lost much of the credit of the discovery as he kept his method for his own use, while Cavalieri published a similar method of his own. Another of Roberval's discoveries was a very general metliod of drawing tangents, by considering a curve as described by a moving point whose motion is the resultant of several simpler motions. His own description of his method may be translated as follows : " General rule. By means of the specific properties of the curve, which will be given, examine the different motions of the tracing point at the place where you wish to draw the tangent ; the direction of the tangent is that of the resultant of these motions." He also discovered a method of deriving one curve from another, by means of which finite areas can be obtained equal to the areas between certain curves and their asymptotes. To these curves, which were also applied to effect some quadratures, Torricelli gave the name of Robervallian lines. Between Roberval and Descartes there existed a feeling of ill-will, owing to the jealousy aroused in the mind of the former by the criticism which Descartes offered to some of the methods employed by him and by Fermat ; and this led him to criticize and oppose the new geometry which Descartes introduced about this time. As results of Roberval's labours outside the department of pure mathematics may be noted a work on the system of the universe, in which he supports the Copernican system and attributes a mutual attraction to all par- ticles of matter ; and also the invention of a special kind of balance which goes by his name (see BALANCE, vol. iii. p. 266). ROBESPIERRE, MAXIMILIEN MARIE ISIDORE (1758- 1794), the most fanatical and most famous of the repub- lican leaders of the French Revolution, was born at Arras on 6th May 1758. His family was of Irish descent, having emigrated from Ireland at the time of the Reformation on account of religion, and his direct ancestors in the male line had been notaries at the little village of Carvin near Arras from the beginning of the 17th century. His grand- father, being more ambitious, established himself at Arras as an avocat; and his father followed the same profession, marrying Mademoiselle Josephine Carraut, daughter of a brewer in the same city, in 1757. Of this marriage four children were born, two sons and two daughters, of whom Maximilien was the eldest; but in 1767 Madame Derobes- pierre, as the name was then spelt, died, and the discon- solate widower at once left Arras and wandered about Europe until his death at Munich in 1769. The children were taken charge of by their maternal grandfather and aunts, and Maximilien was sent to the college of Arras, whence he was nominated in 1770 by the bishop of his native town to a bursarship at the College Louis-le-Grand at Paris. Here he had for fellow -pupils Camille Des- moulins and Stanislas Fr6ron. Completing his law studies with distinction, and having been admitted an avocat in 1781, Robespierre returned to his native city to seek for practice, and to struggle against poverty. His reputa- tion had already preceded him, and the bishop of Arras, M. de Conzie, appointed him criminal judge in the diocese of Arras in March 1782. This appointment, which he soon resigned, to avoid pronouncing a sentence of death, did not prevent his practising at the bar, and he speedily became known as a careful and painstaking advocate. His argument in the question of the legality of paraton- nerres or lightning-conductors, which was widely reported and translated into both English and German, raised his fame as an advocate to its height, and with this success his struggles against poverty were over. He now turned to the pleasures of literature and society and came to be esteemed as one of the best writers and most popular dandies of Arras. In December 1783 he was elected a member of the academy of Arras, whose meetings he attended regularly ; and, like all other young Frenchmen with literary proclivities, he began to compete for the XX. 76