the Reign of the Emperor Charles the Fifth occupied ten consecutive years of labour. It appeared in three volumes quarto in 1769. In 1777 he published his History of America and in 1791 his Disquisition concerning the Knowledge which the Ancients had of India, which concluded his historical labours and appeared only two years before his death, which occurred near Edinburgh on the 11th of June 1793. His fame had long been European, and he left no rival in the field of historical composition save Gibbon alone.
For an adequate appreciation of Robertson’s position in British literature, and more especially of his rank as an historian, we have to consider the country and the age in which he was born and his own personal qualities and limits. Considering the small size and poverty of the country, Scotland had made a more than creditable figure in literature in the great age of the Reformation and the Renaissance, and Scottish contributions to British literature in the last half of the 18th century were distinctly superior to those produced in the southern portion of the island.
Of the three great British historians of the 18th century two were Scotsmen. The exact place of Robertson with regard to his two friends Hume and Gibbon, and to such historians as the rest of Europe had to offer, presents a question of some nicety, because it is complicated by extraneous considerations, so to speak, which should not weigh in an abstract estimate, but cannot be excluded in a concrete and practical one. If we regard only Robertson's potential historic power, the question is not so much whether he was equal to either of his two friends as whether he was not superior to both. The man who wrote the review of the state of Europe prefixed to the History of Charles V., 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 shortcomings 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 connected 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 well 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. Robertson's views are now out of date. 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 have overtaken 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 accessible. Justice requires that we should estimate his performance 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 is singularly clear, harmonious and persuasive. The most serious reproach 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.
By his wife, Mary Nisbet, whom he married in 1751, Robertson left three sons: William (1753–1835), who in 1805 was raised to the Scottish bench as Lord Robertson; James, who became a general in the British army; and David, who in 1799 married Margaret, sister of Colonel Donald Macdonald and heiress of Kinloch-Moidart, whose surname he assumed.
There are lives of Robertson by Dugald Stewart (Edinburgh, 1801 and 1802), prefixed to most of the collective editions of his works; by George Gleig, bishop of Brechin (Edinburgh, 1812); and by Lord Brougham in Lives of Men of Letters, &c. (1845–1846).
ROBERTSON, WILLIAM BRUCE (1820–1886), Scottish
divine, was born at Greenhill, St Ninians, Stirlingshire, on
the 24th of May 1820, and was educated at Glasgow University
and at the Secession Theological Hall, Edinburgh, where he
made the acquaintance of Thomas de Quincey, and on his recommendation
went to Halle and studied under Tholuck. After
travelling in Italy and Switzerland he was licensed to preach
by the presbytery of Stirling and Falkirk in 1843, and was soon
after ordained at the Secession (after 1847, the United Presbyterian)
Church in Irvine, Ayrshire. In this charge he remained
for 3 5 years, exercising from his pulpit a truly magnetic influence,
not so discernible in his published sermons. From
1871 his health failed, in spite of several visits to Florence and
the Riviera. He resigned his charge in 1878 and died at Bridge
of Allan on the 27th of June 1886.
He wrote many hymns, among them a version of “Dies Irae”; several of them, together with letters, &c., are to be found in the Life by James Brown. A volume containing Robertson’s lectures on Martin Luther and other subjects was published in 1892.
ROBERVAL, GILLES PERSONNE (or Personier) DE (1602–1675), French mathematician, was born at Roberval, near Beauvais, on the 8th of August 1602. His name was originally Gilles Personne, that of Roberval, by which he is known, being taken from the place of his birth. Like René 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 two years later 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 on the 27th of October 1675.
Roberval was one of those mathematicians who, just before the invention of the infinitesimal 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 surfaces and the cubature of solids, which he accomplished, in some of the simpler cases, by an original method which he called the “Method of Indivisibles”; but he lost much of the credit of the discovery as he kept his method for his own use, while Bonaventura Cavalieri published a similar method which he himself had invented. Another of Roberval's discoveries was a very general method of drawing tangents, by considering a curve as described by a moving point whose motion is the resultant of several simpler motions. See Infinitesimal Calculus.) 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, Evangelista 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 Pierre de Fermat; and this led him to criticize and oppose the analytical methods which Descartes introduced into geometry 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 particles of matter;
