Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 49.djvu/183

 He died on 26 July 1795, and his body was borne to Blackfriars through a dense crowd, the city marshals preceding it on horseback, and nearly fifty private coaches following.

In 1755 he married Miss Price, by whom he had two sons and a daughter. A son, captain in the army, died in 1783 at Trincomalee.

Romaine was by nature reserved. He possessed little of those varied sympathies which made John Newton excellent as a spiritual counsellor. He was capable, too, of displays of hot temper. When he saw people talking in church, he would not only tap them on the shoulder, but sometimes knock their heads together.

As a preacher he exercised great power. His theology and his conception of the spiritual life are most fully exhibited in three treatises, ‘The Life of Faith’ (1763), ‘The Walk of Faith’ (1771), and ‘The Triumph of Faith’ (1795), which contain many passages full of tender and passionate devotion. The idea of a spiritual progress, which the titles convey, is not realised. The same field of religious ideas is surveyed in each treatise. The form which the doctrine of election took in his creed was too extreme for some even of his religious friends. Newton confessed to Wilberforce that Romaine had made many antinomians ( and, Hist. of the English Church in the Eighteenth Century, p. 374). He was strongly opposed to dissenters, holding the Calvinist side of the articles as the essence of the church of England. In the bitter Calvinist controversy he was free from bitterness. When Whitefield's opposition was fiercest, John Wesley wrote to Lady Huntingdon that Romaine had shown ‘a truly sympathising spirit.’ He adhered to the metrical psalms against the hymns of Watts and Wesley; his revival of the old nicknames of ‘Watts's whims’ and ‘Watts's jingle,’ in his strenuous defence of psalmody (1775), gave offence to Lady Huntingdon.

A portrait of Romaine, painted in 1758 by F. Cotes, was engraved by Houston, who also engraved another by J. Russell; an engraving of Romaine in the ‘Gospel Magazine’ (i. 121) in wig and gown shows a keen and animated face.



ROMAINE, WILLIAM GOVETT (1815–1893), comptroller-general in Egypt, second son of Robert Govett Romaine, vicar of Staines, Middlesex, was born in 1815, and graduated at Trinity College, Cambridge (B.A. 1837, M.A. 1859). He was entered at the Inner Temple, 9 Nov. 1834, and was called to the bar 25 Jan. 1839. After practising in the courts, he was appointed in 1854, on the outbreak of the Crimean war, deputy judge-advocate of the army in the east, and there distinguished himself in many capacities. At the close of the battle of the Alma, he voluntarily undertook the humane work of attending to the Russian wounded who had been left neglected on the field of battle. Adventurous, fond of travel, a keen observer, high-spirited, and zealous in all he undertook, Romaine often proved himself exceedingly useful to Lord Raglan. The latter called him ‘the eye of the army,’ in reference to the long sight with which he was gifted, and it was owing to his wise counsel that the Crimean army fund was set on foot. In appreciation of his services he was made a companion of the Bath in 1857. At the general election of March 1857 he unsuccessfully contested the representation in parliament of Chatham. Next month he was made second secretary to the admiralty. In June 1869 he became judge-advocate-general in India, where he remained until 1873. In 1876 the foreign office recommended Romaine to Ismail Pacha as member of the Egyptian Conseil du Trésor. Of that body he afterwards became president, and eventually under the Joint Control he acted as English comptroller-general of finances until he retired from public life in 1879. Romaine died at Old Windsor, 5 May 1893, at the age of seventy-six. He married, in 1861, Frances, daughter of Henry Tennant of Cadoxton Lodge, Glamorganshire.



ROMANES, GEORGE JOHN (1848–1894), man of science, third son of the Rev. George Romanes, was born at Kingston, Canada West, on 20 May 1848. His father, who held the professorship of Greek in the university of Kingston, belonged to an old lowland Scottish family settled since 1586 in Berwickshire. His mother, Isabella Gair, whose vivacity was in marked contrast with the reticence of her husband, was daughter of Robert Smith (d. 1824), minister of Cromarty. The father inherited a considerable fortune in 1848, and removed to England, settling at 8 Cornwall Terrace, Regent's Park, and visiting the continent from time to time. George's early education was de-