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Rh letters to the New York Evangelist, and subsequently lectured on the war and wrote for periodicals. Among his novels were Barriers Burned Away (1872), which first appeared as a serial in the Evangelist and made him widely known; What Can she Do? (1873), Opening of a Chestnut Burr (1874), From Jest to Earnest (1875), Near to Nature's Heart (1876), A Knight of the Nineteenth Century (1877), A Face Illumined (1878), A Day of Fate (1880), Without a Home (1881), Nature's Serial Story (1884), A Young Girl's Wooing (1884), An Original Belle (1885), He Fell in Love with his Wife (1886), The Earth Trembled (1887) and Miss Lou (left unfinished, 1888). He wrote also Play and Profit in My Garden (1873), Success with Small Fruits (1881) and The Home Acre (1887). His novels were very popular in their day, especially with middle-class readers in England and America, and were translated into several European languages. Their strong moral and religious purpose, and their being written by a clergyman, did much to break down a Puritan prejudice in America against works of fiction.

See E. P. Roe: Reminiscences of his Life (New York, 1899), by his sister, Mary A. Roe.

ROE (or ), SIR THOMAS (c. 1581–1644), English diplomatist, son of Robert Rowe, and of Elinor, daughter of Robert Jermy of Worstead in Norfolk, was born at Low Leyton near Wanstead in Essex, and at the age of twelve (1593) matriculated at Magdalen College, Oxford. Shortly afterwards he joined one of the inns of court, and was made esquire of the body to Queen Elizabeth. He was knighted by James I. in 1605, and became intimate with Henry, prince of Wales, and also with his sister Elizabeth, afterwards queen of Bohemia, with whom he maintained a correspondence and Whose cause he championed. In 1610 he was sent by Prince Henry on a mission to the West Indies, during which he visited Guiana and the river Amazon, but failed then, and in two subsequent expeditions, to discover the gold which was the object of his travels. In 1614 he was elected M.P. for Tamworth, and in 1621 for Cirencester. His permanent reputation was mainly secured by the success which attended his embassy in 1615–18 to the court at Agra of the Great Mogul, Jahangir, the principal object of the mission being to obtain protection for an English factory at Surat. Appointed ambassador to the Porte in 1621, which he even then describes as being “irrevocably sick, ” he distinguished himself by further successes. He obtained an extension of the privileges of the English merchants, concluded a treaty with Algiers in 1624, by which he secured the liberation of several hundred English captives, and gained the support, by an English subsidy, of the Transylvanian Prince Bethlen Gabor for the European Protestant alliance and the cause of the Palatinate. Through his friendship with the patriarch of the Greek Church, Cyril Lucaris, the famous Codex Alexandrinus was presented to James I., and Roe himself collected several valuable MSS. which he subsequently presented to. the Bodleian library. In 1629 he was again successful in another mission undertaken to arrange a peace between Sweden and Poland. Subsequently Roe negotiated treaties with Danzig and Denmark, returning home in 1630, when a gold medal was struck in his honour. In January 1637 he was appointed chancellor of the Order of the Garter, with a pension of £1200 a year. Subsequently he took part in the peace conferences at Hamburg, Regensburg and Vienna, and used his influence to obtain the restoration of the Palatinate, the emperor declaring that he had “ scarce ever met with an ambassador till now.” In June 1640 he was made a privy councillor, and in October was returned to parliament as member for the university of Oxford, where his unrivalled knowledge of foreign affairs, commerce and finance, together with his learning and eloquence, gained for him in another sphere considerable reputation. He died on the 6th of November 1644. He had married Eleanor, daughter of Sir Thomas Carr of Stamford, Northamptonshire. Roe was a distinguished and most successful diplomatist, an accomplished scholar and a patron of learning, while his-personal character was unblemished.

His Journal of the mission to the Mogul, several times printed, has been re-edited, with an introduction by W. Foster, for the Hakluyt Society (1899). This is a valuable contribution to the history of India in the early 17th century. Of his correspondence, Negotiations in his Embassy to the Ottoman Porte, 1621-28, vol. i. was published in 1740, but the work was not continued. Other correspondence, consisting of letters relating to his mission to Gustavus Adolphus, was edited by S. R. Gardiner for the Camden Society Miscellany (1875), vol. vii., and his correspondence with Lord Carew in 1615 and 1617 by Sir F. Maclean for the same society in 1860. Several of his MSS. are in the British Museum collections. Roe published a True and Faithful Relation. . . concerning the Death of Sultan Osman. ., 1622; a translation from Sarpi, Discourse upon the Resolution taken in the Valteline (1628); and in 1613 Dr T. Wright published Quatuor Colloquia, consisting of theological disputations between himself and Roe; a poem by Roe is printed in Notes and Queries, iv. Ser. v. 9. The Swedish Intelligencer (1632-33), including an account of the career of Gustavus Adolphus and of the Diet of Ratisbon (Rcgensburg), is attributed to Roe in the catalogue of the British Museum. Several of his speeches, chiefly on currency and financial questions, were also published. Two other works in MS. are mentioned by Wood: Compendious Relation of the Proceedings. . . of the Imperial Diet at Ratisbon and Journal of Several Proceedings of the Order of the Garter.

ROEBLING, JOHN AUGUSTUS (1806–1869), American civil engineer, was born at Mtihlhausen, Prussia, on the 6th of June 1806. Soon after his graduation from the polytechnic school at Berlin he removed to the United States, and in 1831 entered on the practice of his profession in western Pennsylvania; He established at Pittsburg a manufactory of wire-rope, and in May 1845 completed his first important structure, a suspended aqueduct across the Allegheny river. This was followed by the Monongahela suspension bridge at Pittsburg and several suspended aqueducts on the Delaware & Hudson Canal. Removing his wire manufactory to Trenton, New Jersey, he began, in 1851, the erection at Niagara Falls of a long span wire suspension bridge with double roadway, for railway and carriage use (see ), which was completed in 1855. Owing to the novelty of its design, the most eminent engineers regarded this bridge as foredoomed to failure; but, with its complete success, demonstrated by long use, the number of suspension bridges rapidly multiplied, the use of wire-ropes instead of chain-cables becoming all but universal. The completion, in 1867, of the still more remarkable suspension bridge over the Ohio river at Cincinnati, with a clear span of 1057 ft., added to Roebling's reputation, and his design for the great bridge spanning the East river between New York and Brooklyn was accepted. While personally engaged in laying out the towers for the bridge, Roebling received an accidental injury, which resulted in his death, at Brooklyn, from tetanus, on the 22nd of July 1869. The bridge was completed under the direction of his son, Washington Augustus Roebling (b. 1837), who introduced several modifications in the original plans.

ROEBOURNE, a settlement of De Witt county, Western Australia, 8 m. from the N.W. coast, on the Harding river, 920 m. direct N. of Perth. It is the centre of one of the richest and most varied mineral districts in the colony; gold, silver, tin, lead, copper, diamonds and other precious stones are found. There are extensive pearl fisheries off its port at Cossack Bay.

ROEBUCK, JOHN (1718–1794), English inventor, was born in 1718 at Shefheld, where his father had a prosperous manufacturing business. After attending the grammar school at Sheffield and Dr Philip Doddridge's academy at Northampton, he studied medicine at Edinburgh, where he was imbued with a taste for chemistry by the lectures of William Cullen and Joseph Black, and he finally graduated M.D. at Leiden in 1742. He started practice at Birmingham, but devoted much of his time to chemistry, especially in its practical applications. Among the most important of his early achievements in this field was the introduction, in 1746, of leaden condensing chambers for use in the manufacture of sulphuric acid. Together with Samuel Garbett he erected a factory at Prestonpans, near, Edinburgh, for the production of the acid in 1749, and for some years enjoyed a monopoly; but ultimately his methods became known, and, having omitted to take out patents for