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Rh part of the town has a Moorish aspect, with narrow, steep and crooked lanes, and still retains some Moorish towers and other medieval buildings. The Ronda bull-ring is one of the finest in Spain, and can accommodate 10,000 spectators. Ronda has a considerable trade in leather, saddlery, horses, soap, flour, chocolate, wine and hats.

Some remains of an aqueduct and theatre, about 7 m. N. of Ronda, are supposed to represent the Acinipo or Arunda of ancient geographers. Ronda was taken from the Moors in 1485. It gives its name to the Sierra or Serrania de Ronda, one of the main sections of the coast mountains which rise between the great plain of Andalusia and the Mediterranean.

RONDEAU (Ital. Rondo), a structural form in poetry and (in the form of “ rondo ”) in music. In poetry the rondeau is a short metrical structure which in its perfect form consists of thirteen eight- or ten-syllables verses divided into three strophes of unequal length, and knit together by two rhymes and a refrain. In Clement Marot's time the laws of the rondeau were laid down, and, according to Voiture, in the 17th century, the following was the type of the approved form of the rondeau:— "Ma foy, c'est fait de moy, car Isabeau    M'a conjuré de luy faire un Rondeau:     Cela me met en une peine extrême.     Quoy treize vers, huit en eau, cinq en ème.     Je luy ferois aussi-tot un bateau

En voilà cinq pourtant en un monceau: Faisons en huict, en invoquant Bordeaux, En puis mettons, par quelque stratagème, Ma foy, c'est fait !

Si je pouvois encore de mon cerveau Tirer cinq vers, l'ouvrage seroit beau; Mais dependant, je suis dedans l'onzième, Et si je croy que je fais le douzième En voila treize ajustez au niveau. Ma foy, c'est fait !”

All forms of the rondeau, however, are alike in this, that the distinguishing metrical emphasis is achieved by a peculiar use of the refrain. Though we have a set of rondeaux in the Rolliad (written by Dr. Lawrence the friend of Burke, according to Edmund Gosse, who has given us an admirable essay upon exotic forms of verse), it was not till recent years that the form had any real vogue in England. Considerable attention, however, has lately been given in England to the form. Some English rondeaux are as bright and graceful as Voiture's own. Swinburne, who in his Century of Roundels was perhaps the first to make the refrain rhyme with the second verse of the first strophe, has brought the form into high poetry. In German, rondeaux have been composed with perfect correctness by Weckherlin, and with certain divergences from the French type by Götz and Fischart; the German name for the form is rundum or ringel-gedicht.

Although the origin of the retrain in all poetry was no doubt the improvisatory's need of a rest, a time in which to focus his forces and recover breath for future flights, the refrain has a distinct metrical value of its own; it knits the structure together, and so intensifies the emotional energy, as we see in the Border ballads, in the Oriana of Lord Tennyson, and in the Sister Helen of Rossetti. The suggestion of extreme artificiality—of “ difficulty overcome ”—which is one great fault of the rondeau as a vehicle for deep emotion, does not therefore spring from the use of the refrain, but from the too frequent recurrence of the rhymes in the strophes—for which there is no metrical necessity as in the case of the Petrarchan sonnet. The rondeau is, however, an inimitable instrument of gaiety and grace in the hands of a skilful poet.

RONDEL, a form of verse closely allied to the rondeau (q.'v.) but distinguished from it by containing fourteen instead of thirteen lines, and by demanding a slightly different arrangement of rhymes. Moreover, the initial couplet is repeated in the middle and again at the close. The arrangement of rhymes is as follows: a, b b, a; a b, a b; a, b, b, a, a, b. This form, which was invented in the 14th century, was largely used in later medieval French poetry, but particularly by Charles d'Orléans (1391-1465), the very best of whose graceful creations are all rondels. One of the most famous of this prince's rondels may be given here as a type of their correct construction:-

“ Le temps a laissié son manteau

De vent, de froidure et de pluye,

Et s'est vestu de brouderie

De souleil luisant, cler et beau.

Il n'y a beste ne oyseau

Qu'en son jargon ne chante on crie:

Le temps a laissié son manteau

De vent, de froidure et de pluye.

Riviere, fontaine et ruisseau

Portent, en livrée 'olie,

Gouttes d'argent ci'or faverie;

Chascun s'abille de nouveau;

Le temps a laissié son manteau

De vent, de froidure et de p1uye."

The rondel, in French, may begin with either a masculine or a feminine rhyme, but its solitary other rhyme must be of the opposite kind. The rondel was introduced into English in the 15th century, but the early specimens of it are Very clumsy. It was revised in the 19th century, but it appears to suit the French better than any other language. Correct examples are found in the poems of Robert Bridges, Dobson, Gosse and Henley. The following, by Austin Dobson, gives an exact impression of what an English rondel should be in all technical respects:-

“ Love comes back to his vacant dwelling, - The old, old Love that we knew of yore ! We see him stand by the open door,

With his great eyes sad, and his bosom swelling. He makes as though in our arms repelling He fain would lie as he lay before;-

Love comes back to his vacant dwelling, - The old, old Love that we knew of yore ! Ah ! who shall help us from over-spelling That sweet, forgotten, forbidden lore P E'en as we doubt, in our hearts once more, With a rush of tears to our eyelids welling, Love comes back to his vacant dwelling, The old, old Love that we knew of yore !”

Théodore de Banville remarks that the art of the rondel consists in the gay and natural reintroduction of the refrain, which should always seem inevitable, while slightly changing the point of view of the reader. If this is not successfully achieved, “ on ne fera que de la marqueterie et du placage, c'est-a-dire, en fait de poésie, -rien!" In Germany, the rondel was introduced, in the 18th century, under the name of ringel-gedicht, by Tohann Nikolaus Gotz (1731-1781), and was occasionally used, in the course of the 19th century, by German poets.

RONDO, a musical form originally derived from the rondel in verse; as may be seen, long before the development of instrumental forms, in some of the chansons of Orlando di Lasso. The rondeau en couplets of Couperin and his contemporaries shows both in name and form the same connexion with verse. It consists of the alternation between a single neatly rounded phrase and several slightly contrasted episodes (the couplets) without any important change of key. Bach enriched it with his wealth of epigram, but did not expand its range. The later sense of the term covers an important series of the sonata forms (q.'v.), chiefly found in finales; but rondo-form sometimes occurs in slow movements (e.g.' Mozart, Hafner Serenade, String Quintet in E flat; Beethoven, Fourth Symphony; Quartet, Op. 74, &c.). The single-phrase ritornello and short couplets of the old form are in the sonata style replaced by a broadly designed melody and well-contrasted episodes in different keys. »

If the form of a Bach or Couperin rondo may be represented by A B A C A D A, &c., the various forms of the later rondo may be represented somewhat as follows: placing on a horizontal line those parts that are in the main key, and representing other keys by differences of level:-

(i) Sectional rondos; i.e. with little or no development or