Page:EB1911 - Volume 23.djvu/727

Rh his school set in fashion. He knew well too how to manage the gorgeous adjectives (" marbrine," “ cinabrine," “ ivoirine" and the like) which were another fancy of the Pléiade, and in his hands they rarely become stiff or cumbrous. In short, Ronsard shows eminently the two great attractions of French 16th-century poetry as compared with that of the two following ages—magnificence of language and imagery and graceful variety of metre.

.—The chief separately published works of Ronsard are noted above. He produced, however, during his life a vast number of separate publications, some of them mere pamphlets or broadsheets, which from time to time he collected, often striking out others at the same time, in the successive editions of his works. Of these he himself published seven—the first in 1560, the last in 1584. Between his death and the year 1630 ten more complete editions were published, the most famous of which is the folio of 1609. A copy of this presented by Sainte-Beuve to Victor Hugo, and later in the ssession of M. Maxime du Camp, has a place of its own in French literary history. The work of C. Binet in 1586, Discours de la vie de Pierre de Ronsard, is very important for early information, and the author seems to have revised some of Ronsard's work under the poet's own direction. From 1630 Ronsard was not again reprinted for more than two centuries. just before the close of the second, however, Sainte-Beuve printed a selection of his poems to accompany the above-mentioned Tableau (1828). There are also selections by M. Noel (in the Collection Didot) and Becq de Fouquières. In 1857 M. Prosper Blanchemain, who had previously published a volume of Œuvres inédites de Rorisard, undertook a complete edition for the Bibliothèque Elzévirienne. The eighth and last volume of this appeared ten years later. It is practically complete; a few pieces of a somewhat free character which are ascribed with some certainty to the poet are, however, excluded. A later and better edition still is that of Marty-Laveaux (1887–1893), and another that of B. Pifteau (1891). As for criticism, Sainte-Beuve followed up his early work by articles in the Causeries du lundi, and the chief later critics have dealt with him in their collected works. Of books may be mentioned those of E. Gandar (Metz, 1854), which considers him chiefly in his relation to the ancients, Ronsard, imitateur d’Homére et de Pindare; the marquis de Rochambeau, La Famille de Ronsard (1868); G. Scheffier, Ronsard et sa réforme littéraire (1874); G. Bizos, Ronsard (1891); the Abbé Froger, Les Premières poésies de Ronsard (1892); L. Mellerio, Lexique de Ronsard (1895); P. Perdrizet, Ransard et la reform (1902), with a still more recent series of articles in different publications by M. Paul Lemonnier. In English Mr A. Tilley's Literature of the French Renaissance (1904) may be consulted, and on Ronsard's critical standpoint Saintsbury’s History of Criticism, vol. ii.

 RONSDORF, a town of Germany, in the Prussian Rhine province, situated on the Morsbach, a small affluent of the Rhine, 18 m. E. of Dusseldorf and 5 m. S. of Elberfeld-Barmen by rail. Pop. (1905) 14,005. It is the seat of iron, steel and copper industries, besides carrying on extensive manufactures of ribbons, trimmings and silk goods generally. It has also breweries, distilleries and electrical works.

Founded in 1737 by the followers of Elias Eller, a religious enthusiast, Ronsdorf received civic rights in 1745. The Ronsdorf sect, the members of which called themselves Zionites, is now extinct.

RÖNTGEN, DAVID, sometimes called (1743–1807), German cabinet-maker, eldest son of Abraham Röntgen, was born at Herrenhag. In 1753 his father migrated to the Moravian settlement at Neuwied, near Coblenz, where he established a furniture factory. He learned his trade in his father's workshop, and succeeded to the paternal business in 1772, when he entered into some kind of partnership with the clock-maker Kintzing. At that time the name of the firm appears already to have been well known, at all events in France; but it is a curious circumstance that although he is always reckoned as one of the little band of foreign cabinetmakers and workers in marquetry who, like Oeben and Riesener, achieved distinction in France during the superb floraison of the Louis Seize style, he never ceased to live at Neuwied, where apparently the whole of his furniture was made, and merely had a shop, or show-room, in Paris. We have, as it happens, a record of his first appearance there. The engraver Wille enters in his journal of August 30, 1774, that “ M. Röntgen, célèbre ébéniste, établi à Nieuwied, près de Coblenz, m'est venu voir, en m'apportant une lettre de recommendation de M. Zick, peintre à Coblenz. . . Comme M. Röntgen connaissait personne à Paris, je lui fus utile en lui enseignant quelques sculpteurs et dessinateurs dont il avait besoin.” Röntgen was first and foremost an astute man of business, and it is not improbable that the moving cause of this opening up of relations with Paris was the accession to the throne of Marie Antoinette, whose Teutonic sympathies were only too well known. Before very long she appointed him her ébéniste-méchanicien. He appears, indeed, to have acquired considerable favour with the queen, for on several occasions she took advantage of his journeys through Europe to charge him with the delivery of presents and of dolls dressed in the Paris fashions of the moment—they were intended to serve as patterns for the dressmakers—to her mother and her sisters. He appears at once to have opened a shop in Paris, but despite, and perhaps because of, the favour in which he was held at court, all was not plain sailing. The powerful trade corporation of the maîtres-ébénistes disputed his right to sell in Paris furniture of foreign manufacture, and in 1780 he found that the most satisfactory way out of the difficulty was to get himself admitted a member of the corporation to which all his great rivals belonged. By this time he had attracted a good deal of attention by the introduction of a new style of marquetry, in which light and shade, instead of being represented as hitherto by burning, smoking or engraving the materials, were indicated by small pieces of wood so arranged as to create the impression of pietra dura. We have seen that Röntgen had been appointed ébéniste-méchanicien to Marie Antoinette, and the appointment is explained by his fondness for and proficiency in constructing furniture in which mechanical devices played a great part. The English cabinet-makers of the later eighteenth century often made what was called, with obvious allusion to its character, “ harlequin furniture,” especially little dressing-tables and washstands which converted into something else or held their essentials in concealment until a spring was touched. David was a past master in this kind of work, and unquestionably much of the otherwise inexplicable reputation he enjoyed among contemporaries who were head and shoulders above him is explained by his mechanical genius. The extent of his fame in this direction is sufficiently indicated by the fact that Goethe mentions him in Wilhelm Meister. He compares the box inhabited by the fairy during her travels with her mortal lover to one of Röntgen's desks, in which “ at a pull a multitude of springs and latches are set in motion.” For a desk of this kind Louis XVI. paid him 80,000 livres. Outwardly it was in the form of a commode, its marquetry panels symbolizing the liberal arts. A personification of sculpture was in the act of engraving the name of Marie Antoinette upon a column to which Minerva was hanging her portrait. Above a riot of architectural orders was a musical clock (the work of the partner Kintzing), surmounted by a cupola representing Parnassus. The interior of this monumental effort, 11 ft. high, was a marvel of mechanical precision; it disappeared during the First Empire. Röntgen did not confine his activities to Paris, or even to France. It has been said that he travelled about Europe accompanied by furniture vans, and undoubtedly his aptitude as a commercial traveller was remarkable. He had shops in Berlin and St Petersburg, and himself apparently twice went to Russia. On one of these visits he sold to the Empress Catherine furniture to the value of 20,000 roubles to which she added a personal present of 5000 roubles and a gold snuff-box—in recognition, it would seem, of his readiness and ingenuity in surmounting a secretaire with a clock indicating the date of the Russian naval victory over the Turks at Cheshme, news of which had arrived on the previous evening. This suite of furniture is believed still to be in the Palace of the Hermitage, the hiding-place of so much remarkable and forgotten art. To the protection of the queen of France and the empress of Russia David added that of the king of Prussia, Frederick William II., who in 1792 made him a Commerzienrath and commercial agent for the Lower Rhine district. The French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars which so speedily followed, eclipsed Röntgen's star as they eclipsed those of so many other great cabinet-makers of the period. In 1793 the Revolutionary government, regarding him as an émigré, seized the contents