Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 20.djvu/639

Rh R O C R O C 615 "Rochester is the author of both these imperishable descrip- tions of Charles II., and by them and his poem " Upon Nothing," and his death -bed conversation with Bishop Burnet he is now chiefly known. His poetry has hardly had a fair chance against that of his contemporaries, for owing to his scandalous character, which was probably worse than the time only in respect of his ostentatious defiance of proprieties, all kinds of indecencies were fathered upon him and inserted in unauthorized editions of his works. This has ensured his exclusion from decent libraries, an edition issued in 1691 by friends careful of his memory having been pushed out of sight by these more piquant publications. His letters to his wife and his son show that the real man was much better than the public estimate of him, which he invited by his occasional daring breaches of decorum and morality. Some of his lyrics are very pretty, full of ingenious fancy and musical rhythm, but wit and intellect are more marked in his writing than the free flow of lyrical sentiment. For wit, versatility, and intense vitality of intellect this strangely wasted life stood high above the level of its age. In his youth Rochester distinguished himself in the Dutch wars by acts of signal personal bravery ; his alleged cowardice afterwards in street brawls and personal quarrels looks rather like daringly contemptuous cynicism. Rochester had a taste for the humours of low life, and is said to have haunted the low quarters of the town in various disguises, on one occasion personating a mountebank on Tower Hill. He died on 26th J^uly 1680, at the early age of thirty-three, and the common account is that his constitution was undermined and exhausted by profligate excesses. ROCHE-SUR-YON, LA, a town of France, the chief town of the department of La Vende'e, lies 278 miles south- west of Paris by the railway to Sables d'Olonne, on an eminence 164 feet above the sea on the right bank of the Yon, a little tributary of the Lay, itself an affluent of the Pertuis Breton. In 1881 the population of the town was 9965, of the commune 10,634. The castle of La Roche- sur-Yon, which probably existed before the time of the crusades, and which was frequently attacked or taken in the Hundred Years' War and in the wars of religion, was finally dismantled under Louis XIII. ; and when Napoleon in 1805 made this place the chief town of a department the stones from its ruins were employed in the erection of the administrative buildings, which, being all produced at once after a regular plan, have a monotonous effect. The equestrian statue of Napoleon I. in an immense square over- looking the rest of the town ; the statue of General Travot, who was engaged in the " pacification " of La Vendee ; the museum, with several paintings by P. Baudry, a living native artist of note, are the only objects of interest. The dog fairs of Roche -sur- Yon are important. Napoleon- Vendee and Bourbon-Vendee, the names borne by the town according to the dominance of either dynasty, gave place to the original unpolitical name after the revolution of 1870. ROCKET. See AMMUNITION and PYROTECHNY; for the use of rockets to rescue the shipwrecked see LIFEBOAT, vol. xiv. p. 572. ROCKFORD, a city of the United States, the county seat of Winnebago county, Illinois, on both banks of the Rock river, which, rising in Wisconsin, falls into the Mis- sissippi after a course of 350 miles. By rail it lies 92 miles north-west of Chicago and is a junction of the Chicago and North- Western, the Chicago, Milwaukee, and St Paul, and the Chicago, Burlington, and Quincy Rail- roads. Abundant water-power was secured by a dam 800 feet long constructed across the river in 1844. The chief objects of industry of Rockford, one of the largest manu- facturing centres in the Mississippi valley, are agricultural implements, furniture, watches, silver-plated ware, cutlery, tacks and nails, bolts, wire-cloth, netting, woollen and cotton goods, paper, flour, oatmeal, glucose. Waterworks on the Holly system (1874) are capable of pumping 5,500,000 gallons through the mains in twenty-four hours. The city stands in a fine agricultural district, is handsomely built and well shaded, and has a public library, a public high school, and ten other public school buildings, a seminary for girls (1849), five banks, and twenty-one churches. The population was 6976 in 1860, 11,049 in 1870, and 13,129 in 1880 (township, 14,525). Rockford was settled about 1836 ; in 1852 it received incorporation as a city. ROCKHAMPTON, a town of Queensland, is situated some 40 miles up the Fitzroy river, nearly on the Tropic of Capricorn. The streets are well formed and kept, bordered by trees, with ever-flowing water down the channels. Em- bosomed in hills, it has a climate, in spite of heat, of singular salubrity, the death-rate being only about half that of London. The population in 1884 was about 11,000. Rockhampton is the gateway to a fine pastoral interior and is a port of export for wool. The hills in its neighbourhood are rich in metallic wealth ; and Mount Morgan, 30 miles from Rockhampton, seems likely to eclipse the production of Victoria and New South Wales. If anything be needed to complete the prospective im- portance of Rockhampton, it is the growing development of sugar plantations at no great distance from the town. ROCKINGHAM, CHARLES WATSON WENTWORTH, SECOND MARQUIS OF (1730-1782), twice prime minister of England, was the only son of Thomas Watson Wentworth, whose father had inherited the great Wentworth estates in Yorkshire on the death of William Wentworth, fourth earl of Straff ord, and who had himself succeeded his second cousin as sixth Lord Rockingham in 1746 and been created marquis of Rockingham in the same year. Charles Watson Wentworth was born in 1730 on the 19th of March (Albe- marle), or the 13th of May (Collins), and was educated at Eton. He showed his spirit as a boy by riding across from Wentworth to Carlisle in 1745 with but one servant, to join the duke of Cumberland in his pursuit of the Young Pretender. He was created earl of Mai ton in the peerage of Ireland on 4th September 1750, and succeeded his father as second marquis of Rockingham on 14th December in the same year. In 1751 he became lord-lieutenant of the North and West Ridings of Yorkshire and a lord of the bedchamber, and in 1760 was made a knight of the Garter. After George III. had begun his policy of divid- ing the great Whig families, those Whig noblemen and gentlemen who did not choose to join the sections headed by the Grenvilles, the duke of Bedford, or any other great nobleman, selected as their chief the young marquis of Rockingham. In May 1762 the king's favourite, the earl of Bute, became first lord of the treasury, and the marquis of Rockingham was amongst those who in the following year were dismissed from their lord-lieutenancies. The opposition now grew so strong that Lord Bute resigned in April 1763 and the king, true to his policy, appointed George Grenville to be his successor. But Grenville's section of the Whig party was not strong enough to main- tain him in power long, and on 12th July 1765 Lord Rockingham formed his first administration with General Conway and the duke of Grafton as secretaries of state. The cabinet seemed stronger than it really was, for it was divided by intestine quarrels, and the earl of Chatham refused to have anything to do with it. Nevertheless Rockingham recovered his lord -lieutenancies and won reputation as a good administrator. In May 1766 the duke of Grafton, a far abler man than Rockingham, though neither so conciliatory in his manners nor so generally popular, seceded from the Government, and in August