Page:The New International Encyclopædia 1st ed. v. 17.djvu/265

* KOMAN CATHOLIC EMANCIPATION. 241 ROMANCE. to the rites of his Church, were debarred from aequiriiiji Koman Latliolics land by ])urehase. Tersons educated abroad in the Roman Catholic faith were declared incapable of succeeding to real property, and their estates were forfeited to the ne.Kt Protestant heir. A son or other nearest relative, being a Protestant, was empowered to take possession of the estate of his Koman Catho- lic father or other kinsman during his life. A Roman Catholic was disqualified from undertak- ing the guardianshi]) even of Roman Catholic children. Roman Catholics were excluded from the legal profession, and it was presumed that a Protestant lawyer who married a Roman Catholic had adopted the faith of his wife. It was a capi- tal ofi"ense for a Roman Catholic priest to cele- brate a marriage between a Protestant and a Ro- man Catholic. In 1780 Sir George Saville intro- duced a bill for the repeal of some of the most severe disqualifications in the case of such Roman Catholics as would submit to a proposed test, which included au oath of allegiance to the sov- ereign, and abjuration of the Pretender, a decla- ration of disbelief in the several doctrines — that it is lawful to put individuals to death on pretense of their being heretics; that no faith is to be kept with heretics: that princes e.vcommunicated maV be deposed or put to death ; and that the Pope is entitled to any temporal jurisdiction within the realm. The bill, from the operation of which Scotland was exempted, eventually passed into law. In 1791 a bill was passed atTording further relief to such Roman Catholics as would sign a protest against the temporal power of the Pope and his authority to release from civil obliga- tions; and in the following year the most severely penal of the restrictions bearing on the Scottish Roman Catholics were removed without opposi- tion. Endeavors were made at the same time by the Irish Parliament to place Ireland on an equality in point of religious freedom with England. The agitation culminated in the Irish Rebellion of 1798; the union of 1801 followed, which was part- ly carried by means of pledges, not redeemed, re- garding the removal of the disabilities in ques- tion. Meantime in England Roman Catholics continued subject to many minor disabilities, which the above-mentioned acts failed to remove. In the early part of the nineteenth centurj- many measures were proposed for the removal of these disqualifications, and the agitation on the sub- ject among the Roman Catliolics themselves greatly increased, in 1824 assuming an organ- ized shape by the formation of the "Roman Catho- lic As.sociation' in Ireland. The Duke of Welling- ton, who for a long time felt great repug- nance to admit the Roman Catholic claims, was at last brought to the conviction that the security of the Empire would be imperiled by further re- sisting them, and in 1829 a measure was intro- duced by the Duke's Jlinistry for Catholic eman- cipation. The celebrated Roman Catholic Relief Bill was passed the same year. By this act an oath is substituted for the oaths of allegiance, supremacy, and abjuration, on taking which Ro- man Catholics may sit or vote in cither House of Parliament, and be admitted to most other offices from which they were before excluded. They, however, contiiuie to be excluded from the offices of guardian and justice or regent of the United Kingdom, Lord Chancellor, Lord Keeper, or Lord Commissioner of the Great Seal of Great Britain or Ireland, and Lord High Commi.ssionor to the General Assembly of the Church of .Scotland. ROMANCE (OF. romans, romiiii:, roumanx, romuii, iiimiiiit, roumunt, romatin; from ML. Rumunici; in Roman or Latin fashion, from Lat. Itumauiciis, from liomaiitis. Kuiiiaii, from llunm, Rome). Originally, anything written in one of the Romance lajiguages; in the llfleenth and six- teenth centuries, a story in prose ilealing with the adventures of knights. J'idmi the Krench, which had taken it from the .Spanish, the word ronumce came into English. The es.sentials of romance are a passion for the adventurous, the strange, and the marvelous, and a tendency to exaggerate the virtues and vices of human nature. European romance, in the larger a|)plieati<in of the term, dates from the Greeks. It was a de- velopment from the epic. The Iliad, representing men and incidents as they were believed to be at the time of its composition, is an epic with only few romantic episodes, liut the (htj/ssi'!/. de|)iet- ing an imaginary voyage employed as the frame- work for a series of marvelous folk-tales, is es- sentially a romance. This love of romance. »o manifest among the earlier Greeks, reached its climax in the first centuries of the Christian era. In the article Xovix is given a brief account of the fictions then current, in which the .sophists tried to ontilo one another in imagining adven- tures that could not possil)ly happen in real life. But the same age produced the lieautiful t'ltpid and Psyche of Apuleius (who, though he wrote in Latin, was Greek in spirit), and the llrro and Lcandcr of Musirus, which has charmed a suc- cession of English poets from Marlowe to Byron. The Greek stories began to find their way into Western Europe as early as the twelfth century. Indeed. Apulloniiif: of Ti/rc was translatcil into Anglo-Saxon from a Latin epitonu' of the original Greek; and after various renderings, it was turned into a drama b.v SImkespearc in his Pericles, Prince of Tyre. One Greek motive, that of the hero or heroine in disguise to be followed by a beautiful recognition scene, became a fa- vorite with the romancers of Western Europe, from whom it passed into the choicest comedies of Shakespeare. Other familiar motives of mod- ern romance, as 'the exile and return." "the a.s- sumed death,' and 'the lest of chastity.' seem also to have been val verse romance was an olTslioot of those epic luirratives called chansons dv yesle, celebrating the victories of Charlemagne and other great leaders, usuallv over the Saracens. hen the incidents which first gave occasion to the epic recital receded into the distant |>a.st, marvel was added to marvel. And when in the twelfth centiiry the French tronvfres assigned love as the jirime motive for the adventures of the knight, the epic was transformed into the romance. From their original home in France. the romances were dilluscd over Western and Northern Europe. Made for men and wonu'n of rank, often for the Court, they were not recited, as were the earlier chansons dc gestc, by min- strels; they were rather designed to l)e read aloud in groups of lords and ladies, or, like the mndern novel, to be read in jirivate. The mcdiawal ro- mances gathered in e.veles round great events ami favorite heroes, as the siege of Tro.v, Charle- magne, and King Arthur. The Tro.v legend, de- rived from Latin sources, was treated in France