Biographical Memoir of Count Rumford. 45 



Count Rumford liimself experienced, more than once, that it is 

 not so easy in the west as in China, to engage other men to be noth- 

 ing but hands ; and yet no one was so well prepared as he to make 

 good use of the hands that might be submitted to him. 



An empire, such as he conceived, would not have been more 

 difficult for him to manage, than his barracks and poor-houses* For 

 this he trusted especially to the power of order. He called order the 

 necessary auxiliary of genius, the only possible instrument of real 

 good, and almost a subordinate divinity regulating this lower world. 

 He purposed to make it the subject of a work which he thought 

 would be more important than all that he had written ; but of this work 

 there were found among his papers only a few unconnected materials. 

 He himself, in his person, was, in all imaginable points, a model of 

 order. His wants, his pleasures, and his labors, were calculated, 

 like his experiments. He drank nothing but water, and ate only 

 fried or roasted meat, because boiled meat, in the same bulk, does 

 not afford quite so much nutriment. In short, he permitted in him- 

 self nothing superfluous, not even a step or a word, and it was in the 

 strictest sense that he took the word superfluous. 



This was no doubt a sure means of devoting his whole strength to 

 useful pursuits, but it could not make him an agreeable being in the 

 society of his fellows. The world requires a little more freedom, 

 and is so constituted that a certain height of perfection often appears 

 to it a defect, when the person does not take as much pains to con- 

 ceal his knowledge as he has taken to acquire it. 



Whatever Count Rumford's sentiments were with respect to men, 

 they diminished nothing of his respect for the Divinity. In his works, 

 he neglected no opportunity of expressing his religious admiration 

 of Providence, and of offering to the admiration of others the innu- 

 merable and varied precautions of Providence for the preservation 

 of his creatures. Perhaps even his system of politics was derived 

 from the circumstance of his imagining that princes ought to act in 

 like manner, and take care of their subjects, without being account- 

 able to them. 



This rigorous observance of order, which probably marred the 



pleasure of his life, did not contribute to prolong it. A sudden and 

 violent fever carried him off, in his full vigor, at the age of sixty-one. 

 He died on the 21st August, 1814, in his country house at Auteuil, 

 where he passed the summer. 



