2 Life of Count Rumford. 



the English monarch, they both, at different periods of 

 their lives, claimed their privileges as such, visiting their 

 ancestral soil, though under widely unlike circumstan- 

 ces, and there winning fame and distinction for services 

 to humanity. We almost forget the occasion which 

 parted them in the sphere of politics, because they 

 come so close together in the more engrossing and 

 beneficent activity of their genius. 



I cannot learn that these two eminent men, with so 

 much that was common between them in their interests 

 and pursuits, ever met together, or sought each other's 

 acquaintance, or even recognized each other's existence, 

 though they were contemporaries for more than thirty 

 years, were both in Europe the one in England, the 

 other in France for six of those years, and were 

 intimate in friendship or correspondence with some of 

 the same distinguished persons. 



In the best work of their several lives they sought 

 to do, and eminently succeeded in doing, what should 

 prove effective of good to their common humanity in 

 the ordinary interests of existence, without distinction 

 of class, and without a view to any personal ends of 

 thrift or glory. Nor is there ground or occasion for 

 any broad distinction in our estimate of the moral char- 

 acter or of the private life of these two eminent men. 

 Neither of them had in his early, nor even in his later, 

 years that rigid purity of principle which insured that 

 all his domestic relations should be such as would 

 admit of record, according to the good New England 

 usage, on the few blank leaves between the Old and the 

 New Testament in the family Bible. There are details 

 concerning both these Benjamins of a sort which their 

 biographers must pass unmentioned, thankful if only 



