Life of Count Rumfoi'd. 235 



crated by the fuel, all the rest passing off by the chim- 

 ney. He fixed upon an angle of one hundred and thirty- 

 five degrees as the one that ought to be formed between 

 the sides of the fireplace and the back of it, and decided 

 that the back should be one third of the breadth of the 

 front opening, and be carried up perpendicularly till it 

 joins the breast, and leave the throat of the chimney 

 about four inches wide. The historian of the Royal 

 Society, its assistant secretary and librarian, writing in 

 1848, says in a note:* "One of the earliest of Rum- 

 ford's stoves, or fireplaces, is that set up under the 

 Count's immediate superintendence in my office in 

 the Royal Society. It is by far the best fireplace which 

 I have seen." The Count did not neglect the interests 

 and comfort of the -sooty chimney-sweepers, so impor- 

 tant a class in the London of those days. 



In a poem entitled "The Pursuits of Literature," 

 by Thomas James Mathias, (erroneously ascribed in 

 Watt's Bibliotheca Britannica to William Gifford) the 

 first part of which was published in May, 1794, and 

 which, in spite of its prosiness and its dull satire, was so 

 popular as to have reached the seventh edition of all its 

 four parts in London in 1798, and to have been re- 

 printed in Philadelphia two years afterwards, occurs the 

 following tribute to Rumford, perhaps the best thing 

 in the whole work : 



" Yet all shall read, and all that page approve, 

 When public spirit meets with public love. 

 Thus late, where poverty with rapine dwelt, 

 Rumford's kind genius the Bavarian felt, 

 Not by romantic charities beguiled, 

 But calm in project, and in mercy mild; 

 Where'er his wisdom guided, none withstood, 

 Content with peace and practicable good ; 



* Weld's History, &c. Vol. II. p. 213. 



