442 Life of Count Rumford. 



himself as being an unseen auditor of all the lecturers 

 who have occupied the platform in Albemarle Street, 

 we might expect it would have been with a degree of 

 surprise that he would have listened to the wit and 

 humor of Sydney Smith as he there discoursed upon 

 moral philosophy. Was it in compliment to the Count, 

 or as a piece of his raillery, that the jesting divine, in 

 his third lecture, described what Priestley did for Hart- 

 ley's system as " Rumfordizing" it?* 



Sir James Mackintosh, writing from Bombay in 1806, 

 to his friend Richard Sharp, Esq., London, announces 

 his desire to return to England in 1809, and his wish 

 to lecture in London for eight or nine years on moral 

 philosophy. He adds: "Your account of the Lon- 

 don Institution has delighted and tantalized me. I 

 wish I were a professor ! But the printed paper is too 

 general to admit of any discussion. You do not say 

 how many and who are to be professors. It may 

 surely be a little more solid than the fashionable nerves 

 of Albemarle Street could endure, without ceasing to be 

 popular." } 



Dr. Jones, in the letter of his last quoted, refers to 

 the raillery of which the Institution had been the sub- 

 ject in the attempt to make science fashionable. But 

 the jeers and ridicule which it encountered from this 



* Elementary Sketches of Moral Philosophy delivered at the Royal Institution. 

 By the late Rev. Sydney Smith. London, 1850, p. 49. 



A very interesting sketch of the origin and history of the Royal Institution is given 

 by Mons. Ed. Mailly, in his " Essai sur les Institutions Scientifiques de la Grande 

 Brctagne et de 1'Irlande " (Bruxelles, 1867), though the writer perpetuates some of 

 the common errors in the short biographical account of Rumford which precedes it. 

 A translation of this sketch, the errors just mentioned being left without correction, 

 is given in the collections published by the Smithsonian Institution for 1867. 



f Memoirs of the Life of the Right Hon. Sir James Mackintosh. By his Son. 

 London, 1836. Vol. I. p. 290. 



