C’était sans doute un moyen de consacrer plus sûrement toutes ses forces au bien, mais ce n’en était pas un d’être agréable dans la société de ses pareils; le monde veut un peu plus d’abandon, et il est tellement fait qu’une certaine hauteur de perfection lui paraît souvent un défaut quand on ne met pas autant d’efforts à la dissimuler qu’on en a mis à l’acquérir. Quels que fussent au reste les sentiments de M. de Rumford pour les hommes, ils ne diminuaient en rien son respect pour la divinité. Il n’a négligé dans ses ouvrages aucune occasion d’exprimer sa religieuse admiration pour la Providence et d’y offrir à l’admiration des autres les précautions innombrables et variées par lesquelles elle a pourvu à la conservation de ses créatures; peut-être même son système politique venait-il de ce qu’il croyait que les princes doivent faire comme elle et prendre soin de nous sans nous en rendre compte. Cuvier finished his éloge with this epitaph: ‘L’homme qui par l’heureux choix des sujets de ses travaux a su lui donner à la fois pour appui l’estime des savans et la reconnaissance des malheureux.’ Dr. Young, who, whilst Professor at the Royal Institution, knew Rumford well, said of him in the ‘Encyclopedia Britannica:’ Count Rumford certainly possessed considerable facility of conversation, and there was a very laudable spirit of originality in his views and mode of reasoning, although he had never leisure to acquire profound learning in any department of study. In person he was above the middle size, with a dignified and pleasing expression of countenance and a mildness in his manner and tone of voice. He was ambitious of fame and distinction, and had too great a propensity to dictate without sufficiently regarding the opinions of those who were of equal authority with himself. His mode of life was abstemious, and his health was even supposed to have suffered from too great abstinence, though his regimen was much more the result of medical opinion regarding his health than of his own peculiar taste for temperance. By his will, of which Lafayette was a witness, he made a bequest to his daughter, and another to Harvard College for the purpose of founding, under the direction and government of the corporation, overseers, and governors of that university, a new institution and professorship, in order to teach by regular courses of academical and public lectures, accompanied with proper experiments, the utility of the physical and mathematical sciences for the improvement of the useful arts, and for the extension of the industry, prosperity, happiness, and well-being of society.