government to accept the prince's offer, he received the honour of knighthood from George III., and during eleven years he remained at Munich as minister of war, minister of police, and grand chamberlain to the elector. His political and courtly employments, however, did not absorb all his time, and he contributed during his stay in Bavaria a number of papers to the Philosophical Transactions. But that he was sufficiently alert as the principal adviser of the elector the results of his labours in that capacity amply prove. He reorganized the Bavarian army; he immensely improved the condition of the industrial classes throughout the country by providing them with work and instructing them in the practice of domestic economy; and he did much to suppress mendicity. The multitude of beggars in Bavaria had long been a public nuisance and danger. In one day he caused no fewer than 2600 of these outcasts and depredators in Munich and its suburbs alone to be arrested by military patrols, and transferred by them to an industrial establishment which he had prepared for their reception. In this institution they were both housed and fed, and they not only supported themselves by their labours but earned a surplus for the benefit of the electoral revenues. The principle on which their treatment proceeded is stated by him in the following memorable words: “To make vicious and abandoned people happy,” he says, “it has generally been supposed necessary first to make them virtuous. But why not reverse this order? Why not make them first happy, and then virtuous?”
In 1791 he was created a count of the Holy Roman Empire, and chose his title of Rumford from the name as it then was of the American township to which his wife’s family belonged. In 1795 he visited England, one incident of his journey being the loss of all his private papers, including the materials for an autobiography, which were contained in a box stolen from off his postchaise in St Paul's Churchyard. During his residence in London he applied himself to the discovery of methods for curing smoky chimneys and the contrivance of improvements in the construction of fireplaces. But he was quickly recalled to Bavaria, Munich being threatened at once by an Austrian and a French army. The elector fled from his capital, and it was entirely owing to Rumford that a hostile occupation of the city was prevented. It was now proposed that he should be accredited as Bavarian ambassador in London; but the circumstance that he was a British subject presented an insurmountable obstacle. He, however, again came to England, and remained there in a private station for several years.
In 1798 he presented to the Royal Society his “Enquiry concerning the Source of Heat which is excited by Friction,” in which he combated the current view that heat was a material substance, and regarded it as a mode of motion. In 1799 he, in conjunction with Sir Joseph Banks, projected the establishment of the Royal Institution. It received its charter of incorporation from George III. in 1800, and Rumford himself selected Sir Humphry Davy as scientific lecturer there. Until 1804 he lived at the Royal Institution in Albemarle Street, London, or at a house which he rented at Brompton, and he then established himself in Paris, marrying (his first wife having died in 1792) as his second wife the wealthy widow of Lavoisier, the celebrated chemist. With this lady he led an extremely uncomfortable life, till at last they agreed to separate. He took up his residence at Auteuil, where he died suddenly on the 21st of August 1814, in the sixty-second year of his age.
Rumford was the founder and the first recipient of the Rumford medal of the Royal Society. He was also the founder of the Rumford medal of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and of the Rumford professorship in Harvard University. His complete works with a memoir by G. E. Ellis were published by the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1870-75.
RŪMĪ, (1207–1273). Mahommed b. Mahommed b. Husain
albalkhī, better known as Maulānā Jalāl-uddīn Rūmī (or simply
Jalāl-uddiīn, or Jelāl-eddīn), the greatest Sūfic poet of Persia,
was born on the 30th of September 1207 (604 A.H. 6th of Rabīʽ I.)
at Balkh, in Khorāsān, where his family had resided from time
immemorial. He claimed descent from the caliph Abūbekr,
and from the Khwārizm-Shāh Sultān ʽAlā-uddīn b. Tukush
(1199–1220), whose only daughter, Malika-i-Jahān, had been
married to Jalāl-uddīn's grandfather. Her son, Mahommed,
commonly called Bahā-uddīn Walad, was famous for his learning
and piety, but being afraid of the sultan’s jealousy, he
emigrated to Asia Minor in 1212. After residing for some
time at Malatīa and afterwards at Erzingān in Armenia, Bahā-uddīn
was called to Lāranda in Asia Minor, as principal of the
local college. Here young Jalāl-uddīn grew up, and in 1226
married Jauhar Khātūn, the daughter of Lālā Sharaf-uddīn
of Samarkand. Finally, Bahā-uddīn was invited to Iconium
by ʽAlā-uddīn Kaikubād (1219–1236), the sultān of Asia Minor,
or, as it is commonly called in the East, Rūm—whence Jalāl-uddīn's
surname (takhallus) Rūmī.
After Bahā-uddīn's death in 1231, Jalāl-uddīn went to Aleppo and Damascus for a short time to study, but, dissatisfied with the exact sciences, he returned to Iconium, where he became by and by professor of four separate colleges, and devoted himself to the study of mystic theosophy. His first spiritual instructor was Sayyid Burhān-uddīn Husainī of Tirmidh, one of his father's disciples, and, later on, the wandering Sūfī Shams-uddīn of Tabriz, who soon acquired a most powerful influence over Jalāl-uddīn. Shams-uddīn's aggressive character roused the people of Iconium against him, and during a riot in which Jalāl-uddīn's eldest son, ʽAlā-uddīn, was killed, he was arrested and probably executed; at least he was no more seen. In remembrance of these victims of popular wrath Jalāl-uddīn founded the order of the Maulawī (in Turkish Mevlevī) dervishes, famous for their piety as well as for their peculiar garb of mourning, their music and their mystic dance (samā), which is the outward representation of the circling movement of the spheres, and the inward symbol of the circling movement of the soul caused by the vibrations of a Sūfī's fervent love to God. The establishment of this order, which still possesses numerous cloisters throughout the Turkish empire, and the leadership of which has been kept in Jalāl-uddīn's family in Iconium uninterruptedly for the last six hundred years, gave a new stimulus to his zeal and poetical inspiration. Most of his matchless odes were composed in honour of the Maulawī dervishes, and even his opus magnum, the Mathnawī (Mesnevi), or, as it is usually called, The Spiritual Mathnawī (mathnawī-i-maʽnawī), in six books or daftars, with 30,000 to 40,000 double-rhymed verses, can be traced to the same source. The idea of this immense collection of ethical and moral precepts was first suggested to the poet by his favourite disciple Hasan, better known as Husām-uddīn, who in 1258 became Jalāl-uddīn's chief assistant. Jalāl-uddīn dictated to him, with a short interruption, the whole work during the remaining years of his life. Soon after its completion Jalāl-uddīn died, on the 17th of December 1273 (672 A.H. 5th of Jomādā II.). His first successor in the rectorship of the Maulawī fraternity was Husām-uddīn himself, after whose death in 1284 Jalāl-uddīn's younger and only surviving son, Shaikh Bahāudd-īn Ahmed, commonly called Sultān Walad, and favourably known as author of the mystical mathnawī Rabābnāma, or the Book of the Guitar (died 1312), was duly installed as grand-master of the order.
Jalāl-uddīn's life is fully described in Shams-uddīn Ahmed Aflakī’s Manākib-ul ʽārifīn (written between A.D. 1318 and 1353), the most important portions of which have been translated by J. W. Redhouse in the preface to his English metrical version of The Mesnevī, Book the First (London, 1881); there is also an abridged translation of the Mathnawī, with introduction on Sufism, by E. H. Whinfield (2nd ed., 1898). Complete editions have been printed in Bombay, Lucknow, Tabriz, Constantinople and in Bulaq (with a Turkish translation, 1268 A.H.), at the end of which a seventh daftar is added, the genuineness of which is refuted by a remark of Jalāl-uddīn himself in one of the Bodleian copies of the poem, Ouseley, 294 (f. 328a seq.). A revised edition was made by ʽAbd-ullatīf between 1024 and 1032 A.H., and the same author's commentary on the Mathnawī, Latā’if-ulmaʽnawī, and his glossary, Latā’if-allughāt, have been lithographed in Cawnpore (1876) and Lucknow (1877) respectively, the latter under the title Farhang-i-mathnawī. For the other numerous commentaries and for further biographical and literary particulars of Jalāl-uddīn, see Rieu's Cat. of the Persian MSS
