CHAPTER II.

SIR HUMPHRY DAVY-MR. GODWIN MRS. GRANT.

SIR HUMPHRY DAVY, of all those whom I have just mentioned nay, of all the eminent persons whom I have ever seen even by a casual glimpse was the most agreeable to know on the terms of a slight acquaintance. What he might have proved upon a closer intimacy, I cannot say; not having had the honor of any such connection with him. My acquaintance had never gone far enough to pass the barrier of strangership, and the protection which lies in that consciousness, reciprocally felt; for, if friendship and confidential intimacy have the power to confer privileges, there are other privileges which they take away; and many times it is better to be privileged as the stranger' of a family than as its friend. Some I have known who, therefore, only called a man their friend, that they might have a license for taking liberties with him. Sir Humphry, I have no reason to believe, would have altered for the worse on a closer connection. But for myself I knew him only within ceremonious bounds; and I must say that nowhere, before or since, have I seen a man who had so felicitously caught the fascinating tone of high-bred urbanity which distinguishes the best part of the British nobility. The first time of my seeing him was at the Courier office, in a drawing-room then occupied by Mr. Coleridge, and as a guest of that

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gentleman this must have been either in 1808 or 1809. Sir Humphry (I forget whether then a baronet, but I think not) had promised to drink tea with Mr. Coleridge, on his road to a meeting of the Royal Society; before which learned body he was on that evening to read some paper or other of his own composition. I had the honor to be invited as sole respondent' to the learned philosopher; sole supporter of the antistrophe in our choral performance. It sounded rather appalling to be engaged in a glee for three voices, with two performers such as these; and I trepidated a little as I went up stairs, having previously understood that the great man was already come. door was thrown open by the servant who announced me; and I saw at once, in full proportions before me, the fulllength figure of the young savant, not perhaps above ten years older than myself, whose name already filled all the post-horns of Europe, and levied homage from Napoleon. He was a little below the middle height; agreeable in his person, and amiable in the expression of his countenance. His dress was elaborately accurate and fashionable traces of soot or furnace there; it might be said, also, that it was youthful and almost gay in its character. what chiefly distinguished him from other men, was the captivating one might call it the radiant courtesy of his manner. It was at once animated, and chastised by good-breeding; graceful, and, at the same time, gracious.

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But

From a person so eminent it would not have been a sufficient encouragement that his manner should be, in a passive sense, courteous. This would have expressed only a consciousness of what was due to himself. But Sir Humphry's manner was conciliatory and intentionally winning. To a person as obscure as myself, it held out the flattering expressions of a wish to recommend himself, an assurance of interest in your person, and a desire

both to know and to be known. In such expressions of feeling, when they are borne upon the very surface of the manners, and scattered like sunbeams indiscriminately upon all who fall within their range, doubtless there must be something of artifice and a polished hypocrisy. And nobody can more readily acknowledge than myself the integrity which lies at the bottom of our insular reserve and moroseness. Two sound qualities are at the root of these unpleasant phenomena - modesty or unpresumingness in the first place, and sincerity in the second. To be impudent was so much of the essence of profligacy in the ideas of the ancients, that the one became the most ordinary expression for the other; and sincerity, again, or directness of purpose, is so much of the essence of conscientiousness, that we take obliquity or crookedness for one way of expounding dishonesty, or depravity of the moral sense and, according to their natural tendencies,

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no doubt this is true. But such things admit of many modifications. Without absolute dissimulation, it is allowable and even laudable to reject, by a second or amended impulse, what the first involuntary impulse would have

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* Viz., in the word improbus. But so defective are all dictionaries, that there is some difficulty in convincing scholars that the leading idea of improbus, its sole original idea, is impudence, boldness, or audacity. Great is the incoherency and absurdity of learned men in questions of philology. Thus, Heyne, in a vain attempt to make out (consistently to make out) the well-known words, labor improbus omnia vincit,' says, that improbus means pertinax. How so? Improbus originally always has the meaning of audacious. Thus Pliny, speaking of the first catalogue of stars made by Hipparchus, calls it — 'labor itiam Deo improbus' - an enterprise audacious even for a superhuman being. Here is the very same word labor again qualified by the same epithet. And five hundred other cases might be adduced in which the sense of audacity, and that only, will unlock all, as by a master-key. Salmasius fancied (see his De Pallio of Tertullian) that the true idea was the excessive or enormo 's-whatever violated the common standards in any mode of disproportion.

prompted; and to practise so much disguise as may withdraw from too open notice the natural play of human feelings. By what right does a man display to another, in his very look of alienation and repulsion at his first introduction, that he dislikes him, or that he is doubtful whether he shall like him? Yet this is the too general movement of British sincerity. The play of the feelings, the very flux and reflux of contending emotions, passes too nakedly, in the very act and process of introduction, under the eyes of the party interested. Frankness is good, honesty is good; but not a frankness, not an honesty which counteracts the very purposes of social meetings for, unless he comes with the purpose of being pleased, why does a man come at all into meetings, not of business or necessity, but of relaxation and social pleasure?

From Sir H. Davy's conversation, which he carefully turned aside from his professional knowledge, nothing of importance was to be collected; he did not mean that there should. He meant to be a French talker — light, glancing, sparkling; and he was so. Upon this first occasion of my seeing him, I remember that he supported the peculiarly shallow hypothesis, that climate was the great operating cause in determining national differences of all kinds- in the arts as well as in civil institutions. Apparently he did this with malice prepense, as a means of exciting Mr. Coleridge to talk, by the provocation of shallowness. But he fought imparibus armis against Coleridge the great boa constrictor could not be roused into unfolding his coils; the monster was lethargic on this evening, as if he had recently swallowed a herd of goats and their horns. The fact was, as I afterwards found, that Coleridge did not like the brilliant manipulator and lecturer. Coleridge thought him effeminate, and (like many others at that time) ridiculed his lecturing‘in white

kid gloves,' and adapting his experiments public experiments at the Royal Institution

that is, his to the shal

low and trivial taste of mere amateurs, who happened to be in powerful stations. Still more, he complained of what he considered Davy's sycophancy and subservience to women of fashion and high rank. Coleridge assured me that Davy was much admired by various women of quality; and so enthusiastically by some, that they would exclaim audibly at the public lecture room - 'Oh, those eyes! those brilliant eyes!' and that the philosopher was weak enough to be pleased with this homage.

Worse even than this, in Coleridge's eyes, was Davy's behavior at fashionable dinner-tables, especially at Lord Darnley's, where the élite of the London savans and literati at that time congregated. Davy was charged, by many others as well as Coleridge, with too much forgetting the dignity of science in such society, and too openly laying himself out to win favor or applause. 'I could read in Lady Darnley's eyes,' said Coleridge one day, when reporting an instance of Davy's suppleness in accommodating himself to a very great man's theory of aeroliths — 'I could read plainly in Lady Darnley's eyes the very words - "I despise this this man is degrading himself wilfully." However, it must be remembered that Sir H. Davy had a much larger and readier introduction into fashionable society than Coleridge. To profess any one intelligible art or accomplishment, and in this one to have attained an acknowledged or reputed preeminence, is a far better passport into privileged society. than to have the largest intellectual pretensions of a less determinate class. The very narrowness of a man's claims, by making them definite and appreciable, is an advantage. Not merely a leader in a branch of art which presupposes a high sense of beauty, a cultivated taste,

man;