Me toils and pleasures alternate share,
Books and the converse of the fair,
To see is to adore them;
With these and London for my home,
I envy not the joys of Rome,
The circus or the Forum.
At the Royal Institution he had plenty of time for research, a good laboratory, and influential friends who took the greatest interest in his work and welfare. How different it was with poor Linnæus!
Concerning Davy's first course of lectures at the Royal Institution, it has been stated that
. . . the enthusiastic admiration which they obtained is scarcely to be imagined. Men of the first rank and talent, the literary and the scientific, the practical and the theoretical, blue-stockings and women of fashion, the old and the young—all crowded, eagerly crowded, the lecture room. His youth, his simplicity, his natural eloquence, his chemical knowledge, his happy illustrations and well-conducted experiments, excited universal attention and unbounded applause. Compliments, invitations, and presents were showered upon him in abundance from all quarters; his society was courted by all, and all appeared proud of his acquaintance.
The age of Davy was essentially the age of the voltaic battery in chemical research; and what he did with the battery, recently invented by Volta, were discoveries in chemistry second to no others.
The researches, indicated in his Bakerian lecture of 1806, were rewarded with a prize of three thousand francs by the Académie des Sciences. He began his electrochemical researches in the early years of the last century. In his Elements of Chemical Philosophy he says:—
