It was the most glorious triumph of his genius. In 1816 it was adopted. With his “Davy” in his hand there was now no fear for the miner.
“The highest ambition of my life,” he wrote, “has been to deserve the name of a friend to humanity.”
He took out no patent. He wanted no money for it. It was reward enough for him to see it work.
“If you had patented it,” said a friend to him one day, “you might have been drawing your five or ten thousand a year.”
“No, my good friend,” was his reply, “I never thought of such a thing. My sole object was to serve the cause of humanity. It might undoubtedly enable me to put four horses in my carriage, but what would it avail me to have it said that Sir Humphrey drives his carriage-and-four?”
“I value it,” he said again, “more than anything I ever did.”
And now the world’s honours waited upon him. In 1818 Government made him Baronet. In 1820 he was made President of the Royal Society.
But already in the zenith of his triumph, there were small signs that showed too surely that he was failing. In 1826 he retired from the Presidentship, and later in the year he was attacked by apoplexy, followed by paralysis.
“Here I am,” he wrote pathetically from Rome, “a ruin among ruins.”
And so he began to look death in the face.