LONDON:
BRADBURY AND EVANS, PRINTERS,
BOUVERIE STREET.
PREFACE.
The following pages were originally intended for the perusal only of my own family and immediate friends. Some of these now persuade me to lay them before the public, believing that, to it, a detail of circumstances connected, as my Journal necessarily is, with the last recreations and pursuits of the late Sir Humphry Davy, must be interesting. To have been in any degree a partaker of the hours of this great man, whose name must shed a lustre over his native land, so long as genius and science shall be admired, I cannot be supposed to imagine otherwise than highly gratifying; and aware that my Journal through him bears an interest it could not otherwise pretend to, I do not hesitate to comply with their request.
The state of Sir Humphry's health inducing him to seek its restoration in a tour on the Continent, he wrote to my mother, who was residing on my account and that of my brothers at Heidelberg, stating his plan to her, and naming his wish to have a son of his "warmly-loved and sincerely-lamented friend," as the assistant and companion of his journey. My mother did not hesitate to suspend my studies during the period of the proposed tour, conscious that in the society of such a mind and acquirements as those of Sir Humphry, mine must advance. And to have been the companion of his latter days, clouded as they often were by the sufferings which I beheld him endure, will be my last pride and advantage; and though the hand of death has laid low many a hope which gilded the future, it cannot deprive me of the recollection of those hours, when I marked his spirit still radiant and glowing (to use his own words)