“I fear my light of life is burnt out, and that there remains nothing but stink, and smoke and dying snuff.... Dubito fortissime restaurationem meum.—Decidedly worse and have decided to go home immediately.”
At Mayence he informed his wife that he trusted soon to see her in Park Street. He had a lingering hope that she might still be induced to cross the water, and that he might meet her at Calais.
“I think you will find me altered in many things—with a heart still alive to value and reply to kindness, and a disposition to recur to the brighter moments of my existence of fifteen years ago, and with a feeling that though a burnt-out flame can never be rekindled, a smothered one may be.... I hope it is a good omen that my paper by accident is couleur de rose.”
He had previously determined to resign the chair of the Royal Society, and announced his decision in a letter to his old friend Davies Gilbert, the treasurer. To his wife he wrote:—
“If I had perfectly recovered I know not what I should have done with respect to the P. under the auspices of a new and more enlightened government; but my state of health renders the resignation absolutely necessary. To attempt business this year would be to prepare for another attack.”
He is pleased with the idea that Sir Robert Peel, who had “no scientific glory to awaken jealousy,” may be his successor; and he resumes:—
“The prosperity of the Royal Society will always be very dear to me, and there is no period of my life to which I look back with more real satisfaction than the six years of labour for the interests of that body. I never was, and never could be, unpopular with the active and leading members, as six unanimous elections proved; but because I did not choose the Society to be a tool of Mr. ——’s journal jobs, and resisted the admission of improper members, I had some enemies, who were listened to and encouraged from Lady ——’s chair. I shall not name them, but as Lord Byron has said ‘my curse shall be forgiveness.’”
He arrived in London in the first week in October, and towards the end of the month he wrote to his friend Poole that he had consulted all the celebrated men who had written upon or studied the nervous system.
“They all have a good opinion of my case, and they all order absolute repose for at least twelve months longer, and will not allow me to resume my scientific duties or labours at present; and they insist upon my leaving London for the next three or four months and advise a residence in the West of England.”
Poole promptly asked him down to Nether Stowey. His friend relates that although his bodily infirmity was very great and his sensibility painfully acute—(“Here I am, the ruin of what I was!” he exclaimed on his arrival)—his mind still showed much of its wonted ardour and vigour. He spent his mornings in literary work, mainly on his “Salmonia; or, Days of Fly-fishing,” a philosophical disquisition on angling, published in 1828, and which, despite the rollicking banter of Christopher North, passed through five or six editions. Davy had the ambition to do for fly-fishing what Walton had done for the humbler art of bottom-fishing. But Davy’s book, although constructed on much the same lines as “The Compleat Angler,” lacks every feature which has made honest Izaak’s work immortal—the quaint simplicity, the homely wit, the delicate humour, the delightful charm—the reflection, in a word, of the mental features of a lovable man blessed with the ornament of a meek and quiet spirit. The egotism and garrulity of Piscator are delicious; the loquacity and self-confidence of Davy’s Halieus are tiresome to the last degree. We are bored with his long didactic speeches, his consciousness of superiority, and his cheap and tawdry sentiment. It was a poor return for all the kindness and skill of Babington, that his patient should have seen in such a creation the character of one of the most charming and estimable of men.