Читать книгу A Book About Doctors - John Cordy Jeaffreson - Страница 15

"Physician art thou? one all eyes;

Philosopher? a fingering slave,

One that would peep and botanize

Upon his mother's grave!

"Wrapt closely in thy sensual fleece,

O turn aside—and take, I pray,

That he below may rest in peace,

Thy ever-dwindling soul away!"

At the summit of his success, Davy was morbidly sensitive of the humility of his extraction. That his father had been a respectable mechanic—that his mother, on her husband's death, had established herself as milliner in Penzance, in order to apprentice her son to an apothecary in that town—that by his own intellects, in the hard battle of life, he had raised himself from obscure poverty to a brilliant eminence—were to him facts of shame, instead of pride. In contradiction to this moral cowardice, there was in him, on some points, an extravagant eccentricity, which, in most men, would have pointed to imperviousness to ridicule. The demands of society, and the labours of his laboratory, of course left him with but little leisure. He, however, affected not to have time enough for the ordinary decencies of the toilet. Cold ablutions neither his constitution nor his philosophic temperament required, so he rarely washed himself. And, on the plea of saving time, he used to put on his clean linen over his dirty—so that he has been known to wear at the same time five shirts and five pairs of stockings. On the rare occasions when he divested himself of his superfluous integuments, he caused infinite perplexity to his less intimate friends, who could not account for his rapid transition from corpulence to tenuity.

The ludicrousness of his costume did not end there. Like many other men of powerful and excitable minds, he was very fond of angling; and on the banks of the Thames he might be found, at all unsuitable seasons, in a costume that must have been a source of no common merriment to the river nymphs. His coat and breeches were of green cloth. On his head he wore a hat that Dr. Paris describes as "having been originally intended for a coal-heaver, but as having, when in its raw state, been dyed green by some sort of pigment." In this attire Davy flattered himself that he resembled vegetable life as closely as it was possible for mortal to do.

But if his angling dress was droll, his shooting costume was more so. His great fear as an angler was that the fish should escape him; his greatest anxiety as a bearer of a gun was to escape being shot. In the one character, concealment was his chief object—in the other, revelation. So that he might be seen from a distance, and run fewer chances of being fired into by accident, he was accustomed on shooting excursions, to crown himself with a broad-brimmed hat, covered with scarlet. It never struck him that, in our Protestant England, he incurred imminent peril of being mistaken for a cardinal, and knocked over accordingly.

Naturally, Davy was of a poetical temperament; and some of his boyish poetry possesses merit that unquestionably justifies the anticipation formed by his poet-friends of the flights his more mature muse would take. But when his intellect became absorbed in the pursuits by which he rendered inestimable service to his species, he never renewed the bright imaginings of his day-spring.

On passing (in 1809) through the galleries of the Louvre, he could find nothing more worthy of admiration than the fine frames of the pictures. "What an extraordinary collection of fine frames!" he observed to the gentleman who acted as his guide, amidst the treasures of art gathered from every part of the Continent. His attention was directed to the "Transfiguration"; when, on its being suggested to him that he was looking at a rather well-executed picture, he said, coldly, "Indeed! I am glad I have seen it." In the same way, the statues were to him simply blocks of material. In the Apollo Belvidere, the Laocoon, and the Venus dei Medici, he saw no beauty; but when his eyes rested on the Antinous, treated in the Egyptian style, and sculptured in alabaster, he made an exclamation of delight, and cried, "Gracious powers, what a beautiful stalactite!"

More amusing than even these criticisms, is a story told of Lady Davy, who accompanied her husband to Paris. She was walking in the Tuileries garden, wearing the fashionable London bonnet of the day—shaped like a cockle-shell. The Parisians, who just then were patronizing bonnets of enormous dimensions, were astounded at the apparition of a head-dress so opposed to their notions of the everlasting fitness of things; and with the good breeding for which they are and have long been proverbial, they surrounded the daring stranger, and stared at her. This was sufficiently unpleasant to a timid English lady. But her discomfort had only commenced. Ere another minute or two had elapsed, one of the inspectors of the garden approached, and telling her Ladyship that no cause of rassemblement could be permitted in that locality, requested her to retire. Alarmed and indignant, she appealed to some officers of the Imperial Guard, but they could afford her no assistance. One of them politely offered her his arm, and proposed to conduct her to a carriage. But by the time she had decided to profit by the courtesy, such a crowd had gathered together, that it was found necessary to send for a guard of infantry, and remove la belle Anglaise, surrounded with bayonets.