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.