and the imaginative faculties of the future illustrious chemist were not nursed in vain. Like Pope, he 'lisped in numbers,' reciting, when only five years old, his own rhymes at some Christmas gambols; and his poetic vein never left him, even in the laboratory or in the lecture-room, compelling the aristocratic idlers of London to love Science, because, as they were constrained to confess, under his magic guidance, Science was made beautiful, and was attired by the Graces. It was said by Coleridge that had Davy not devoted himself to Science, he would have shone with the highest lustre as a poet; and the following youthful lines, full of true local colour, certainly show, as indeed did his whole life, that he had drunk of 'the fount of Helicon:' 'TO THE LAND'S END. 'On the Sea The sunbeams tremble; and the purple light Illumes the dark Bolerium, seat of Storms! Drear are his granite wilds, his schistine rocks Encircled by the wave, where to the gale The haggard cormorant shrieks; and, far beyond, Where the great ocean mingles with the sky, Behold the cloud-like islands[102] grey in mist.' It was this poetic temperament, derived (as his brother, Dr. Davy, thinks) from their grandmother, which induced the gifted Dr. Henry, F.R.S., thus to refer to the subject of this memoir: 'Bold, ardent, enthusiastic, Davy soared to greatest heights; he commanded a wide horizon, and his keen vision penetrated to its utmost boundaries. His imagination, in the highest degree fertile and inventive, took a rapid and extensive range in pursuit of conjectural analogies, which he submitted to close and patient comparison with known facts, and tried by an appeal to ingenious and conclusive experiments. He was imbued with the spirit and was master in the practice of inductive logic; and he has left us some of the noblest examples of the efficacy of that great instrument of human reason in the discovery of truth. He applied it, not only to connect classes of facts of more limited extent and importance, but to develop great and comprehensive laws, which embrace phenomena that are almost universal to the natural world. In explaining those laws he cast upon them the illumination of his own clear and vivid conceptions; he felt an intense admiration of the beauty, order, and harmony which are conspicuous in the perfect _Chemistry of Nature;_ and he expressed those feelings with a force and eloquence which could issue only from a mind of the highest powers and of the finest sensibilities.' Davy's first school was at Penzance, his first schoolmaster a Mr. Bushell; his next, the Rev. Mr. Coryton, seems to have been one of the old rough sort, determined that his pupils should not lack correction, even if they did not profit by his instruction. He used to address the little boy in the following doggrel, whenever he thought he saw an opportunity of administering castigation: