He left Naples in the spring of 1819, and after a short stay at the baths of Lucca he went for the summer and early autumn into the Tyrol, whence he again proceeded to Lucca, and on the approach of winter returned to Naples, where he arrived on December 1st. He quitted it in the spring of 1820, and travelled slowly home by the south of France and Bordeaux, arriving in England about the middle of June. On the 19th of that month Sir Joseph Banks died, and so terminated his forty-two years’ presidency of the Royal Society, to which position he was elected before Davy was even born. Davy immediately announced his intention of becoming a candidate for the vacant chair, and was elected at the following anniversary meeting on November 30th. CHAPTER XI. DAVY AND THE ROYAL SOCIETY--HIS LAST DAYS. Davy was elected into the Royal Society in 1803. His certificate describes him as “a gentleman of very considerable scientific knowledge, and author of a paper in the Philosophical Transactions.” Two years afterwards--that is, in his twenty-seventh year--he was awarded the Copley medal; from which we may infer either that the Society considered their medal not to have the lustre it now possesses, or that they had a confident belief in the power and coming greatness of the recipient, since the papers for which it was given are perhaps the least meritorious of Davy’s productions. His active interest in the affairs of the Society led to his election--or rather selection, for the appointment in those days was made by the President--as one of the Secretaries, a position he held until 1812, when he resigned it at the time of his marriage. In 1816 he received the Rumford medal of the Society for his work in connection with flame and the safety lamp--an award which would have given a peculiar satisfaction to Rumford had he lived to witness it. On the death of Sir Joseph Banks the general voice of the Fellows seemed to designate Wollaston as his successor. It was, indeed, Sir Joseph Banks’s desire that Dr. Wollaston should be nominated. “So excellent a man,” he remarked to Barrow, “of such superior talents, and everyway fitted for the situation. Davy is a lively and talented man, and a thorough chemist; but ... he is rather too lively to fill the chair of the Royal Society with that degree of gravity which it is most becoming to assume.” Oh this gravity! “La gravité,” says La Rochefoucauld, “est un mystère du corps, inventé pour cacher les défauts de l’esprit.” And Sir Joseph had enough of it and to spare. Wollaston--a man of wide knowledge, steady, cautious, and sure,--of cool judgment and sagacious views, as Davy said of him--felt no inclination to accept a position for which his retiring habits and reticent disposition to some extent unfitted him, and he declined to be put in nomination. Davy’s attitude is indicated in the following letter to his friend Poole:--