The love of fame--“the honourable meed of the applause of enlightened men,” as he called it--was his ruling passion and the motive principle of his life. As his experience and the range of his knowledge widened, he felt a growing conviction that with health and strength he need set no bounds to the limits of his ambition. Of the impression he made on others, and of the influence and power he exerted on minds far more matured than his own, we have abundant evidence in the letters of his contemporaries. Miss Edgeworth’s good-humoured patronage quickly passed into amazement and ended in awe. Writing to William Taylor of Norwich, Southey calls Davy “a miraculous young man, whose talents I can only wonder at.” Amos Cottle, poet and publisher, to whom he was introduced shortly after his arrival at Bristol, says of him in the “Reminiscences of Coleridge and Southey”:-- “I was much struck with the intellectual character of his face. His eye was piercing, and when not engaged in converse, was remarkably introverted, amounting to absence, as though his mind had been pursuing some severe train of thought scarcely to be interrupted by external objects; and, from the first interview also, his ingenuousness impressed me as much as his mental superiority.” Cottle on one occasion said to Coleridge, “During your stay in London you doubtless saw a great many of what are called the cleverest men--how do you estimate Davy in comparison with these?” Mr. Coleridge’s reply was strong but expressive: “Why, Davy can eat them all! There is an energy, an elasticity, in his mind which enables him to seize on and analyse all questions, pushing them to their legitimate consequences. Every subject in Davy’s mind has the principle of vitality. Living thoughts spring up like turf under his feet.” It can hardly be doubted that Davy’s connection with that remarkable literary coterie which made its headquarters in the neighbourhood of Bristol in the last year of the eighteenth century, strongly stimulated his intellectual activity. In one of his poems written at this period he speaks of having “felt the warmth, The gentle influence of congenial souls, Whose kindred hopes have cheer’d me” That these “congenial souls” in turn felt his influence no less strongly will be apparent from the following letters--the first from Southey, who then resided at Westbury, the others from Coleridge, who had just removed to the Lake country:-- “Thursday, _May 4th, 1799_.