To enhance his dignity we are told that he petitioned Government for the Red Ribbon of his predecessor, and it was said that he felt so certain his request would be granted that his name was printed with the coveted letters K.B. appended.
During the session he followed the practice of Sir Joseph Banks in assembling the Fellows at a weekly conversazione at his house in Lower Grosvenor Street. Subsequently, on his removal to Park Street, these meetings were held in the apartments of the Society at Somerset House. Davy’s vivacity and conversational powers made the gatherings in the outset a great success, but when the tide of his unpopularity as President set in, the attendance fell off, and they were eventually discontinued.
During the autumn preceding his first election he spent some time with Scott at Abbotsford, in company with Wollaston and Mackenzie (the Man of Feeling), and Lockhart gives some account of him as the party started on a sporting expedition on a September morning.
“But the most picturesque figure was the illustrious inventor of the safety lamp. He had come for his favourite sport of angling ... and his fisherman’s costume--a brown hat with flexible brims, surrounded with line upon line, and innumerable fly-hooks; jack-boots worthy of a Dutch smuggler, and a fustian surtout dabbled with the blood of salmon--made a fine contrast to the smart jackets, white-cord breeches, and well polished jockey-boots of the less distinguished cavaliers about him. Dr. Wollaston was in black, and with his noble serene dignity of countenance might have passed for a sporting archbishop.... I have seen Sir Humphry in many places, and in company of many different descriptions; but never to such advantage as at Abbotsford. His host and he delighted in each other, and the modesty of their mutual admiration was a memorable spectacle. Davy was by nature a poet--and Scott, though anything but a philosopher in the modern sense of that term, might, I think it very likely, have pursued the study of physical science with zeal and success, had he happened to fall in with such an instructor as Sir Humphry would have been to him, in his early life. Each strove to make the other talk--and they did so in turn more charmingly than I have ever heard either on any other occasion whatsoever. Scott in his romantic narratives touched a deeper cord of feeling than usual, when he had such a listener as Davy; and Davy, when induced to open his views upon any question of scientific interest in Scott’s presence, did so with a degree of clear energetic eloquence, and with a flow of imagery and illustration, of which neither his habitual tone of table-talk (least of all in London), nor any of his prose writings (except, indeed, the posthumous Consolations in Travel) could suggest an adequate notion. I say his prose writings--for who that has read his sublime quatrains on the doctrine of Spinoza can doubt that he might have united, if he had pleased, in some great didactic poem, the vigorous ratiocination of Dryden and the moral majesty of Wordsworth? I remember William Laidlaw whispering to me, one night, when their ‘wrapt talk’ had kept the circle round the fire until long after the usual bed-time of Abbotsford--‘Gude preserve us! This is a very superior occasion! Eh, sirs!’ he added, cocking his eye like a bird, ‘I wonder if Shakspeare and Bacon ever met to screw ilk other up?’”