Britons take laughing gas merrily. Tories take it more seriously

The bee seemed to be enjoying itself immensely. First, it was “unable to fly in a straight line”; then it flew in circles; then finally it “fell to the ground as if giddy.” When Humphry Davy gave laughing gas to other animals they reacted similarly: a lizard staggered; a flounder floundered; a butterfly “wrapt [his wings] round his body” before falling senseless. Humans were thrilled. Samuel Taylor Coleridge found laughing gas “highly pleasurable”; another user “felt like the sound of a harp”; a third concluded that “the atmosphere of [the] highest of all possible heavens must be composed of this gas.”