pleasing. It came out of the Consolidated Fund, to which Haydon, who for years had been paying his taxes regularly, must have contributed his share. Had Sir Robert Peel made up the price he paid for the "Napoleon” to the 500 guineas, which he ought to have given Haydon for the picture, such a sum (3897.) would have been a real benefit to the painter, and would probably have saved his life. And it would only have been just from the man with 40,000l. a year towards the poor painter who had painted him so fine a picture, had got so mean a price for it, and was now asking for “help.” But no, not one sixpence from his own private purse would Sir Robert Peel give. That would look like concession. How singular that this man, who never had a guiding principle in politics, who would yield everything to pressure, but resist everything till he was pressed, should, in a matter of this kind, draw a hard and fast line against the evidence of facts he could not controvert, and refuse to grant to feeling what his stiff-necked pride rejected. It was not magnanimous. It was wanting in generosity, cold in heart, and unworthy of a man in Sir Robert Peel's position. But the highest virtue of which the late Sir Robert Peel was capable, and the last he arrived at, was justice to those he had wronged.

WHAT A PICTURE IT IS!

Haydon acknowledged the receipt of the 50l., and in the warmth of his own good heart he paid a compliment to that which he assumed to belong to Sir Robert Peel. But it is to be observed, he put the money aside and did not touch it. This is significant. The 18th, 19th, and 20th of June came, passed, and brought no answer from the Duke of Beaufort or Lord Brougham. Haydon grew gloomy, and became dispirited as a jaded horse. What he suffered during these days, and how acutely, his daily journal tells. He feels his "heart sink"; his brain " 'grows confused"; he lies awake at night in great "the agony of mind." He prays God to bless him through evils" of each day. He takes down to a bookseller a parcel of

66

books he had not paid for, and begs him to "take care of them." He takes an unfinished sketch, upon which he was engaged for Sir W., then Mr. Fairbairn,1 and had been part paid for, and carries it to the house of a relative of this friend, and leaves it in the hall, with a hasty message for its care. He does the same with one or two other small works, and he passes one entire day burning vast quantities of correspondence and documents in the court-yard of his house. In the intervals he sits in his painting-room unable to work, staring at his picture like "an idiot," his brain "pressed down by anxiety," his frenzied eyelids suing in vain for rest. Every post brings him angry demands for the settlement of bills, threats of execution, and immediate prospect of arrest, imprisonment, and ruin. One by one his last hopes fall from him, like dead leaves fluttering from a bough. Good God! what a picture it is! To think of this man, after forty years of noble work to refine the taste and enlighten the understanding of the nobility and people of wealthy England, so as to make art in its higher range a delightful mode of moral elevation, and design a means of their material prosperity, sitting beggared by want of employment, silent and abstracted, with all the disjointed fragments of his perishing hopes about him, in a chaos of unspeakable thought, his soul "melting by reason of his trouble," his brain throbbing with fire, pondering over his past life, and confronting his deep love for his art with his broken fortunes; till, stung by the bitterness of the contrast, like a dying gladiator, he determines on self-murder, lest he be left to languish in his agony. It is a picture of human suffering, under the uttermost burden of wretchedness, that one does not see into so distinctly. Nor was it wholly creditable to the country, nor, in this case, to the Prime Minister of that country in which it was there to be seen. morning of the 21st June he enters in his journal :

On the

66 Slept horribly-prayed in sorrow-got up in agitation."

1 It is now in the possession of Lady Fairbairn, widow of the late Sir William Fairbairn, Bart., F.R.S. The subject is "Christ before Pilate."-ED.

THE END NEAR.

This loss of rest at night was the worst sign about him. I have heard him say he could face any misfortune if he got his sleep. But he could not support the irritability arising from disturbed rest. The action of his brain became morbid and unhealthy. On Sunday, this 21st June, he walked out with one of the family to dine with his friend, Commissioner Evans, at Hampstead. On his way through the Regent's Park he complained much of the intense heat, and said, the night before, when lying awake, he had understood how it was that people committed suicide; that he had dwelt with pleasure on the idea of throwing himself off the Monument and dashing his head to pieces. He was begged not to dwell on such thoughts, and after a time he grew more calm. He spoke of his embarrassments, and appeared to show the greatest repugnance to having to go through again all the degradation and miseries of imprisonment and ruin. They parted at the Avenue Road bridge, and on parting he said, “Tell your mother not to be anxious about me," and went on his way.1 About 5 P.M. he returned home. He said he was not in sufficiently good spirits to stay at Hampstead. At dinner he got up from his chair and turned a glazed picture to the wall: his brain could not bear the reflected light. He looked flushed and haggard, and passed a silent and abstracted evening. That night he was heard walking about his room nearly the whole night, apparently in great agitation. It was in those wakeful hours he settled his resolve. He was dressed and out of his room early the next morning (22d June), and walked down, before breakfast, to Rivière, a gunmaker in Oxford Street, near Regent Street. Here he bought one of a pair of pistols. He came home about 9 A.M., breakfasted alone, then went to his painting-room, and probably wrote the

My brother was so struck by this conversation that, on his return, he had the intention of calling upon and consulting with the family medical man, but my mother, to whom he mentioned his fears, laughed at the idea of my father committing “suicide,” and begged of my brother to dismiss the suspicion from his mind. Her treatment of his fears made him put aside his intention. -Ed.

letters to his children, his will,' and his "last thoughts."

As my mother and sister passed the painting-room door on their way to their rooms, about 10.30 A.M., they tried the door-it was locked-and he called out very fiercely, "Who's there?" A few minutes after, as if regretting the tone in which he had spoken, he came up to my mother's room, kissed her affectionately, and lingered about the room as if he had something to say. But he said little, except to ask her to call that day on an old friend (one of the executors he had just named in his will) and, returned to his painting-room, deliberately wrote in his journal :—

"God forgive me.-Amen!"

"Stretch me no longer on this tough world."-Lear.

and in a few moments had destroyed himself.

THE END.

My poor sister shortly afterwards, returning home alone, and thinking to comfort and console her father in his anxieties, stole gently down to his painting-room, tried the door, it opened, and she looked in. What she saw I never dared to speak to her about. A few weeks before her own death, in the dim twilight of a summer's night, she told me. At first, in the subdued light of the painting-room, she could not distinguish clearly; and the awful silence of the room, broken only by the loud ticking of his watch, chilled her heart. It was as if some sorrow had passed into the air, and oppressed her. She looked for him, but he was not sitting at his table, though his watch was there, and his Journal'lay open, and some letters and a church-service she had given to him. Nor was he in the further corner where he commonly stood to study his picture. Another glance, and she saw him lying on the floor. At first she thought he had thrown himself on the floor to study the foreground of his picture she called gently to him, but he did not answer. She came forward, and leaned hesitatingly over, fearing to dis

1 Being unwitnessed, it was invalid.--ED.

turb him too abruptly, and softly called again. Still he was heedless. She looked steadily at him; he was all on the floor, as if huddled together. Then a horrible, an indescribable dread seized her—he had fallen into a fit. She stepped close to him, her foot slipped as she stooped quickly and touched his head, which was cold as ice. She looked, and his ruddy cheek was white and waxen as if with the pallor of death; a fixed and glassy light was in his eye, and he lay there without motion, pulse, or breath. In a pool of what she first thought red paint spilled upon the floor around her, she saw a razor, and close to it a pistol. Then the awful truth flashed upon her mind. He had destroyed himself, and she was standing in his blood.

Thus died Haydon, by his own hand, in his sixty-first year, in full vigor of life, and on the threshold of what appeared to be a hale old age. It was a sad end to a courageous life of galling conditions: a poor reward for forty-two years of faithful and struggling service to the public under mountains of calumny, contradiction, and neglect. He was buried in Paddington Churchyard, next to Mrs. Siddons, and in the midst of his children who were so dear to his heart. His death created a profound sensation; and an enormous crowd followed him to his grave.

HAYDON'S FAMILY.

Haydon left a widow and three children-all that survived out of his family of eight. Two lovely girls and three boys had sunk under the distresses of their home. Indeed, I am surprised any of us survived. But a few years, and his widow was laid by his side, worn prematurely to death by the sorrows and anxieties of her life. A few more years, and his only surviving daughter-once one of the most beautiful girls in Englandsunk into an early grave, carrying with her the recollections of that terrible day, from the shock of which she never recovered. And this is Historical Painting in England!

Immediately on Haydon's death becoming known, the nobility joined in a public meeting of condolence to the family,