After these offences of self-will and vanity Tom Taylor finds us some other little thing—­I think it is inaccuracy.  Poor Haydon says in one phrase that he paid all his friends on such a day, and in another soon following that the money given or lent to him had been insufficient to pay them completely; and assuredly there are many revisions, after-thoughts, or other accidents to account for such a slip.  His editor says the discrepancy is “characteristic,” but I protest I cannot find another like it among those melancholy pages.  If something graver could but be sifted out from all these journals and letters of frank confession, by the explainer!  Here, then, is the last and least:  Haydon was servile in his address to “men of rank.”  But his servility seems to be very much in the fashion of his day—­nothing grosser; and the men who set the fashion had not to shape their style to Haydon’s perpetual purpose, which was to ask for commissions or for money.

Not the forsaken man only but also the fallen city evokes this exercise of historical morality, until a man in flourishing London is not afraid to assign the causes of the decay of Venice; and there is not a watering place upon our coasts but is securely aware of merited misfortune on the Adriatic.

Haydon was grateful, and he helped men in trouble; he had pupils, and never a shilling in pay for teaching them.  He painted a good thing—­the head of his Lazarus.  He had no fault of theory:  what fault of theory can a man commit who stands, as he did, by “Nature and the Greeks”?  In theory he soon outgrew the Italians then most admired; he had an honest mind.

But nothing was able to gain for him the pardon that is never to be gained, the impossible pardon—­pardon for that first and last mistake—­the mistake as to his own powers.  If to pardon means to dispense from consequence, how should this be pardoned?  Art would cease to be itself, by such an amnesty.

A NORTHERN FANCY

“I remember,” said Dryden, writing to Dennis, “I remember poor Nat Lee, who was then upon the verge of madness, yet made a sober and witty answer to a bad poet who told him, ’It was an easy thing to write like a madman.’  ‘No,’ said he, ’’tis a very difficult thing to write like a madman, but ‘tis a very easy thing to write like a fool.’” Nevertheless, the difficult song of distraction is to be heard, a light high note, in English poetry throughout two centuries at least, and one English poet lately set that untethered lyric, the mad maid’s song, flying again.