Notwithstanding the large income of Vandyck, his style of living was so splendid and costly as to involve him in heavy debt.  To repair his fortunes, he studied alchemy for a time, in the hope of discovering the philosopher’s stone.  But towards the end of his life he was enabled to retrieve his position, and to leave a comfortable competency to his widow.  Rembrandt, on the other hand, involved himself in debt through his love of art.  He was an insatiable collector of drawings, armour, and articles of vertu, and thus became involved in such difficulties that he was declared a bankrupt.  His property remained under legal control for thirteen years, until his death.

The great Italian artists were for the most part temperate and moderate men, and lived within their means.  Haydon, in his Autobiography, says, “Rafaelle, Michael Angelo, Zeuxis, Apelles, Rubens, Reynolds, Titian, were rich and happy.  Why?  Because with their genius they combined practical prudence.”  Haydon himself was an instance of the contrary practice.  His life was a prolonged struggle with difficulty and debt.  He was no sooner free from one obligation, than he was involved in another.  His “Mock Election” was painted in the King’s Bench prison, while he lay there for debt.  There is a strange entry in his Journal:  “I borrowed L10 to-day of my butterman, Webb, an old pupil of mine, recommended to me by Sir George Beaumont twenty-four years ago, but who wisely, after drawing hands, set up a butter shop, and was enabled to send his old master L10 in his necessity.”  Haydon’s Autobiography is full of his contests with lawyers and sheriffs’ officers.  Creditors dogged and dunned him at every step.  “Lazarus’s head,” he writes, “was painted just after an arrest; Eucles was finished from a man in possession; the beautiful face in Xenophon in the afternoon, after a morning spent in begging mercy of lawyers; and Cassandra’s head was finished in agony not to be described, and her hand completed after a broker’s man in possession, in an execution put in for taxes."[1]

[Footnote 1:  Haydon—­Autobiography, vol. ii., p. 400.]

Cowper used to say that he never knew a poet who was not thriftless; and he included himself.  Notwithstanding his quiet, retired life, he was constantly outrunning the constable.  “By the help of good management,” he once wrote, “and a clear notion of economical matters, I contrived in three months to spend the income of a twelvemonth.”  But though the number of thriftless poets may be great, it must not be forgotten that Shakespeare, who stands at the head of the list, was a prudent man.  He economized his means, and left his family in comfort.  His contemporaries were, however, for the most part indebted men.  Ben Jonson was often embarrassed, and always poor, borrowing twenty shillings at a time from Henslowe; though he rarely denied himself another jolly night at the “Mermaid.”  Massinger was often so reduced in circumstances as not to be able to pay his score at the same tavern.