formality of an acceptance.  Like the great lords of Picardy, who had the “right of credit” from their loyal subjects, Godwin claimed his dues from every chance acquaintance.  Crabb Robinson introduced him one evening to a gentleman named Rough.  The next day both Godwin and Rough called upon their host, each man expressing his regard for the other, and each asking Robinson if he thought the other would be a likely person to lend him fifty pounds.

There are critics who hold that Haydon excelled all other borrowers known to fame; but his is not a career upon which an admirer of the art can look with pleasure.  Haydon’s debts hunted him like hounds, and if he pursued borrowing as a means of livelihood,—­more lucrative than painting pictures which nobody would buy,—­it was only because no third avocation presented itself as a possibility.  He is not to be compared for a moment with a true expert like Sheridan, who borrowed for borrowing’s sake, and without any sordid motive connected with rents or butchers’ bills.  Haydon would, indeed, part with his money as readily as if it belonged to him.  He would hear an “inward voice” in church, urging him to give his last sovereign; and, having obeyed this voice “with as pure a feeling as ever animated a human heart,” he had no resource but immediately to borrow another.  It would have been well for him if he could have followed on such occasions the memorable example of Lady Cook, who was so impressed by a begging sermon that she borrowed a sovereign from Sydney Smith to put into the offertory; and—­the gold once between her fingers—­found herself equally unable to give it or to return it, so went home, a pound richer for her charitable impulse.

Haydon, too, would rob Peter to pay Paul, and rob Paul without paying Peter; but it was all after an intricate and troubled fashion of his own.  On one occasion he borrowed ten pounds from Webb.  Seven pounds he used to satisfy another creditor, from whom, on the strength of this payment, he borrowed ten pounds more to meet an impending bill.  It sounds like a particularly confusing game; but it was a game played in dead earnest, and without the humorous touch which makes the charm of Lady Cook’s, or of Sheridan’s methods.  Haydon would have been deeply grateful to his benefactors, had he not always stood in need of favours to come.  Sheridan might perchance have been grateful, could he have remembered who his benefactors were.  He laid the world under tribute; and because he had an aversion to opening his mail,—­an aversion with which it is impossible not to sympathize,—­he frequently made no use of the tribute when it was paid.  Moore tells us that James Wesley once saw among a pile of papers on Sheridan’s desk an unopened letter of his own, containing a ten-pound note, which he had lent Sheridan some weeks before.  Wesley quietly took possession of the letter and the money, thereby raising a delicate, and as yet unsettled, question of morality.  Had he a right to those ten pounds because they had once been his, or were they not rather Sheridan’s property, destined in the natural and proper order of things never to be returned.