I see by the papers you have been ill-used; I hope you won't be
angry--I mean no offence; but I just wish to say, as you have dined
here many years and always paid, if it would be a convenience during
your present work to dine here till it is done--so that you may not be
obliged to spend your money here when you may want it--I was going to
say that you need be under no apprehension--hem! for a dinner."' This
handsome offer was condescendingly accepted, and the good man seemed
quite relieved.

While Solomon was slowly progressing at the expense of the landlord
and the eating-house keeper, Haydon spent his leisure in literary
rather than artistic circles. At Leigh Hunt's he met, and became
intimate with Charles Lamb, Keats, Hazlitt, and John Scott. In January
1813 he writes: 'Spent the evening with Leigh Hunt at West End. His
society is always delightful. I do not know a purer, more virtuous
partner, or a more witty and enlivening man. We talked of his
approaching imprisonment. He said it would be a great pleasure if he
were certain to be sent to Newgate, because he should be in the midst
of his friends.' Hazlitt won our hero's liking by praising his
'Macbeth.' 'Thence began a friendship,' Haydon tells us, 'for that
interesting man, that singular mixture of friend and fiend, radical
and critic, metaphysician, poet, and painter, on whose word no one
could rely, on whose heart no one could calculate, and some of whose
deductions he himself would try to explain in vain.... Mortified at
his own failure [in painting] he resolved that as he had not
succeeded, no one else should, and he spent the whole of his
after-life in damping the ardour, chilling the hopes, and dimming the
prospects of patrons and painters, so that after I once admitted him,
I had nothing but forebodings of failure to bear up against, croakings
about the climate, and sneers at the taste of the public.'