NATHANIEL PARKER WILLIS

LADY HESTER STANHOPE ON HORSEBACK

LADY HESTER STANHOPE IN EASTERN COSTUME

PRINCE PUeCKLER-MUSKAU

MARY HOWITT




BENJAMIN ROBERT HAYDON

PART I


If it be true that the most important ingredient in the composition of
the self-biographer is a spirit of childlike vanity, with a blend of
unconscious egoism, few men have ever been better equipped than Haydon
for the production of a successful autobiography. In naive simplicity
of temperament he has only been surpassed by Pepys, in fulness
of self-revelation by Rousseau, and his _Memoirs_ are not
unworthy of a place in the same category as the _Diary_ and the
_Confessions_. From the larger public, the work has hardly
attracted the attention it deserves; it is too long, too minute, too
heavily weighted with technical details and statements of financial
embarrassments, to be widely or permanently popular. But as a human