Mary, and having no longer anything to hope in love, I get more
content with my lot, which, God knows, is rapturous beyond
imagination. Here I sit sketching, with the loveliest face before me,
smiling and laughing, and "solitude is not." Marriage has increased my
happiness beyond expression. In the intervals of study, a few minutes'
conversation with a creature one loves is the greatest of all reliefs.
God bless us both! My pecuniary difficulties are great, but my love is
intense, my ambition is intense, and my hope in God's protection
cheering. Bewick, my pupil, has realised my hopes in his picture of
"Jacob and Rachel." But it is cold work talking of pupils when one's
soul is full of a beloved woman! I am really and truly in love, and
without affectation, I can talk, write, or think of nothing else.'

But if a love-match brings increased happiness, it also brings
weightier cares and responsibilities. Haydon's credit had been in a
measure restored by the success of his last picture, but his creditors
seemed to resent his marriage, and during the months that followed,
gave him little peace. He was obliged, in the intervals of painting,
to rush hither and thither to pacify this creditor, quiet the fears of
that, remove the ill-will of a third, and borrow money at usurious
interest from a fourth in order to keep his engagements with a fifth.
In spite of all his compromises and arrangements, he was arrested more
than once during this year, but so far he had been able to keep out of
prison. His favourite pupil Bewick, who sat to him for the head of
Lazarus (being appropriately pale and thin from want of food) has left
an account of the difficulties under which the picture was painted. 'I
think I see the painter before me,' he writes, 'his palette and
brushes in the left hand, returning from the sheriff's officer in the
adjoining room, pale, calm, and serious--no agitation--mounting his
high steps and continuing his arduous task, and as he looks round to