document, and as the portrait of a temperament, its value can hardly
be overestimated; while as a tragedy it is none the less tragic
because it contains elements of the grotesque. Haydon set out with the
laudable intention of writing the exact truth about himself and his
career, holding that every man who has suffered for a principle, and
who has been unjustly persecuted and oppressed, should write his own
history, and set his own case before his countrymen. It is a fortunate
accident for his readers that he should have been gifted with the
faculty of picturesque expression and an exceptionally keen power of
observation. If not a scholar, he was a man of wide reading, of deep
though desultory thinking, and a good critic where the work of others
was concerned. He seems to have desired to conceal nothing, nor to set
down aught in malice; if he fell into mistakes and misrepresentations,
these were the result of unconscious prejudice, and the exaggerative
tendency of a brain that, if not actually warped, trembled on the
border-line of sanity. He hoped that his mistakes would be a warning
to others, his successes a stimulus, and that the faithful record of
his struggles and aspirations would clear his memory from the
aspersions that his enemies had cast upon it.

Haydon was born at Plymouth on January 26, 1786. He was the lineal
descendant of an ancient Devonshire family, the Haydons of Cadbay, who
had been ruined by a Chancery suit a couple of generations earlier,
and had consequently taken a step downwards in the social scale. His
grandfather, who married Mary Baskerville, a descendant of the famous
printer, set up as a bookseller in Plymouth, and, dying in 1773,
bequeathed his business to his son Benjamin, the father of our hero.
This Benjamin, who married the daughter of a Devonshire clergyman
named Cobley, was a man of the old-fashioned, John Bull type, who
loved his Church and king, believed that England was the only great