historical pictures of a saleable size. The advance was to be secured
on a life insurance, and to be repaid out of the sale of the pictures,
with interest at four per cent. This offer was accepted with some
reluctance, and the following year was one of comparative peace and
quiet. The Journal gives evidence of greater ease of mind, and renewed
pleasure in work. Haydon's love for his wife waxed rather than waned
with the passing of the years, and his children, of whom he too soon
had the poor man's quiverful, were an ever-present delight. 'My
domestic happiness is doubled,' he writes about this time. 'Daily and
hourly my sweet Mary proves the justice of my choice. My boy Frank
gives tokens of being gifted at two years old, God bless him! My
ambition would be to make him a public man.... I have got into my old
delightful habits of study again. The mixture of literature and
painting I really think the perfection of human happiness. I paint a
head, revel in colour, hit an expression, sit down fatigued, take up a
poet or historian, write my own thoughts, muse on the thoughts of
others, and hours, troubles, and the tortures of disappointed ambition
pass and are forgotten.'

Portraits, and one or two commissions for small pictures, kept Haydon
afloat throughout this year, but a widespread commercial distress in
the early part of 1826 affected his gains, and in February he records
that for the last five weeks he has been suffering the tortures of the
Inferno. He was persuaded, much against his will, to send his pictures
to the Academy, and he was proportionately annoyed at the adverse
criticism that greeted his attempts at portraiture. This attack he
regarded as the result of a deep-laid plot to injure him in a
lucrative branch of his art. He consoled himself by beginning a large
picture of 'Alexander taming Bucephalus,' the 'finest subject on
earth.' Through his friend and opposite neighbour, Carew the sculptor,