country in the world, swore that Napoleon won all his battles by
bribery, and would have knocked down any man who dared to disagree
with him. The childhood of the future historical painter was a
picturesque and stirring period, filled with the echoes of revolution
and the rumours of wars. The Sound was crowded with fighting ships
preparing for sea, or returning battered and blackened, with wounded
soldiers on board and captured vessels in tow. Plymouth itself was
full of French prisoners, who made little models of guillotines out of
their meat-bones, and sold them to the children for the then
fashionable amusement of 'cutting off Louis XVI.'s head.'

Benjamin was sent to the local grammar-school, whose headmaster, Dr.
Bidlake, was a man of some culture, though not a deep classic. He
wrote poetry, encouraged his pupils to draw, and took them for country
excursions, with a view to fostering their love of nature. Mr. Haydon,
though he was proud of Benjamin's early attempts at drawing, had no
desire that he should be turned into an artist, and becoming alarmed
at Dr. Bidlake's dilettante methods, he transferred his son to the
Plympton Grammar-school, where Sir Joshua Reynolds had been educated,
with strict injunctions to the headmaster that the boy was on no
account to have drawing-lessons. On leaving school at sixteen,
Benjamin, after, a few months with a firm of accountants at Exeter,
was bound apprentice to his father for seven years, and it was then
that his troubles began.

'I hated day-books, ledgers, bill-books, and cashbooks,' he tells us.
'I hated standing behind the counter, and insulted the customers; I
hated the town and all the people in it.' At last, after a quarrel
with a customer who tried to drive a bargain, this proud spirit
refused to enter the shop again. In vain his father pointed out to him