portrait must have been very tempting.  “What a pity it was,” he said, “that Crome was dead.”  “Crome,” said the orator of the deputation that had called on John Borrow,

“Crome; yes, he was a clever man, a very clever man, in his way; he was good at painting landscapes and farm-houses, but he would not do in the present instance, were he alive.  He had no conception of the heroic, sir.  We want some person capable of representing our mayor standing under the Norman arch of the cathedral.” [20]

At the mention of the heroic John bethought himself of Haydon, and suggested his name; hence his visit to London, and his proposed interview with Haydon.  The two brothers went together to call upon the “painter of the heroic” at his studio in Connaught Terrace, Hyde Park.  There was some difficulty about their admission, and it turned out afterwards that Haydon thought they might be duns, as he was very hard up at the time.  His eyes glistened at the mention of the £100.  “I am not very fond of painting portraits,” he said, “but a mayor is a mayor, and there is something grand in that idea of the Norman arch.”  And thus Mayor Hawkes came to be painted by Benjamin Haydon, and his portrait may be found, not without diligent search, among the many municipal worthies that figure on the walls of that most picturesque old Hall in Norwich.  Here is Borrow’s description of the painting:

The original mayor was a mighty, portly man, with a bull’s head, black hair, body like that of a dray horse, and legs and thighs corresponding; a man six foot high at the least.  To his bull’s head, black hair, and body the painter had done justice; there was one point, however, in which the portrait did not correspond with the original—the legs were disproportionably short, the painter having substituted his own legs for those of the mayor.

John Borrow described Robert Hawkes to his brother as a person of many qualifications:

—big and portly, with a voice like Boanerges; a religious man, the possessor of an immense pew; loyal, so much so that I once heard him say that he would at any time go three miles to hear any one sing God save the King; moreover, a giver of excellent dinners.  Such is our present mayor, who, owing to his loyalty, his religion, and a little, perhaps, to his dinners, is a mighty favourite.

Haydon, who makes no mention of the Borrows in his Correspondence or Autobiography, although there is one letter of George Borrow’s to him in the former work, had been in jail for debt three years prior to the visit of the Borrows.  He was then at work on his greatest success in “the heroic”—The Raising of Lazarus, a canvas nineteen feet long by fifteen high.  The debt was one to house decorators, for the artist had ever large ideas.  The bailiff, he tells us, [21] was so agitated at the sight of the painting of Lazarus in the studio that he cried out, “Oh, my God!  Sir, I won’t arrest you.  Give me your word to meet me at twelve at the attorney’s, and I’ll take it.”  In 1821 Haydon married, and a little later we find him again “without a single shilling in the world—with a large picture before me not half done.”  In April, 1822, he is arrested at the instance of his colourman, “with whom I had dealt for fifteen years,” and in November of the same year he is arrested again at the instance of “a miserable apothecary.”  In April, 1823, we find him in the King’s Bench Prison, from which he was released in July.  The Raising of Lazarus meanwhile had gone to pay his upholsterer £300, and his Christ’s Entry into Jerusalem had been sold for £240, although it had brought him £3000 in receipts at exhibitions.  Clearly heroic pictures did not pay, and Haydon here took up “the torment of portrait-painting” as he called it.

“Can you wonder,” he wrote in July, 1825, “that I nauseate portraits, except portraits of clever people.  I feel quite convinced that every portrait-painter, if there be purgatory, will leap at once to heaven, without this previous purification.”

Perhaps it was Mayor Hawkes who helped to inspire this feeling.  Yet the hundred pounds that John Borrow was able to procure must have been a godsend, for shortly before this we find him writing in his diary of the desperation that caused him to sell his books.  “Books that had cost me £20 I got only £3 for.  But it was better than starvation.”  Indeed it was in April of this year that the very baker was “insolent,” and so in May, 1824, as we learn from Tom Taylor’s Life, he produced “a full-length portrait of Mr. Hawkes, a late Mayor of Norwich, painted for St. Andrew’s Hall in that city.”  But I must leave Haydon’s troubled career, which closes so far as the two brothers are concerned with a letter from George to Haydon written the following year from 26 Bryanston Street, Portman Square:

Dear Sir,—I should feel extremely obliged if you would allow me to sit to you as soon as possible.  I am going to the south of France in little better than a fortnight, and I would sooner lose a thousand pounds than not have the honour of appearing in the picture.—Yours sincerely,

George Borrow. [22]

As Borrow was at the time in a most impoverished condition, it is not easy to believe that he would have wished to be taken at his word.  He certainly had not a thousand pounds to lose.  But he did undoubtedly, as we shall see, take that journey on foot through the south of France, after the manner of an earlier vagabond of literature—Oliver Goldsmith.  Haydon was to be far too much taken up with his own troubles during the coming months to think any more about the Borrows when he had once completed the portrait of the mayor, which he had done by July of this year.  Borrow’s letter to him is, however, an obvious outcome of a remark dropped by the painter on the occasion of his one visit to his studio when the following conversation took place:

“I’ll stick to the heroic,” said the painter; “I now and then dabble in the comic, but what I do gives me no pleasure, the comic is so low; there is nothing like the heroic.  I am engaged here on a heroic picture,” said he, pointing to the canvas; “the subject is ‘Pharaoh dismissing Moses from Egypt,’ after the last plague—the death of the first-born,—it is not far advanced—that finished figure is Moses”: they both looked at the canvas, and I, standing behind, took a modest peep.  The picture, as the painter said, was not far advanced, the Pharaoh was merely in outline; my eye was, of course, attracted by the finished figure, or rather what the painter had called the finished figure; but, as I gazed upon it, it appeared to me that there was something defective—something unsatisfactory in the figure.  I concluded, however, that the painter, notwithstanding what he had said, had omitted to give it the finishing touch.  “I intend this to be my