Harp whilst Rome was Burning," and some others. In the large front room of the Egyptian Hall, General Tom Thumb was holding his levees, and a swarm of people crowded to these, and very few looked in on Haydon's exhibition.
In his diary he enters: "21 April. Tom Thumb had 12,000 people last week. B. R. Haydon 133½ (the ½ a little girl). Exquisite taste of the English people!"
He closed his exhibition on 18 May, and had lost by it £111 8s. rod. He wrote: "I have not decayed, but the people have been corrupted. I am the same, they are not."
This was a wound so severe to his vanity that it never healed. He abused the public, contrasting his own merits with those of his diminutive rival, and mixing up the sublime with the ridiculous in such a manner as to make his complaints the source of laughter rather than of commiseration. He was at some moments in so excited a condition from his own disappointment, contrasted with the success of the dwarf and the showman, that he appeared to his friends to be almost insane.
On 22 June he wrote in his diary the lines from Lear: —
Stretch me no longer on this rough world.
This was written between half-past ten and a quarter to eleven o'clock on that morning. He was in his studio. About a quarter to eleven his wife and daughter heard the report of firearms, but took little notice of it, as they supposed it to proceed from the troops then exercising in the Park. Mrs. Haydon went out. Miss Haydon entered the painting-room, and found her father stretched dead before the easel on which stood his unfinished picture of "King Alfred and the First English Jury"—his white hairs dabbled in blood, a
