A few days before Barnum brought Tom Thumb back to the Egyptian Hall, Benjamin Robert Haydon, the historical painter, had taken another room in the hall to exhibit his latest painting, “The Banishment of Aristides,” together with his “Nero Playing His Lyre While Rome Is Burning.” Haydon depended upon this exhibition to relieve him from debt. He wrote in his now famous diary, “I fear nothing on earth but my banker, where I have not five shillings on account, and have a bill coming due and want help.” Haydon’s two paintings were part of a series he planned for the decoration of the House of Lords, but Sir Robert Peel, who was one of his patrons, told Haydon he feared the House would not accept the works. Haydon was the personal friend of Keats, who sent him his poems for criticism as he wrote them, and also of Wordsworth, who sent his sonnets, “piping hot from the brain,” as one of the poet’s letters expressed it. When Haydon exhibited at Egyptian Hall, he was sixty years old, and worried almost to frenzy by the struggles of those years. He trembled in fear of the debtor’s prison, which he had already experienced once. His father had been a printer and bookseller, and Haydon had no means but his art. His independent spirit and lack of patience with ignorance caused him to upbraid for their stupidity those patrons he was lucky enough to get. William Michael Rossetti wrote that he was vain and combative, and _Blackwood’s Magazine_ had nicknamed him “The Cockney Raphael.” Haydon’s grand conception was a series of historical paintings to adorn England’s public buildings. He had already painted “Solomon,” “Jerusalem,” “The Banishment of Aristides with His Wife and Children,” “Nero Playing His Lyre While Rome Is Burning,” and he was at work on “Alfred and the First Jury,” when General Tom Thumb moved into Egyptian Hall. Haydon’s scheme for a series of historical paintings had been taken up with George IV, but that king was always more interested in private affairs than in public works.