“My sister, hanging over my poor mother, wept painfully. She, Cross, my uncle and aunt, were all sobbing and much touched; for my part, my chest hove up and down as I struggled with emotions at this singular and afflicting meeting. Disappointment in love, where the character is amiable, gives a pathetic interest to woman or man. But how much more than ordinary sympathy must he excite who, dumb by nature, can only express his feelings by the lightenings of the eye! Thus had this man been left for thirty years, brooding over affections wounded as for the mere pleasure of torture. For many months after my mother married he was frantic and ungovernable at her continued absence, and then sank into sullen sourness. His relations and friends endeavoured to explain to him the cause of her going away, but he was never satisfied, and never believed them; now, when the recollection of her, young and beautiful, might occasionally have soothed his imagination, she suddenly bursts on him with two children, the offspring of her marriage with his rival--and that so altered, bowed, and weakened as to root out the association of her youthful beauty with the days of his happy thoughts. “There are moments of suffering or joy when all thought of human frailties is swept away in the gush of sympathy. Such a moment was this. His anger, his frantic indignation, and his sullen silence at her long absence, all passed away before her worn and sickly face. He saw her before him, broken and dying; he felt all his affection return, and flinging himself forward on the table, he burst into a paroxysm of tears as if his very heart-strings would crack. By degrees we calmed him, for nature had been relieved by this agonizing grief, and they parted in a few moments for the last time.” Next day Haydon and his sister went on with their mother, but did not reach London with her; she died at Salt Hill, in the inn. Surely had B. R. but deigned to paint a picture of the old dumb lover with arms outspread on the table, weeping--as he so touchingly describes the scene, it would have appealed to the public. But no! the scene was not heroic. Old Cross was not a classic figure. Haydon had resolved to be a painter of heroic in art or be nothing.