HAYDON AND FUSELI.
Prince Hoare introduced Haydon to Fuseli, who was so struck with his close attendance at the Royal Academy, that he one day said, “Why, when do you dine?” The account of his introduction is very characteristic. “Such was the horror connected with Fuseli’s name, (says Haydon,) that I remember perfectly well the day before I was to go to him, a letter from my father concluded in these words: ‘God speed you with the terrible Fuseli.’ Awaking from a night of awful dreaming, the awful morning came. I took my sketch-book and drawings,—invoking the protection of my good genius to bring me back alive, and sallied forth to meet the enchanter in his den! After an abstracted walk of perpetual musing, on what I should say, how I should look, and what I should do, I found myself before his door in Berners-street——1805.” Haydon was shown into his painting-room, full of Fuseli’s hideous conceptions. He adds:—“At last, when I was wondering what metamorphosis I was to undergo, the door slowly opened, and I saw a little hand come slowly round the edge of it, which did not look very gigantic, or belonging to a very powerful figure, and round came a little white-faced lion-headed man, dressed in an old flannel dressing-gown, tied by a rope, and the bottom of Mrs. Fuseli’s work-basket on his head for a cap. I was perfectly amazed! there stood the designer of Satan in many an airy whirl plunging to the earth; and was this the painter himself?—Certainly. Not such as I had imagined when enjoying his inventions. I did not know whether to laugh or cry, but at any rate I felt that I was his match if he attempted the supernatural. We quietly stared at each other, and Fuseli kindly understanding my astonishment and inexperience, asked in the mildest voice for my drawings. Here my evil genius took the lead, and instead of showing him my studies from the antique, which I had brought, and had meant to have shown him, I showed him my sketch-book I did not mean to show him, with a sketch I had made coming along, of a man pushing a sugar-cask into a grocer’s shop. Fuseli seeing my fright, said, by way of encouragement, ‘At least the fellow does his business with energy.’ ” From that hour commenced a friendship which lasted till his death.