When Flaxman was taken to Italy, Fuseli was
given to me for a season,

And now Flaxman hath given me Hayley, his
friend, to be mine.

"You," he wrote to Hayley, "conducted me through three years that would have been the darkest years that ever mortal suffered . . . I know that if I had not been with you I must have perished."

He had the neurotic's sense of time. Like Andrew Marvell he could say:

at my back I always hear,

Time's winged chariot hurrying near.

"Every moment lost is a moment that cannot be redeemed." "Temptations are on the right hand and on the left. Behind, the sea of time and space roars and follows swiftly. He who keeps not right onwards is lost; and if our footsteps slide in clay, how can we do otherwise than fear and tremble?"

"There are two races of people," according to Mr. Sinclair Lewis, "only two, and they live side by side." They will never understand each other and it is madness for them to debate. They call each other the neurotic and the stupid.

If William Blake was neurotic, William Hayley was stupid. He was the lineal ancestor of the old lady in the plush chair at the Park Avenue Hotel who reaches out a qivering hand for the newspaper and says, "I thought I'd just like to look over the death notices." It was Hayley's work, said Byron, "to damn the dead with purgatorial praise."

Follow his correspondence with Flaxman for a short period. "I was enabled to compose on a sudden, the other morning at the dawn of day, what I had wish'd to do in vain for some years

I mean an Epitaph, that may, I think, be unexceptionable, on that wonderful Being, my poor Eliza!" Again he sent to the same "sublime sculptor," marked "Most private," "A recent epitaph new-born ... and designed to be plac'd with a work of the sublime sculptor in the Abbey or in St. Paul's." The sculptor answered perhaps in his own rôle of one who preferred living to starving, for Hayley's next letter ran: "Let me now thank my dear warm-hearted Friend for his animated Expressions concerning a monument in the Abbey. No! my excellent Monitor, I did not mean to be so improperly lavish, as to defray the

1 Hayley letters in the Fairfax Murray Collection, Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge.

expense of that monument." Later he wrote: "I was delighted by your kind praise of my various Epitaphs-the best return I can make to praise so dearly welcome is to transcribe for you a new Epitaph that I have just compos'd:

Hicks, the kind usher to the social Room,

Here points, to all, the all-awaiting Tomb.

Keep the epitaphs in perfect privacy," he urged. "I am making a little collection of Epitaphs in manuscript," he wrote, "and am astonished to find them so numerous. I shall close the list with my own, which I composed some years ago."

This writer of epitaphs, let us reflect with awe, was once offered the laureateship. Of him Byron further wrote:

His style in youth or age is still the same
Forever feeble and forever tame.

Triumphant first see "Temper's Triumphs" shine!
At least I'm sure they triumphed over mine.
Of "Music's Triumphs" all who read may swear
That luckless Music never triumphed there.

Southey said everything about Hayley was good except his poetry. Here I am sure that Southey used "good" in its worst sense. There is an irre

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