Haydon, however, had heard the news from the lips of the
courier himself. Returning to his lodgings in Great Marlborough
Street, a little before midnight on June 21st, he was crossing
Portman Square when he heard someone running after him from
the direction of Oxford Street. It was a fine night, with a high
moon which did full justice to the neo-classic elegance of John
Nash's London. All was quiet in the sleeping city, save for the
subdued sounds of revelry that came from a house on the south
side of the Square, where a rout was taking place. The courier
ran straight up to Haydon and demanded to know which was
the house of Lord Harrowby, the Lord President of the Council.
"For the Duke has beat Napoleon," the man poured out, "taking
one hundred and fifty pieces of cannon, and is marching to
Paris!" In his excitement, Haydon entirely forgot his where-
abouts, and directed the courier to the same point in Portman
Square that Lord Harrowby's house occupied in Grosvenor
Square. Off ran the courier, straight up the steps and into the
house where the rout was taking place. The violins stopped
abruptly, cheering broke out, and Haydon went racing back to
knock up his host of the evening in the Edgware Road and to
shout, "Huzza!" under the windows. "How this victory pursues
one's imagination!" he was reflecting, four days later. "Great
and glorious Wellington!" He prided himself on not having
rubbed it in when talking to Leigh Hunt, who, as a Liberal, could
not rejoice at a battle which seemed to spell the ruin of "cos-
mopolite philosophy". Hunt could only groan: "Terrible battle,
this, Haydon." William Hazlitt, another Liberal, put on a crêpe
band as a sign of mourning, and went about unwashed, un-
shaved, and in a state of intoxication for several weeks, because
he chose to believe that Bonaparte had been the champion of
liberty and enlightenment. Chacun a son goût. . . . Tory or
Liberal, everyone agreed that the age that could produce such
events was sublime. "In the history of the world, never was
there such a period as this of 1815," was Haydon's final
verdict.

It was the age of the monstrous, the heroic, and the sublime.
The ordinary civilian Englishman could still leave wars to be
fought by the professional soldiers, together with what the Duke
called "the scum of the earth, enlisted for drink", while he sat
at home and cheered, or groaned, at the distant thunder of the
dynasts. The cult of sheer size, of the colossal, had been fostered

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