This biography tells the story of a great artist and diarist, an irrepressible correspondent, an incessant pamphleteer, Benjamin Robert Haydon. An essential figure for understanding the art of the Romantic period, Haydon recorded in his diary the dazzle of the greats he admired heroes like Napoleon and Wellington, and politicians such as Grey, Brougham, Melbourne, and Peel. Above all, Haydon wrote about writers, Wordsworth, Keats, Hazlitt, Hunt, Shelley, the Lambs, and late in life, Elizabeth Barrett. (Distributed by Rutgers University Press for The Wordsworth Trust.)