I am going to the south of France in little better than a fortnight, and I would sooner lose a thousand pounds than not have the honour of appearing in the picture .-- Yours sincerely, GEORGE BORROW.[19] As Borrow was at the time in a most impoverished condition, it is not easy to believe that he would have wished to be taken at his word.

He certainly had not a thousand pounds to lose.

But he did undoubtedly, as we shall see, take that journey on foot through the south of France, after the manner of an earlier vagabond of literature--Oliver Goldsmith.
Haydon was to be far too much taken up with his own troubles during the coming months to think any more about the Borrows when he had once completed the portrait of the mayor, which he had done by July of this year.

Borrow's letter to him is, however, an obvious outcome of a remark dropped by the painter on the occasion of his one visit to his studio when the following conversation took place: 'I'll stick to the heroic,' said the painter; 'I now and then dabble in the comic, but what I do gives me no pleasure, the comic is so low; there is nothing like the heroic.

I am engaged here on a heroic picture,' said he, pointing to the canvas; 'the subject is "Pharaoh dismissing Moses from Egypt," after the last plague--the death of the first-born,--it is not far advanced--that finished figure is Moses': they both looked at the canvas, and I, standing behind, took a modest peep.