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Then, not to be outdone in loyal devotion to his friend, the woman of the hour, Haydon painted her portrait and exhibited it among portraits of other celebrities of the year. It was not a flattering likeness—a reproduction of it is given in these pages—and its reception, although not particularly hostile, was not altogether friendly. Haydon’s enemies—and he had many—sniggered and passed on; Miss Mitford’s friends nearly all commiserated her. “Now to the portrait,” says she in a letter to her friend, Mrs. S. C. Hall. “One friend of mine used to compare it to a cook-maid of sixty, who had washed her dishes and sat down to mend her stockings; another to Sir John Falstaff in the disguise of the old woman of Brentford; and a third to Old Bannister, in _Moll Flagon_. I have not myself seen it since it was finished, but there must have been something very formidable about it to put such comparisons into people’s heads.” With her usual good-nature she would not suffer Haydon or his work to be maligned, and so was kept well occupied in defending him.