'You are unjust, depend upon it,' he writes, 'in your estimate of
Byron's poetry, and wrong in ranking Wordsworth beyond him. There are
things in Byron's poetry so exquisite that fifty or five hundred years
hence they will be read, felt, and adored throughout the world. I
grant that Wordsworth is very pure, very holy, very orthodox, and
occasionally very elevated, highly poetical, and oftener insufferably
obscure, starched, dowdy, anti-human, and anti-sympathetic, but he
never will be ranked above Byron, nor classed with Milton.... I
dislike his selfish Quakerism, his affectation of superior virtue, his
utter insensibility to the frailties, the beautiful frailties of
passion. I was walking with him once in Pall Mall; we darted into
Christie's. In the corner of the room was a beautiful copy of the
"Cupid and Psyche" (statues) kissing. Cupid is taking her lovely chin,
and turning her pouting mouth to meet his, while he archly bends down,
as if saying, "Pretty dear!"... Catching sight of the Cupid as he and
I were coming out, Wordsworth's face reddened, he showed his teeth,
and then said in a loud voice, "_The Dev-v-vils!_" There's a
mind! Ought not this exquisite group to have softened his heart as
much as his old, grey-mossed rocks, his withered thorn, and his
dribbling mountain streams? I am altered very much about Wordsworth
from finding him too hard, too elevated, to attend to the voice of
humanity. No, give me Byron with all his spite, hatred, depravity,
dandyism, vanity, frankness, passion, and idleness, rather than
Wordsworth with all his heartless communion with woods and grass.'

An attempt on Haydon's part to reconcile himself with his old enemies,
the Academicians, ended in failure. He heads his account of the
transaction, 'The disgrace of my life.' He was received with cold
civility by the majority of the artists to whom he paid conciliatory
visits, and when he put his name down for election, he received not a