My dear Brothers--I am certain I think of having a letter to-morrow morning for I expected one so much this morning, having been in town two days, at the end of which my expectations began to get up a little. I found two on the table, one from Bailey and one from Haydon, I am quite perplexed in a world of doubts and fancies--there is nothing stable in the world; uproar's your only music--I don't mean to include Bailey in this and so dismiss him from this with all the opprobrium he deserves--that is in so many words, he is one of the noblest men alive at the present day. In a note to Haydon about a week ago (which I wrote with a full sense of what he had done, and how he had never manifested any little mean drawback in his value of me) I said if there were three things superior in the modern world, they were "the Excursion," "Haydon's pictures," and "Hazlitt's depth of Taste"--so I do believe--Not thus speaking with any poor vanity that works of genius were the first things in this world. No! for that sort of probity and disinterestedness which such men as Bailey possess, does hold and grasp the tiptop of any spiritual honours that can be paid to anything in this world--And moreover having this feeling at this present come over me in its full force, I sat down to write to you with a grateful heart, in that I had not a Brother who did not feel and credit me for a deeper feeling and devotion for his uprightness, than for any marks of genius however splendid. I was speaking about doubts and fancies--I mean there has been a quarrel of a severe nature between Haydon and Reynolds and another ("the Devil rides upon a fiddlestick") between Hunt and Haydon--the first grew from the Sunday on which Haydon invited some friends to meet Wordsworth. Reynolds never went, and never sent any Notice about it, this offended Haydon more than it ought to have done--he wrote a very sharp and high note to Reynolds and then another in palliation--but which Reynolds feels as an aggravation of the first--Considering all things, Haydon's frequent neglect of his Appointments, etc. his notes were bad enough to put Reynolds on the right side of the question--but then Reynolds has no power of sufferance; no idea of having the thing against him; so he answered Haydon in one of the most cutting letters I ever read; exposing to himself all his own weaknesses and going on to an excess, which whether it is just or no, is what I would fain have unsaid, the fact is, they are both in the right and both in the wrong.