Hazlitt has a long paper "On Persons One would Wish to have Seen." And surely, if he had lived at this time, he would have added genial and lovable Kit North to the list of those thus honored. There are few of those who belonged to his day and generation to whom we should have a stronger wish to be presented, than to Wilson,--the student, the Bohemian, the bookworm, the sportsman, the professor, the kindliest, merriest, and most entertaining of genial companions,--the great hero of the "Noctes Ambrosianæ." Not even Lamb--the quaint and merry companion, so full of quips and puns that laughter lingered with any company he graced with his pathetic little body and quizzical countenance--could rival Christopher as a fountain of merriment and eternal good-cheer. His humor was not quiet and subtle like Lamb's, but broad, rich, bordering on farce, and of "imagination all compact." And Lamb could by no means rival him in splendor of description, vivacity of retort, energy of criticism, or in riotous and uproarious mirth. De Quincey alone could match the splendor of his diction when describing outward sights and sounds, and De Quincey had not a tithe of his intense love of Nature, and appreciation of her glory and magnificence. Ruskin alone equals him in this, and he scarcely reaches the height of rhetorical eloquence to which Wilson soars so easily. In these same "Noctes" we have descriptions of some of those nights when, as Carlyle would have said, "there was much good talk." And Wilson was mainly the talker. The chief characteristic of his discourse was its prodigality of humor and its infinite variety. His imagination too ran riot, and his wit sparkled ever and anon with a radiance all its own. His memory was prodigious, and in his conversation he taxed it for anecdotes and illustrations drawn from the four quarters of the globe, and from the most remote and unusual stores of literary hoarding. His mind was many-sided as well as keen, and he kept all his faculties in full play, not excepting his sympathies, which were as broad as the world of men.