What I mean is, that I have heard the best, as I believe, the last of the old century and the first of the new have shown. Footnote 26: ‘He always made the best pun and the best remark in the course of the evening. His serious conversation, like his serious writing, is his best. No one ever stammered out such fine, piquant, deep, eloquent things in half a dozen half-sentences as he does. His jests scald like tears: and he probes a question with a play upon words. What a keen, laughing, hare-brained vein of home-felt truth! What choice venom!’ Footnote 27: It filled the valley like a mist, And still poured out its endless chant, And still it swells upon the ear, And wraps me in a golden trance, Drowning the noisy tumult of the world. . . . . . . Like sweetest warblings from a sacred grove ... Contending with the wild winds as they roar ... And the proud places of the insolent And the oppressor fell ... Such and so little is the mind of Man! Footnote 28: His summary of the fight between Hickman and Bill Neate is alone in literature, as also in the annals of the Ring. Jon Bee was an intelligent creature of his kind, and knew a very great deal more about pugilism than Hazlitt knew; but to contrast the two is to learn much. Badcock (which is Jon Bee) had seen (and worshipped) Jem Belcher, and had reported fights with an extreme contempt for Pierce Egan, the illiterate ass who gave us _Boxiana_. Hazlitt, however, looked on at the proceedings of Neate and the Gaslight Man exactly as he had looked on at divers creations of Edmund Kean. He saw the essentials in both expressions of human activity, and his treatment of both is fundamentally the same. In both he ignores the trivial: here the acting (in its lowest sense), there the hits that did not count. And thus, as he gives you only the vital touches, you know how and why Neate beat Hickman, and can tell the exact moment at which Hickman began to be a beaten man. ’Tis the same with his panegyric on Cavanagh, the fives-player. For a blend of gusto with understanding I know but one thing to equal with this: the note on Dr. Grace, which appeared in _The National Observer_; and the night that that was written, I sent the writer back to Hazlitt’s _Cavanagh_, and said to him ——! On the whole the _Dr. Grace_ is the better of the two. But it has scarce the incorruptible fatness of the _Cavanagh_. Gusto, though, is Hazlitt’s special attribute: he glories in what he likes, what he reads, what he feels, what he writes. He triumphed in his Kean, his Shakespeare, his Bill Neate, his Rousseau, his coffee-and-cream and _Love for Love_ in the inn-parlour at Alton. He relished things; and expressed them with a relish. That is his ‘note.’ Some others have