George Ticknor, Life, letters and journals of George Ticknor
George Hillard, Ed.

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Indeed, the Chancellor seemed to give an uncommon stir and brightness to men's faculties, while he was with us, . . . . there seemed to be a happy and healthy excitement of the intellectual powers and social feelings of all with whom he came in contact, that was the evident result of his rich talents and transparent simplicity of character, and which I have never known to be produced among us in the same degree by any other individual.

To S. A. Eliot, London.

Boston, September 13, 1823.

. . . . Among the strangers who have been here this season, by far the most considerable is Chancellor Kent, now superannuated by the Constitution of the State of New York, because he is above sixty years old, and yet, de facto, in the very flush arid vigor of his extraordinary faculties. He was received with a more cordial and flattering attention than I ever knew a stranger to be in Boston, and had not a moment of his time left unoccupied. He enjoyed it all extremely, and is of such transparent simplicity of character that he did not at all conceal the pleasure he received from the respect paid him during the ten days he was with us. What pleased him most, I suspect, was the Phi Beta¹ dinner. All the old members attended it on his account, so that nearly a hundred sat down to table, among whom were Chief Justice Parker, Judge Davis, Judge Story, Mr. Prescott, Sen., Mr. Webster, etc. The whole was carried through, with extemporaneous spirit, in the finest style, and nothing faltered, up to the last moment.

The best toasts we ever had in this part of the country were given, on requisition from the chair, at an instant's warning, and the succession was uninterrupted. Judge Parker gave, ‘The happy climate of New York, where the moral sensibilities and intellectual energies are preserved long after constitutional decay has taken place’; and Judge Story gave, ‘The State of New York, where the law of the land has been so ably administered that it has become the land of the law’; to which the Chancellor instantly replied, ‘The State of Massachusetts, the land of Story as well as of Song’; and so it was kept up for three or four hours, not a soul leaving the table. At last the Chancellor rose, and the whole company rose with him, and clapped him as far as he could hear it, and then all quietly separated. It was the