He knew Beranger, Hugo and Balzac.

It would be hard to find three Kentuckians less provincial, more unaffected, scintillant and worldly wise than he and William Preston and John Thompson Gray.
Indeed the list of my acquaintances--many of them intimates--some of them friends--would be, if recounted, a long one, not mentioning the foreigners, embracing a diverse company all the way from Chunkey Towles to Grover Cleveland, from Wake Holman to John Pierpont Morgan, from John Chamberlin to Thomas Edison.

I once served as honorary pall-bearer to a professional gambler who was given a public funeral; a man who had been a gallant Confederate soldier; whom nature intended for an artist, and circumstance diverted into a sport; but who retained to the last the poetic fancy and the spirit of the gallant, leaving behind him, when he died, like a veritable cavalier, chiefly debts and friends.

He was not a bad sort in business, as the English say, nor in conviviality.

But in fighting he was "a dandy." The goody-goody philosophy of the namby-pamby takes an extreme and unreal view of life.