I went to hear Christopher Ricks at the Y. I like him a lot! His books, of course, and now I can say I like him as a speaker. He apologized for the scruffiness of his talk, but it didn't matter. On the level of insights and sentences it was a treasure chest. The older I get the more I think, "To hell with essay structure. Sentences are what really matters." (Within limits — the conclusions of Hazlitt's essays are sometimes so flat I wonder if he was doing it on purpose.)