As a student, Sir Benjamin Brodie describes William Lawrence as already remarkable for his great powers of acquirement, his industrious habits, and his immense stores of information. In later life he characterised him as possessed of considerable powers of conversation, abounding in happy illustrations and not ill-natured sarcasm. “In public speaking,” says Brodie, “he is collected, has great command of language, and uses it correctly. In writing, his style is pure, free from all affectation, yet in general not sufficiently concise.... That he is thoroughly acquainted with his profession cannot be doubted.” But Sir Benjamin does not attribute to him so much originality as erudition and industry. It is in his relations to medical politics that the conduct of William Lawrence is most open to question. When the College of Surgeons was a close corporation, he put himself at the head of a great agitation to liberalise it. An eloquent speech at the Freemasons’ Tavern in 1826 was one of the marked features of the campaign, in which he joined heartily with the _Lancet_ in attacking the old-world system of the College. “But,” says the _Lancet_, “the Council feared him, and elected him into their body. From that moment Mr. Lawrence became a conservative and an obstructive, and maintained that character to the close of his life. He not only deserted his former friends, but lost no opportunity of reviling them.... Mr. Lawrence, during the long period that he was a member of the Council, and of the Court of Examiners, resolutely and consistently opposed every attempt that was made to improve the education and the status of the surgeon in general practice.” Lawrence was twice President of the College, and more than once delivered the Hunterian Oration. On the last of these occasions, in 1846, when a new charter had lately been obtained which failed to gratify the just aspirations of the members of the College, no one, it is said, could be persuaded to deliver the Hunterian Oration, till Lawrence, with characteristic polemic zeal, threw himself into the breach. A crowded audience, for the most part hostile, assembled; and Lawrence, instead of avoiding controversy, both defended and commended the action of the Council. A storm of indignation was excited, especially among those who had listened to his contrary deliverances twenty years before. But “the orator was imperturbable in the fiercest of the storm. He certainly displayed on that occasion his most extraordinary talents as an orator. When he had allowed his audience to exhaust their dissatisfaction at the sentiments which he had uttered, he concluded his address in a most masterly and eloquent peroration, which called forth the plaudits of the assembly.”