When the occasion was more formal--as when he took the chair at the Actors’ Benevolent or the Dramatic and Musical Fund--he would sometimes recite to me beforehand part of the speech which he intended to deliver, but I believe he rarely stuck to his plan, and I have heard him say that he preferred merely to prepare the “joints” of his subject--_i.e._ each new departure--and to leave all the filling-in to the inspiration of the moment as influenced by the foregoing speaker or any unforeseen incident. I recollect that the peroration of a speech for the Dramatic and Musical Fund ended: “I plead not so much for the deserving as for the undeserving,” and I believe that he added: “of whom I am one.” I know that he told me next day--half in glee, but much also in pride--that the Toastmaster had told him that he had never stood behind a chair and seen so much money raked in. It was certainly to his mastery of the impromptu that he owed the triumph of his oration before the U.S. Ambassador, Mr. Bayard, at a moment when war seemed suddenly possible with our great English-speaking neighbour; and I recollect that Ellen Terry, who was then in New York, told me later that when Joe’s speech appeared in the papers _en résumé_ (it never could be wholly reported owing to his making no notes) there was a marked change in the tide of feeling. He has related a part of this incident in his _Eminent Victorians_, but he has not mentioned this last particular, neither has he told how his triumph was won by his large appreciation of the love lavished upon the giants of our English literature by our “friends across the seas.” CHAPTER X HOLIDAYS A happy chapter this: for though Joe always had so many irons in the fire that lengthy holidays were not only very few with him but actually avoided and disliked, he made merry so well by the wayside that many a memory falls into a category scarcely enshrined in a longer period than a summer afternoon, or at most, a week-end trip; he made holiday for other folk all the time, and in so doing made it for himself. Of week-end visits none were more joyous than those spent under the hospitable roof of our friends Sir George and Lady Lewis at Walton-on-Thames, where Sir Edward Burne-Jones was a constant visitor. Neither of those friends were knighted or baroneted then, so that perhaps we might all have been said to be--using Joe’s own words--“of the lower middle class, to which I am proud to belong.” Oscar Wilde was often of the Walton party--fresh from Oxford then, and considerably esteemed as a wit himself, though not, as Joe shows in his Reminiscences, always above the suspicion of borrowing. In this respect he somewhat resembled Whistler; but the latter was more honest in his plagiarism.