Leighton’s speech, of course, was expected to be the speech of the evening, and so in a sense it was. But Leighton never spoke without the polished preparation of every word, and though his gifts as an orator were conspicuous, there was always, even upon the happiest occasion, a sense of something artificial in his aptly chosen phrases; and on the evening of which I am thinking, the fact of his being fast bound and fettered by a string of carefully forged and graceful sentences proved disastrous to the speaker. Before Leighton rose to make his acknowledgment of the compliment that had been paid to him, Millais had his part in the programme to discharge, and although he could never boast any considerable gifts as a speaker, there was a directness and simplicity in his utterances that placed his audience in quick sympathy with the man. When I complimented him afterwards he replied, “Yes, my boy, but you see I had a story to tell.” And so he had; but that was not the whole secret of the great impression he made upon his hearers that evening, for though the story was simple enough in itself, it was told with such genuine feeling and with such frank revelation of his own character that it moved his audience not a little. He recalled a day of his youth when he had been summoned by Mr. Thackeray, who lay ill in bed, to receive some instructions for designs that Millais was making for the _Cornhill Magazine_. The business ended, Mr. Thackeray turned to him and said: “Millais, my boy, you must look to your laurels. There’s a young fellow in Rome called Leighton who is making prodigious strides in his art. He speaks every European language, and is an accomplished musician as well. If I’m not mistaken that young man will one day be President of the Royal Academy.” And then Millais turned to us, and in words of the simplest candour confessed that Mr. Thackeray’s prophecy had somewhat hurt him--“For I will own,” he said, “that at that time, with the ambition of a boy, I cherished the hope that _I_ might some day be President of the Royal Academy.” And then after a pause he added, “But now, looking back, I can say, ‘Mr. Thackeray, you were right, and the right man has been chosen.’” It is not easy to convey the effect which that speech made upon the crowded audience, most of whom were artists, but the depth of the impression was shortly realised when Leighton rose to respond. It would have been impossible for any speaker born to his task to have followed Millais without betraying in response a sensibility to those deeper chords of feeling which his simple words had touched. But Leighton was incapable of resuming the unfinished melody Millais had so finely tuned; incapable by his habit and temperament of discarding what he had prepared; and so it happened that the discourse he delivered, though no less perfect and polished than was his wont, left his audience gravely disappointed and wholly unmoved.