"Those perhaps sometimes too perfectly built-up sentences, of which his admirable addresses and speeches were formed, were the outcome of this same quality of mind. One of his most intimate friends, when we were talking about the mental strain occasioned by these, once said to me: 'Leighton would never get over a slight lapse of grammar,' and I can believe it. The accidental was hateful to him when considered in reference to his own work of any kind, though probably no one knew better than he did its value in a work of art; but, as Watts deplored, he never would use it or admit it into his own pictures. This quality and its strain upon him was illustrated by an accident which occurred at his last R.A. Banquet speech, the last he ever made, and which gained immensely from the fact that in one place he forgot for a moment the next sentence, and came to a pause (as he told me afterwards), in fear that he had broken down altogether; but his suspense, painful as it must have been to him, looked perfectly natural and spontaneous, and gave to his speech that touch of something which his better remembered periods did not express so well. This system of speaking entirely from memory added much to the constant strain of his Academy work. He had what he called a 'topical memory,' viz. he remembered the place of each word in his written speech and used to read it off in the air with never-failing accuracy, but did so always with the belief that a forgotten sentence would shipwreck the whole. If he would have been content now and then to lapse from this high pitch of the accuracy he aimed at in all his work, few could have reached a safer or higher standard spontaneously, as he proved in the Royal Academy, General Assembly, and Council meetings, when he never failed to speak admirably on the spur of the moment; and his summing up of a debate there on any subject was invariably marked by the same elegance and cleverness as his prepared speeches, but with more vitality and flexibility, which, however, never led him into anything that was not almost fastidiously exact and precise. I have always felt that no one who had heard only his elaborately prepared speeches knew his real power as a speaker."