XV 



AS A LECTURER 383 



they used to be thronged by crowds of attentive 

 listeners. 



Huxley's public addresses (writes Professor Osborii) 

 always gave me the imi^ression of being largely im- 

 promptu ; but he once told me : " I always think out 

 carefully every word I am going to say. There is no 

 greater danger than the so-called inspiration of the 

 moment, which leads you to say something which is 

 not exactly true, or which you would regret afterwards." 



Mr. G. W. Smalley has also left a striking 

 description of him as a lecturer in the seventies and 

 early eighties. 



I used always to admire the simple and business-like 

 way in which Huxley made his entry on great occasions. 

 He hated anything like display, and would have none 

 of it. At the Royal Institution, more than almost any- 

 where else, the lecturer, on whom the concentric circles 

 of spectators in their steep amphitheatre look down, 

 focuses the gaze. Huxley never seemed aware that 

 anybody was looking at him. From self-consciousness 

 he was, here as elsewhere, singiilarly free, as from self- 

 assertion. He walked in through the door on the left, 

 as if he were entering his own laboratory. In these 

 days he bore scarcely a mark of age. He was in the 

 full vigour of manhood and looked the man he was. 

 Faultlessly dressed — the rule in the Eoyal Institution 

 is evening costume — with a firm step and easy bearing, 

 he took his place apparently without a thought of the 

 people who were cheering him. To him it was an 

 anniversary. He looked, and he probably was, the 

 master. Surrounded as he was by the celebrities of 

 science and the ornaments of London drawing-rooms, 

 there was none who had quite the same kind of 

 intellectual ascendency which belonged to him. The 



