The most finished and elegant of all lecturers, Thackeray often made a very poor appearance when he attempted to deliver a set speech to a public assembly.  He frequently broke down after the first two or three sentences.  He prepared what he intended to say with great exactness, and his favorite delusion was that he was about to astonish everybody with a remarkable effort.  It never disturbed him that he commonly made a woful failure when he attempted speech-making, but he sat down with such cool serenity if he found that he could not recall what he wished to say, that his audience could not help joining in and smiling with him when he came to a stand-still.  Once he asked me to travel with him from London to Manchester to hear a great speech he was going to make at the founding of the Free Library Institution in that city.  All the way down he was discoursing of certain effects he intended to produce on the Manchester dons by his eloquent appeals to their pockets.  This passage was to have great influence with the rich merchants, this one with the clergy, and so on.  He said that although Dickens and Bulwer and Sir James Stephen, all eloquent speakers, were to precede him, he intended to beat each of them on this special occasion.  He insisted that I should be seated directly in front of him, so that I should have the full force of his magic eloquence.  The occasion was a most brilliant one; tickets had been in demand at unheard-of prices several weeks before the day appointed; the great hall, then opened for the first time to the public, was filled by an audience such as is seldom convened, even in England.  The three speeches which came before Thackeray was called upon were admirably suited to the occasion, and most eloquently spoken.  Sir John Potter, who presided, then rose, and after some complimentary allusions to the author of “Vanity Fair,” introduced him to the crowd, who welcomed him with ringing plaudits.  As he rose, he gave me a half-wink from under his spectacles, as if to say:  “Now for it; the others have done very well, but I will show ’em a grace beyond the reach of their art.”  He began in a clear and charming manner, and was absolutely perfect for three minutes.  In the middle of a most earnest and elaborate sentence he suddenly stopped, gave a look of comic despair at the ceiling, crammed both hands into his trousers’ pockets, and deliberately sat down.  Everybody seemed to understand that it was one of Thackeray’s unfinished speeches and there were no signs of surprise or discontent among his audience.  He continued to sit on the platform in a perfectly composed manner; and when the meeting was over he said to me, without a sign of discomfiture, “My boy, you have my profoundest sympathy; this day you have accidentally missed hearing one of the finest speeches ever composed for delivery by a great British orator.”  And I never heard him mention the subject again.