The effect was electrical.  When he first rose to speak he had been coldly received—­no more than a cheer of encouragement from his immediate friends.  As he made his points the applause grew.  When he finished one half of the audience burst into a storm of cheers; the other was thunderstruck by the sacrilegious recoil of the Bishop’s weapon upon his own head:  a lady fainted, and had to be carried out.  As soon as calm was restored Hooker leapt to his feet, though he hated public speaking yet more than his friend, and drove home the main scientific arguments with his own experience on the botanical side.  The Bishop, be it recorded, bore no malice.  Orator and wit as he was, he no doubt appreciated a debater whose skill in fence matched his own.

VIII

PUBLIC SPEAKING AND LECTURES

For Huxley, one result of the affair was that he became universally known, and not merely as he had been known to his immediate circle, as the most vigorous defender of Darwin—­“Darwin’s bulldog,” as he playfully called himself.  Another result was that he changed his idea as to the practical value of the art of public speaking.  Walking away from the meeting with that other hater of speech-making, Hooker, he declared that he would thenceforth carefully cultivate it, and try to leave off hating it.  The former resolution he carried out faithfully, with the result that he became one of the best speakers of his generation; in the latter he never quite succeeded.  The nervous horror before making a public address seldom wholly left him; he used to say that when he stepped on the platform at the Royal Institution and heard the door click behind him, he knew what it must be like to be a condemned man stepping out to the gallows.  Happily, no sign of nervousness ever showed itself; he gave the appearance of being equally master of himself and of his subject.  His voice was not strong, but he had early learnt the lesson of clear enunciation.  There were two letters he received when he began lecturing, and which he kept by him as a perpetual reminder, labelled “Good Advice.”  One was from a “working man” of his Monday evening audience in Jermyn Street, in 1855; the other, undated, from Mr. Jodrell, a great benefactor of science, who had heard him at the Royal Institution.  These warned him against his habits of lecturing in a colloquial tone, which might suit a knot of students gathered round his table, but not a large audience; of running his words, especially technical terms, together, and of pouring out unfamiliar matter at breakneck speed.  These early faults were so glaring that one institute in St. John’s Wood, after hearing him, petitioned “not to have that young man again.”  He worked hard to cure himself, and the later audiences who flocked to his lectures could never have guessed at his early failings.  The flow was as clear and even as the arrangement of the matter was lucid; the voice was