omilly stuck to us for some time longer, but the patience of all the
founders of the Society was at last exhausted, except me and Roebuck. In
the season following, 1826-7, things began to mend. We had acquired two
excellent Tory speakers, Hayward and Shee (afterwards Sergeant Shee):
the Radical side was reinforced by Charles Buller, Cockburn, and others
of the second generation of Cambridge Benthamities; and with their and
other occasional aid, and the two Tories as well as Roebuck and me for
regular speakers, almost every debate was a _bataille rangee_ between
the "philosophic Radicals" and the Tory lawyers; until our conflicts
were talked about, and several persons of note and consideration came to
hear us. This happened still more in the subsequent seasons, 1828 and
1829, when the Coleridgians, in the persons of Maurice and Sterling,
made their appearance in the Society as a second Liberal and even
Radical party, on totally different grounds from Benthamism and
vehemently opposed to it; bringing into these discussions the general
doctrines and modes of thought of the European reaction against the
philosophy of the eighteenth century; and adding a third and very
important belligerent party to our contests, which were now no bad
exponent of the movement of opinion among the most cultivated part of
the new generation. Our debates were very different from those of common
debating societies, for they habitually consisted of the strongest
arguments and most philosophic principles which either side was able to
produce, thrown often into close and _serre_ confutations of one
another. The practice was necessarily very useful to us, and eminently
so to me. I never, indeed, acquired real fluency, and had always a bad
and ungraceful delivery; but I could make myself listened to: and as I
always wrote my speeches when, from the feelings involved, or the nature
of the ideas to be developed, expression seemed important, I greatly
increased my power of effective writing; acquiring not only an ear for
smoothness and rhythm, but a practical sense for _telling_ sentences,
and an immediate criterion of their telling property, by their effect on
a mixed audience.

The Society, and the preparation for it, together with the preparation
for the morning conversations which were going on simultaneously,
occupied the greater part of my leisure; and made me feel it a relief
when, in the spring of 1828, I ceased to write for the _Westminster_.
T