conferred upon him the honorary degree of LL D. He died at Brighton on the 14th of October 1854.
PHILLIPS, STEPHEN (1868–), British poet and dramatist, was born on the 28th of July 1868 at Somertown near Oxford, the son of the Rev. Stephen Phillips, preceptor of Peterborough Cathedral. He was educated at Stratford and Peterborough Grammar Schools, and entered Queen's College, Cambridge; but during his first term at Cambridge, when F. R. Benson's
dramatic company visited the town, he joined it, and for six
years played various small parts. In 1890 a slender volume of
verse was published at Oxford with the title Primavera, which
contained contributions by him and by his cousin Laurence
Binyon and others In 1894 he published Eremus, a long poem
of loose structure in blank verse of a philosophical complexion.
In 1896 appeared Christ in Hades, forming with a few other
short pieces one of the slim paper-covered volumes of Elkin
Matheus's “Shilling Garland.” This poem arrested the attention
of watchful critics of poetry, and when it was followed
by a collection of Poems in 1897 the wr1ter's position as a new
poet of exceptional gifts was generally recognized This volume
contained a new edition of “Christ in Hades,” together with
“Marpessa,” “The Woman with the Dead Soul,” “The Wife”
and shorter pieces, including the fine lines “To Milton, Blind.”
The volume won the prize of £100 offered by the Academy newspaper
for the best new book of its year, ran through half a dozen
ed1t1ons in two years, and established Mr Phill1ps's rank as poet,
which was sustained by the publication in the Nineteenth Century
in 1898 of his poem “Endymion.” George Alexander, the
actor-manager, moved perhaps by a certain clamour among the
critics for a literary drama, then commissioned Mr Phillips to
write him a play, the result being Paolo and Francesca (1900),
a drama founded on Dante's famous episode. Encouraged by
the great success of the drama in its literary form, Mr Alexander
produced the piece at the St James's Theatre in the course of
1901. In the meantime, Mr Ph1llips's next play, Herod: a Tragedy, had been produced by Beerbohm Tree on the 31st of
October 1900, and as published as a book in 1901; Ulysses, also
produced by Beerbohm Tree, was published in 1902; The Sin of David, a drama on the story of David and Bathsheba, translated
into the times and terms of Cromwellian England, was published
in 1904, and Nero, produced by Beerbohm Tree, was published
in 1906 In these plays the poet's avowed aim was, instead of
attempting to revive the method of Shakespeare and the Elizabethans,
to revitalize the method of Greek drama. Paolo and Francesca (which admitted certainly one scene on an Elizabethan
model) was the most successful, the subject being best adapted
to the lyrical cast of Mr Phillips's poetical temperament; but all
contained fine poetry, skilfully stage-managed by a writer who
had practical experience of stage craft.
See the section on Stephen Phillips in Poets of the Younger Generation, by William Archer (1902), also the articles on “Tragedy and Mr Stephen Phillips,” by William Watson, in the Fortnightly Review (March 1898); “The Poetry of Mr Stephen Phillips,” in the Edinburgh Review (January 1900); “Mr Stephen Phillips, " in the Century (January 1901), by Edmund Gosse; and “Mr Stephen Phillips,” in the Quarterly Review (April 1902), by Arthur Symons
For bibliography up to July 1903, see English Illustrated Magazine new series, vol. xxix. p. 442.
PHILLIPS, THOMAS (1770-1845), English portrait and
subject painter, was born at Dudley in Warwickshire on the
18th of October 1770. Having acquired the art of
glass-painting at Birmingham he visited London in 1790 with an
introduction to Benjamin West, who found him employment
on the windows in St George's Chapel at Windsor. In 1792
Phillips painted a view of Windsor Castle, and in the next two
years he exhibited the “Death of Talbot, Earl of Shrewsbury,
at the Battle of Castillon,” “Ruth and Naomi,” “Elijah
restoring the Widow's Son,” “Cupid disarmed by Euphrosyne,”
and other pictures. After 1796, however, he mainly
confined himself to portrait-painting. It was not long before
he became the chosen painter of men of genius and talent,
notwithstanding the rivalry of Hoppner, Owen, Jackson and
Lawrence; and he left behind portraits of nearly all the
illustrious
characters of his day. In 1804 he was elected associate
and in 1808 member of the Royal Academy. In 1824 Phillips
succeeded Fuseli as professor of painting to the Royal Academy,
an office which he held till 1832. During this period he
delivered ten Lectures on the History and Principles of Painting,
which were published in 1833. He died on the 20th of April 1845.
PHILLIPS, WENDELL (1811-1884), American orator and
reformer, was born in Boston on the 29th of November 1811.
His father, John Phillips (1770-1823), a man of wealth
and influence, graduated at Harvard College in 1788, and
became successively “town advocate and public prosecutor,”
and in 1822 first mayor of Boston, then recently made into a city.
Wendell Phillips himself attended the public Latin school,
entered Harvard College before he was sixteen, and graduated
in 1831 in the same class with the historian John Lothrop
Motley. He graduated at the Harvard law school in 1834,
and was admitted to the bar in Boston. He soon came under
the influence of the anti-slavery movement, witnessing in 1835
the mobbing, in Boston, of William Lloyd Garrison. On the
8th of December 1837 a meeting was held at Faneuil Hall to
express the sentiments of the people on the murder of Elijah P.
Lovejoy, at Alton, Illinois, for defending his press from a
pro-slavery mob. In the course of the meeting a speech was made
in opposition to its general current by James T. Austin (1784-1870),
attorney-general of the state, who said that Lovejoy
had died “as the fool dieth,” and compared his murderers to
the men who threw the tea into Boston harbour just before the
War of Independence. The speech seemed likely to divide the
audience, when Wendell Phillips took the platform. “When
I heard,” he said, “the gentleman lay down principles which
placed the murderers of Alton side by side with Otis and
Hancock, with Quincy and Adams, I thought these pictured lips
(pointing to their portraits) would have broken into voice to
rebuke the recreant American, the slanderer of the dead.” This
appeal not merely determined the sentiment of the meeting,
it gave Wendell Phillips his first fame and determined his
career. Although loving his profession, and this especially
for the opening it gave in the direction of public life, he
practically stepped outside the sphere dearest to young Americans,
and lived henceforth the life of an agitator, or, like his father,
that of a “public prosecutor.” Accepting unhesitatingly the
leadership of Garrison, and becoming like him gradually a
disunionist, he lived essentially a platform life, interested in a
variety of subjects, but first and chiefly an abolitionist. In
1865, however, after the Civil War, he broke with Garrison
over the question of discontinuing the Anti-Slavery Society,
and from that date until the society was disbanded in 1870 he,
instead of Garrison, was its president. He was not, moreover,
like his great leader, a non-resistant, nor was he, on the other
hand, like John Brown, borne on by irresistible necessity to
overt action. Nor did he find, like his fellow-worker, Theodore
Parker, the leisure to keep up his scholarship and lead in part
the life of a student. Early study and travel had indeed
furnished him with abundant material for rhetorical illustration;
and he was also a great reader of newspapers, but he used to
say that he knew in his whole life but one thing thoroughly,
namely, the history of the English Civil War, and there were few occasions when he could not draw from it the needful illustration. His style of eloquence was direct and brilliant, but eminently self-controlled. He often surprised his hearers by the quietness of his beginnings, and these were very often the speeches which turned out most brilliant and most irresistible ere the close. He may be said to have introduced the direct and colloquial manner upon the American public platform, as distinct from the highly elaborated and often ornate style which had been established by Edward Everett; nor has there ever been a reversion since his day to the more artificial method. He was capable at times, nevertheless, of highly sonorous periods with superb climaxes; yet his favourite style was the conversational. His logic, while never obtruded, was rarely at fault; but he loved the flash of the rapier, and
