arguments which it necessitated, was always his hobby. His favorite study was history, including a lively interest in genealogy, and even in heraldry.

"But," said Mr. Phillips one day, in speaking of his college-life, "if I had followed my own bent, I should have given my time to mechanics or history; and my mother used to say, that, when I became a lawyer, a good carpenter was spoiled."

An intimate friend, writing in 1874 of Phillips's college-life, says,

"Mr. Phillips, when at college, gave a year to the study of the English Revolution of 1640. He studied every thing relating to it, from Clarendon to Godwin, every memoir, every speech, every novel, every play, that was accessible to him, whether written at the time, or the scene of which was laid in those years.

"He gave another year to the study of biographies and memoirs of the age of George the Third, covering our own Revolution with the same completeness. He next studied Dutch history with equal thoroughness as far as English literature afforded the means of doing so. Proverbs were his especial delight. The character of a young man is best known by a knowledge of his heroes. Those of Mr. Phillips in English history were Sir Walter Raleigh, Andrew Marvell, Pym, Sir Harry Vane, Cromwell, Chesterfield, De Foe, Lady Mary Wortley Montague, John Hunter, James Watt, and Brindley. In American history they were Jay, Franklin, Hamilton, Samuel Adams, and Eli Whitney.

"Among novelists, Richardson was a great favorite; and Scott he knew almost by heart. In Latin literature, Tacitus and Juvenal were his favorites. In French literature, Sully, Rochefou cauld, De Retz, Pascal, Tocqueville, Guizot, and Victor Hugo.

In English, his pets were Swift, Ben Jonson, Jeremy Taylor, Massinger, Milton, Southey (in The Doctor, Lamb, the elder Disraeli, and all of Horace Walpole.'

"He was late in opening to Shakspeare. Then he regarded Elizabeth Barrett Browning as the first of modern poets, an opinion that he has not changed. To-day he thinks that George Eliot and Charlotte Bronté see life truer and deeper than either Dickens or Thackeray, though they lack the artistic skill of their more celebrated contemporaries."

We are indebted to Rev. Edgar Buckingham of Deerfield, Mass., a classmate of Mr. Phillips, and for many years the class-secretary of the class of 1831, for the following interesting reminiscences. They begin with the days at the Latin School.

"Any one may be happy in having been the schoolmate of Wendell Phillips. We were in the same class, in school art college, for five years. Comparatively few men can tell of him when he was a boy. But, to my mind then, he was the most beautiful person I had ever seen, handsome, indeed, in form and feature; but what I mean by his beauty was his grace of character, his kindly, generous manners, his brightness of mind, his perfect purity and whiteness of soul. His face was very fair, though it could not have been called pale; and it had a radiance from which shone forth the soul that dwelt within. He was a good scholar, and the happiest and most charming of companions, either in play or talk. I shall never forget when, in our play around the houses in Montgomery Place, then unfinished, I tumbled down an open cellar-way, he was down first to see if I was hurt. In school-time, besides Horace and Homer, the boys did a great deal of talking. We drew pictures. We carved alabaster into shapes to stamp let

ters with, in days when letters for the mail were sealed with wax or wafers. The seats on which we sat during our last year were so placed in regard to the desk of the teacher, that the teacher could not conveniently watch us unless he was particularly anxious to do so; and I think he had a fellow-feeling with us, and allowed us to talk unless we disturbed others by noise. The subject of our conversation at that time-boys fourteen or fifteen years of age

was the trinity, atonement, or some other point of orthodox theology. Dr. Lyman Beecher was at that time reigning as sovereign over the orthodox churches of Boston, and was in the height of his power and influence. Large numbers of persons were attending his church in Hanover Street, to listen to the terrors of his eloquence, some from the Unitarian connection, among them some of the nearest relations of Wendell; and he himself was drawn in as a convert. I suppose he needed no conversion from the moral education his mother had given him, and from the dispositions he inherited from his ancestors; but he probably obtained clearer ideas of duty and consecration from the instruction he received, and the excitement through which he passed, and became, for the most part, fixed in some ideas of a great, important life. At any rate, his conversion, it is plain, exercised no permanent narrowing influences over him. It did not, by overwhelming views of a future world, make him, as a technical conversion does some, uninterested in people's welfare in the present life, nor, as it often does, make theology superior to philanthropy. I have not learned that he ever changed his theological opinions. It has not been opinion that has made him the man he has shown himself to be, and no sectarian could argue in favor of a special creed from the life and labors Mr. Phillips has pursued. At one time, in his middle life, he renounced the church, as at present constituted or conducted; and to a friend, a minister, who said to him, 'I suppose you think “laborare est orare,"—"your working is your prayer," or otherwise,

"your devotion to duty is your devoutness," - he replied, 'Yes; but I think much of the "orare," the praying, too.' But to return to his earlier days. The excitement of the revival gradually passed off in him; that is, in a few years. But his conversion for quite a while made a deep impression on his companions, awakening their reverence -the word is not too strong-for this religious boy, and probably leading some on for a time in interesting views of the religious life.

"His evident religiousness continued for some time after his entrance into college. I remember well his appearance of deep devoutness during morning and evening prayers in the chapel, which so many attended only to save their credit with the government. Doddridge's 'Expositor' Wendell bore to college in his freshman year, a present, I think, from his mother, a new volume, to be his help in daily thought and prayer. His interest in his studies was never remitted through his college course: and to the last he stood high in a class, the largest but one that had at that time ever been graduated from Harvard; and its members, however justly or unjustly, believed that their eighth or tenth scholar would have been first in any other class. Motley the historian was also a member of it, and an intimate friend of Phillips. But, out of the first ten scholars, a large proportion died in their youth, and despoiled the class of power to prove by subsequent achievements and by public fame that their self-flattery was really just. Phillips was really handsome, as I have said, in figure and feature a young Apollo. I remember, in his room, measurements we made of him to see how near his proportions came to that example of Grecian ideas of manly beauty.

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"He was of a wealthy family; and with manly beauty, with a most attractive face, a smile that was a benediction,' with manners of superior elegance, with conversation filled with the charms of literature, with biography and history, full of refined pleasantry,

with never a word or thought that the purest might not know and listen to, it was no wonder that his society was courted, and especially by those who had wealth at their command, and still more by those young men that came from the South. It is said that he is proud; that he was a born patrician. In a good sense of the words, he was a born patrician: in the sense of the French expression, noblesse oblige,' he felt the responsibilities of his birth and education, his responsibility to keep himself pure, upright, and good. I would not say that he never developed at any time any thing of worldly pride also. I believe he did look down with scorn on that vulgarity, that form of professed democracy, whose virtue only was to envy those better and purer than themselves as well as loftier in position. I never knew that he scorned any one who was merely poor. But it happened, as one of the strangest of all human phenomena, that this young man, who, in all his public life, has been the defender of the trodden-down and despised, was the especial pet, in his junior and senior years in college, of the aristocracy in that institution. Indeed, he had the credit of being their leader: they put him up to it. The democracy of the class became excited to the highest degree,- for reasons that I do not now recall, and believe I never knew (and I dare say there were none), and it was determined to put Phillips and others of his associates down. I think he used some of his fine scorn at that time. We had then a military organization, a great pride of ours, the Harvard Washington corps; and though our uniform was black coats and white pantaloons, and the officers had golden-appearing buttons on their coats, with the usual feathers, epaulets, and sashes, yet, in my mind then, no company, however richly uniformed, made a handsomer appearance. When the time came for election of officers by the class to which we belonged, a great struggle took place. It ended in a compromise. Phillips was not chosen captain. A young man from the South, yet not of