Mr. Phillips’s repertoire was encyclopædic, embracing a vast list: travel, science, current politics, reform, labor, anti-slavery, education, legal topics, foreign matters, biography, and religion. Some of his titles were: “Street Life in Europe,” “The Lost Arts,” “The Times, or a Lesson of the Hour,” “Temperance,” “Woman,” “The Indians, or in Early Days,” “Agitation,” “Training,” “Law and Lawyers,” “Courts and Jails,” “The Irish Question,” “O’Connell,” “Sumner,” and “Christianity a Battle, not a Dream.” No speaker of his day ever treated a greater variety of topics, nor with more even excellence, than Wendell Phillips. I quote from some of his letters illustrating an experience while on a long Western lecture tour. From Illinois he writes in a car with a lead pencil: “The weather is dull; only two days since I left that I have seen the sun. Rain, snow, clouds, damp, mud, and grim heavens. Still, the audiences are large.” From, one of the oil towns in Pennsylvania: “Here I am in an oil town, mud over the hubs of the wheels; literally, one horse was smothered in it; the queerest crowd of men, with trousers tucked in their boots; no privacy--hotels all one crowd--chambers mere thoroughfares, everybody passing through at will, and here I must stay until Sunday. I find some of the Boston people here. Everybody here is making money--the first place I have found where this is the case. Explanation--they have all struck oil.” Again he writes from an Iowa town: “It has been extremely cold. I have been in the smaller towns and have had poor hotels and a generally hard time, rushed from one train to another, and puffed from station to station. In eleven days I have slept in a regular bed but four nights, still I have been fortunate in filling every engagement, and Sumner has been the favorite subject. “In Milwaukee, I was at the ‘Plankington,’ where I had a fine suite of rooms, bath, chamber, parlor with pier glass ten feet high and five feet broad--nothing showy--just comfortable.” Another time from Davenport, Iowa, to Redpath, his former abolitionist friend, as well as manager: “I, the traveller, the ‘elderly gentleman,’ have been--kissed! in Illinois! Put that in your pipe and smoke it, if you can without choking your envious soul. Yes, kissed!! on a public platform, in front of a depot, the whole world envying me. ‘Who did it?’ do you ask? It was an old man of seventy-three years--a veteran abolitionist, a lovely old saint. In the early days of the cause we used to kiss each other like the early Christians, and when he saw me he resumed the habit.” William Lloyd Garrison.--Now that Phillips and Garrison and the era in which they flourished have passed into history, it is common for writers who treat on that period to talk of these two champions of freedom as if they were equals, or of Phillips, even, as if he were Garrison’s inferior. [Illustration] Those who knew both men smile at such absurdities.