He was versed in several languages,--German, Italian, and Spanish, but French was his favorite among the modern tongues. He was always skilled in Latin. Already his life had become more serious through the preaching of Dr. Lyman Beecher. The Rev. Dr. O. P. Gifford relates that Phillips once told a friend that he asked God "that whenever a thing be wrong it may have no power of temptation over me; whenever a thing be right, it may take no courage to do it. From that day to this it has been so. Whenever I have known a thing to be wrong, it has held no temptation. Whenever I have known a thing to be right, it has taken no courage to do it." The Rev. Dr. Edgar Buckingham, secretary of the class of 1831, says: "I remember well his appearance of devoutness during morning and evening prayers in the chapel, which many attended only to save their credit with the authorities. 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." Another of his classmates says: "Before entering college he had been the subject of religious revival. Previous to that he used to give way to violent outbursts of temper, and his schoolmates would sometimes amuse themselves by deliberately working him into a passion. But after his conversion they could never succeed in getting him out of temper." "He had a deep love for all that was true and honorable," said his room-mate, the Rev. John Tappan Pierce of Illinois, "always detested a mean action. His Bible was always open on the centre-table. His character was perfectly transparent; there were no subterfuges, no pretences about him. He was known by all to be just what he seemed.... As an orator, Phillips took the highest stand of any graduate of our day. I never knew him to fail in anything or hesitate in a recitation." Dr. Buckingham speaks of his "kindly, generous manner, his brightness of mind, his perfect purity and whiteness of soul; ... 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, ... it was no wonder that his society was courted and respected by those who had wealth at their command, and still more by those young men who came from the South." He was a member of the "Phi Beta Kappa," on account of his scholarship, and president of the exclusive "Porcellian" and "Hasty-Pudding Club." After graduation Phillips entered the Harvard Law School, under the brilliant Judge Story, and was admitted to the bar when he was twenty-three. His first honor, after leaving the law school, was the invitation to deliver a Fourth of July address at New Bedford.