An attempt was made to mob him in Philadelphia. He wrote to his wife's cousin, Miss Grew, "I have become so notorious, that at Albany, Kingston, and Hartford the Lyceum could not obtain a church for me; and the papers riddled me with pellets for a week; but that saved advertising, and got me larger houses gratis. At Troy they even thought of imitating Staten Island, and getting up a homoeopathic mob, but couldn't." Phillips was becoming accustomed to mobs. He had, says Mr. Higginson, "a careless, buoyant, almost patrician air, as if nothing in the way of mob-violence were worth considering." Dec. 2, 1860, on the anniversary of John Brown's execution, being debarred from speaking in Tremont Temple, a crowded meeting was held in the Belknap-street colored church. The mob determined to get him into their hands, says Charles W. Slack, in George Lowell Austin's life of Phillips, and were only prevented "by a cordon of young men, about forty or more in number, who with locked arms and closely compacted bodies, had Phillips in the centre of their circle, and were safely bearing him home." On Jan. 24, 1861, the annual meeting of the Massachusetts Anti-slavery Society was held in Tremont Temple. Mrs. Lydia Maria Child describes the scene: "Soon the mob began to yell from the galleries. They came tumbling in by hundreds.... Such yelling, screeching, and bellowing I never heard.... "Mr. Phillips stood on the front of the platform for a full hour, trying to be heard whenever the storm lulled a little. They cried, 'Throw him out! Throw a brickbat at him! Your house is afire; go put out your house!' Then they'd sing, with various bellowing and shrieking accompaniments, 'Tell John Andrew, tell John Andrew, John Brown's dead!' I should think there were four or five hundred of them. At one time they all rose up, many of them clattered down-stairs, and there was a surging forward toward the platform. My heart beat so fast I could hear it; for I did not then know how Mr. Phillips's armed friends were stationed at every door, and in the middle of the aisle. At last it was announced that the police were coming. Mr. Phillips tried to speak, but his voice was again drowned. Then ... he stepped forward and addressed his speech to the reporters stationed directly below him." He said to the reporters--the noisy crowd shouted, "Speak louder! We want to hear what you're saying!"--"While I speak to these pencils, I speak to a million of men. What, then, are these boys? We have got the press of the country in our hands.... My voice is beaten by theirs, but they cannot beat types. All hail and glory to Faust, who invented printing, for he made mobs impossible." Nothing seemed to fire the great orator like opposition. He was the very soul of courage.