more to him than mosquitoes are to the behemoth or to the lion.  He was aristocratic in his pride, and lived higher than most men lived.  He was called of God as much as ever Moses and the prophets were; not exactly for the same great end, but in consonance with those great ends.  You remember, my brother, when Lovejoy was infamously slaughtered by a mob in Alton?—­blood that has been the seed of liberty all over this land!  I remember it.  At this time it was that Channing lifted up his voice and declared that the moral sentiment of Boston ought to be uttered in rebuke of that infamy and cruelty, and asking for Faneuil Hall in which to call a public meeting.  This was indignantly refused by the Common Council of Boston.  Being a man of wide influence, he gathered around about himself enough venerable and influential old citizens of Boston to make a denial of their united request a perilous thing; and Faneuil Hall was granted to call a public meeting to express itself on this subject of the murder of Lovejoy.  The meeting was made up largely of rowdies.  They meant to overawe and put down all other expressions of opinion except those that then rioted with the riotous.  United States District-attorney Austin (when Wendell Phillips’s name is written in letters of light on one side of the monument, down low on the other side, and spattered with dirt, let the name of Austin also be written) made a truculent speech, and justified the mob, and ran the whole career of the sewer of those days and justified non-interference with slavery.  Wendell Phillips, just come to town as a young lawyer, without at present any practice, practically unknown, except to his own family, fired with the infamy, and, feeling called of God in his soul, went upon the platform.  His first utterances brought down the hisses of the mob.  He was not a man very easily subdued by any mob.  They listened as he kindled and poured on that man Austin the fire and lava of a volcano, and he finally turned the course of the feeling of the meeting.  Practically unknown when the sun went down one day, when it rose next morning all Boston was saying, “Who is this fellow?  Who is this Phillips?” A question that has never been asked since.

A FLAMING ADVOCATE OF LIBERTY.

Thenceforth he has been a flaming advocate of liberty, with singular advantages over all other pleaders.  Mr. Garrison was not noted as a speaker, yet his tongue was his pen.  Mr. Phillips, not much given to the pen, his pen was his tongue; and no other like speaker has ever graced our history.  I do not undertake to say that he surpassed all others.  He had an intense individuality, and that intense individuality ranked him among the noblest orators that have ever been born to this continent, or I may say to our mother-land.  He adopted in full the tenets of Garrison, which were excessively disagreeable to the whole public mind.  The ground which he took was that which Garrison took.