Which serves us for lamplight all night in the dark,
While the sun only shines in the day, which by natur,
Wants no light at all, as ye all may remark."
SIR RICHARD PHILLIPS.
Sir Richard Phillips[[555]] (born 1768) was conspicuous in 1793, when he was sentenced to a year's imprisonment[[556]] for selling Paine's Rights of Man; and again when, in 1807[[557]], he was knighted as Sheriff of London. As a bookseller, he was able to enforce his opinions in more ways than others. For instance, in James Mitchell's[[558]] Dictionary of the Mathematical and Physical Sciences, 1823, 12mo, which, though he was not technically a publisher, was printed for him—a book I should recommend to the collector of works of reference—there is a temperate description of his doctrines, which one may almost swear was one of his conditions previous to undertaking the work. Phillips himself was not only an anti-Newtonian, but carried to a fearful excess the notion that statesmen and Newtonians were in league to deceive the world. He saw this plot in Mrs. Airy's[[559]] pension, and in Mrs. Somerville's[[560]]. In 1836, he
did me the honor to attempt my conversion. In his first letter he says:
"Sir Richard Phillips has an inveterate abhorrence of all the pretended wisdom of philosophy derived from the monks and doctors of the middle ages, and not less of those of higher name who merely sought to make the monkish philosophy more plausible, or so to disguise it as to mystify the mob of small thinkers."
So little did his writings show any knowledge of antiquity, that I strongly suspect, if required to name one of the monkish doctors, he would have answered—Aristotle. These schoolmen, and the "philosophical trinity of gravitating force, projectile force, and void space," were the bogies of his life.
I think he began to publish speculations in the Monthly Magazine (of which he was editor) in July 1817: these he republished separately in 1818. In the Preface, perhaps judging the feelings of others by his own, he says that he "fully expects to be vilified, reviled, and anathematized, for many years to come." Poor man! he was let alone. He appeals with confidence to the "impartial decision of posterity"; but posterity does not appoint a hearing for one per cent. of the appeals which are made; and it is much to be feared that an article in such a work of reference as this will furnish nearly all her materials fifty years hence. The following, addressed to M. Arago,[[561]] in 1835, will give posterity as good a notion as she will probably need:
"Even the present year has afforded EVER-MEMORABLE examples, paralleled only by that of the Romish Conclave which persecuted Galileo. Policy has adopted that maxim of Machiavel which teaches that it is more prudent to reward