Phillips was not supremely great—if he were, how could we comprehend him?
And now if you will open those folding doors—there! that will do—thank you.
When was he born? Ah, I'll tell you—it was in his twenty-fifth year—about three in the afternoon, by the clock, October Twenty-first, Eighteen Hundred Thirty-five. The day was Indian summer, warm and balmy. He sat there reading in the window of his office on Court Street, Boston, a spick-span new law-office, with four shelves of law-books bound in sheep, a green-covered table in the center, three armchairs, and on the wall a steel engraving of "Washington Crossing the Delaware."
He was a handsome fellow, was this Wendell Phillips—it would a' been worth your while just to run up the stairs and put your head in the door to look at him. "Can I do anything for you?" he would have asked.
"No, we just wanted to see you, that's all," we would have replied.
He sat there at the window, his long legs crossed, a copy of "Coke on Littleton" in his hands. His dress was what it should be—that of a gentleman—his face cleanly shaven, hair long, cut square and falling to his black stock. He was the only son of Boston's first Mayor, both to the manor and to the manner born, rich in his own right; proud, handsome, strong, gentle, refined, educated—a Christian gentleman, heir to the best that Boston had to give—a graduate of the Boston Latin School, of Harvard College, of the Harvard Law School—living with his widowed mother in a mansion on Beacon Hill, overlooking Boston's forty-three acres of Common!
Can you imagine anything more complete in way of endowment than all this? Did Destiny ever do more for mortal man?
There he sat waiting for clients. About this time he made the acquaintance of a cockeyed pulchritudinous youth, Ben Butler by name, who was errand-boy in a nearby office. It was a strange friendship—peppered by much cross-fire whenever they met in public—to endure loyal for a lifetime.
Clients are sure to come to the man who is not too anxious about them—sure to come to a man like Phillips—a youth clothed with the graces of a Greek—waiting on the threshold of manhood's morning.