Page:A biographical dictionary of modern rationalists.djvu/336

 PHILALETHES &quot;

PHILLPOTTS

Bishop of London has spoken of it as &quot; that most dangerous of books.&quot; Mrs. Phelips shares her husband s Agnosticism, and cordially supports his work.

&quot; PHILALETHES.&quot; See FELLOWES, B.

PHILLIPS, Sir Richard, writer and publisher. B. 1767. Ed. private schools London. In 1786 he began to teach at Chester, and two years later he passed to a school at Leicester. In 1790, however, he opened a hosiery shop, which he pre sently converted into a book-shop. He went on to printing and publishing, and founded the Leicester Herald. Phillips was a very advanced thinker and a repub lican, and his paper was very outspoken. In 1798 he was sentened to eighteen months in prison for selling Paine s Eights of Man, and he continued in jail to edit his paper. In 1795 he founded The Museum, but in the same year he migrated to London, where he established the Monthly Magazine. His own vigorous contributions to it were signed &quot; Common Sense.&quot; His business prospered, and he was elected a Sheriff of London (1807) and then knighted (1808). His Golden Bides of Social Philosophy (1826), which he dedi cated to Bolivar, expresses his Deistic views. D. Apr. 2, 1840.

PHILLIPS, Stephen, poet. B. July 28, 1868. Ed. Stratford -on -Avon, Peter borough Grammar School, and Cambridge (Queen s College). He left Cambridge at the end of the first term to join Benson s Theatrical Company, and was six years on the stage in that company. He next taught English history for a short time in a college for army candidates ; but his literary gifts forced recognition, and he devoted himself entirely to cultivating them. His first work was in collaboration with two other authors, Primavera (1890). In 1894 his EremiLS drew attention to his high poetical power, and in 1896 he firmly established his reputation with Christ in Hades, and Other Poems. In the following 599

year his new volume, Poems, was awarded by the Academy a prize of a hundred guineas as the best book of the year. Paolo and Francesco, appeared in 1899, Herod in 1900. Phillips nowhere presents a definite view of life, but his independence of the Christian doctrine and ethic is seen in all his work. D. Dec. 9, 1915.

PHILLPOTTS, Eden, poet, novelist, and dramatist. B. (India) Nov. 4, 1862. Ed. Plymouth. From 1880 to 1890 Phillpotts was a clerk in the Sun Fire Insurance Office at London. He studied for the stage, but literary experiments discovered his real gifts, and in 1896 his Lying Prophets won a repute which was more than confirmed by his Children of the Mist (1898). Poor health had compelled him to leave London and settle at Torquay, where he began the great epic of Devonshire life which runs through the majority of his novels. Phillpotts early adopted the high and severe standard of art of the French masters of fiction, Flaubert and Mau passant, and no other English novelist of our time approaches him in purely aesthetic quality. His fine descriptions of nature are also in part inspired by the genuine earth-joy of a thinker who disdains all supernatural illusions. He is an expert and devoted gardener, and is author of several volumes on gardening. Of recent years he has written much for the stage. His Secret Woman was dramatized in 1912, and The Mother in 1913 ; and he has written The Shadow, The Angel in the House, The Farmer s Wife, St. George and the Dragons, and other plays. His poems appear frequently in the magazines, and he has contributed long poems to various issues of the E.P.A. Annual, in which his complete rejection of all creeds and fine vindication of nature and human life find expression. He is an Agnostic, and is rare among our poets and novelists, not only for the standard of his art, but for his possession of a very definite philosophy of life, based on wide reading, and his out spoken enmity to all forms of obscurantism. 600