s soon distinguished himself, for the
Liberals came to him, and he had quite enough sense to discover if a
book was good. He produced many capital volumes of Ana, on the French
system, and memoirs of Foote, Monk, Lewes, Wilkes, and Lady Mary Wortley
Montagu. He published Holcroft's "Travels," Godwin's best novels, and
Miss Owenson's (Lady Morgan's) first work, "The Novice of St. Dominick."
In 1807, when he removed to New Bridge Street, he served the office of
sheriff; was knighted on presenting an address, and effected many
reforms in the prisons and lock-up houses. In his useful "Letter to the
Livery of London" he computes the number of writs then annually issued
at 24,000; the sheriffs' expenses at L2,000. He also did his best to
repress the cruelties of the mob to poor wretches in the pillory. He was
a steady friend of Alderman Waithman, and was with him in the carriage
at the funeral of Queen Caroline, in 1821, when a bullet from a
soldier's carbine passed through the carriage window near Hyde Park. In
1809 Phillips had some reverses, and breaking up his publishing-office
in Bridge Street, devoted himself to the profitable reform of
school-books, publishing them under the names of Goldsmith, Mavor, and
Blair.

This active-minded man was the first to assert that Dr. Wilmot wrote
"Junius," and to start the celebrated scandal about George III. and the
young Quakeress, Hannah Lightfoot, daughter of a linendraper, at the
corner of Market Street, St. James's. She afterwards, it is said,
married a grocer, named Axford, on Ludgate Hill, was then carried off by
the prince, and bore him three sons, who in time became generals. The
story is perhaps traceable to Dr. Wilmot, whose daughter married the
Duke of Cumberland. Phillips found time to attack the Newtonian theory
of gravitation, to advocate a memorial to Shakespeare, to compile a book
containing a million of facts, to write on Divine philosophy, and to
suggest (as he asserted) to Mr. Brougham, in 1825, the first idea of the
Society for Useful Knowledge. Almost ruined by the failures during the
panic in 1826, he retired to Brighton, and there pushed forward his
books and his interrogative system of education. Sir Richard's greatest
mistakes, he used to say, had been the rejection of Byron's early poems,
of "Waverley," of Bloomfield's "Farmer's Boy," and O'Meara's "Napoleon
in Exile." He always stoutly maintained his claim to the suggestion of
the "Percy Anecdotes." Philli