Background
Ambrose Philips was born on October 9, 1674 in Shropshire, England.
(Excerpt from The Poetical Works of Ambrose Philips: Conta...)
Excerpt from The Poetical Works of Ambrose Philips: Containing His Pastorals, Epistles, Odes, Songs, Epigrams, Translations, Etc;, Etc;, Etc W (lease, and food of humble thinu, Below the nail, below thefiowne olkonea, Thanks'totny am, a urine meweetadllfe; No aloepleas mum l oounu no day ofetrlfc. Content tome, content to die, unknown, woot'myaelf. Accountable to none. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.
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Ambrose Philips was born on October 9, 1674 in Shropshire, England.
He was educated at Shrewsbury school and St John's College, Cambridge, of which he became a fellow in 1699.
He seems to have lived chiefly at Cambridge until he resigned his fellowship in 1708, and his pastorals probably belong to this period.
He worked for Jacob Tonson the bookseller, and his Pastorals opened the 6th volume of Tonson's Miscellanies (1709), which also contained the pastorals of Pope. In Nos. 22, 23, 30 and 32 (1713) of the Guardian he was injudiciously praised as the only worthy successor of Spenser. The writer of the papers, who is supposed to have been Thomas Tickell, pointedly ignored Pope's pastorals. In the Spectator Addison applauded him for his simplicity, and for having written English eclogues unencumbered by the machinery of classical mythology. Pope's jealousy was roused, and he sent an anonymous contribution to the Guardian (No. 40) in which he drew an ironical comparison between his own and Philip's pastorals, censuring himself and praising Philips's worst passages. Philips is said to have threatened to cane Pope with a rod he kept hung up at Button's coffee-house for the purpose. It was at Pope's request that Gay burlesqued Philips's pastorals in his Shepherd's Week, but the parody pleased by the very quality of simplicity which it was intended to ridicule. Samuel Johnson describes the relations between Pope and Philips as a "perpetual reciprocation of malevolence. " Pope lost no opportunity of scoffing at Philips, who figured in the Bathos and the Dunciad, as Macer in the Characters; and in the "Instructions to a porter how to find Mr Curll's authors" he is a "Pindaric writer in red stockings. "
In 1718 he started a Whig paper, The Freethinker, in conjunction with Hugh Boulter, then vicar of St Olave's, Southwark. He had been made justice of the peace for Westminster, and in 1717 a commissioner for the lottery, and when Boulter was made archbishop of Armagh, Philips accompanied him as secretary. He sat in the Irish parliament for Co. Armagh, was secretary to the lord chancellor in 1726, and in 1733 became a judge of the prerogative court.
His patron died in 1742, and six years later Philips returned to London, where he died on the 18th of June 1749.
He is best-known for his Pastorals.
(Excerpt from The Poetical Works of Ambrose Philips: Conta...)
Philips was a staunch Whig.
