Philips

Philips, or PHILLIPS, EDWARD, the elder of the two nephews brought up and educated by Milton, the sons of his sister Anne, whose husband E. Phillips held a government office in Chancery, and died in 1631, leaving two sons to Milton's care. Edward Philips was born in 1630, and became a student of Magdalen College, Oxford, but left in 1651 without taking a degree. In 1663 he was tutor to the son of John Evelyn at Say Court in Essex. He is mentioned in Evelyn's Diary as 'not at all infected by Milton's principles,' yet certainly he entertained a great respect and admiration for his uncle, and not only extolled Milton in his Theatrum Poetarum as 'the exactest of heroic poets,' 'who hath revived the majesty and true decorum of Heroic Poesy and Tragedy,' but has left us a valuable though short and fragmentary Life of the poet. This was originally prefixed (1694) to a translation of Milton's Letters of State, but is now most accessible in Godwin's Lives of E. and J. Philips (1815, pp. 350-383), and is, as Johnson says, 'the only authentic account of Milton's domestic manners.' Of his numerous works may be mentioned a complete edition (the first) of the Poems of Drunmond of Hawthornden (1656); New World of English Words (1658), a kind of dictionary, which went through several editions; the Continuation of Baker's Chronicle of the Kings of England (1665); Theatrum Poetarum, or a Complete Collection of the Poets (1675); the Tractatus de Carmine Dramatico Poetarum in the 18th edition of Buchler's Thesaurus (1679); and Tractatus de Lingua Latina (1682). Milton, says Anbrey, made his nephews songsters, and sing from the time they were with him, and verses by both are found in Ayres and Dialogues for One, Two, and Three Voices, by Henry Lawes (1653). Edward is supposed to have died shortly after the publication (1694) of the Letters of State.