Philips, AMBROSE, minor poet, was descended from a Leicestershire family, and born about 1671. He was educated at St John's College, Cambridge, and contributed to the university memorial verses on the death of Queen Mary. Coming up to London he became intimate with Addison and Steele, did hack work for Tonson, and first gained a reputation by the 'Winter-piece' in the Tatler (No. 12) and the six Pastorals which opened the sixth volume of Tonson's Miscellany (1709), of which the first four volumes had been edited by Dryden. Strangely enough the same volume closed with the Pastorals of the young Pope, whose jealousy was aroused by Tickell's praising Philips and passing over himself, in his paper in the Guardian on Pastoral Poetry from Theocritus downwards. Pope took a characteristic revenge by a paper in the Guardian (No. 40), in which the worst of the verses of Philips were ironically exalted above the best of his own. His design he disguised with such dexterity that, though Addison discovered it, as Dr Johnson tells us, Steele was deceived, and was afraid of displeasing Pope by publishing his paper. Philips is said to have hung up a rod in Button's Coffee-house with which he threatened to chastise Pope on the first occasion. Pope nourished his anger against him, and all the more after his own quarrel with Addison to whose circle Philips belonged, and did not forget him in the Dunciad. Philips supported the government in the columns of the Free-thinker, and was rewarded by being made secretary to Archbishop Boulter in Ireland. Later he sat for Armagh, acted as secretary to the Lord Chancellor and judge of the Prerogative Court, and after his patron Boulter's death returned to London, and died in 1749. Of his plays, The Distress'd Mother (1712)—an adaptation from Racine's Andromache—was warmly praised in the Spectator; The Briton and Humphry, Duke of Gloucester lived only long enough to be damned. His Pastorals are vigorous and easy yet graceful verse, but lack the charm that belongs to Gay, whose Shepherd's Week was really written at Pope's instigation to take Philips off. Some of his odes, addressed to children, and written with infantine simplicity of diction, earned him from Henry Carey the lasting nickname of 'Namby-Pamby.'
See Johnson's Lives, and Pope's Correspondence in Elwin and Courthope's edition.