Edward Phillips was an English

England

England is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. It shares land borders with Scotland to the north and Wales to the west; the Irish Sea is to the north west, the Celtic Sea to the south west, with the North Sea to the east and the English Channel to the south separating it from continental...

 author

Author

An author is broadly defined as "the person who originates or gives existence to anything" and that authorship determines responsibility for what is created. Narrowly defined, an author is the originator of any written work.-Legal significance:...

.

Life

He was the son of Edward Phillips of the crown office in chancery, and his wife Anne, only sister of John Milton

John Milton

John Milton was an English poet, polemicist, a scholarly man of letters, and a civil servant for the Commonwealth of England under Oliver Cromwell...

, the poet. Edward Phillips the younger was born in the Strand

Strand, London

Strand is a street in the City of Westminster, London, England. The street is just over three-quarters of a mile long. It currently starts at Trafalgar Square and runs east to join Fleet Street at Temple Bar, which marks the boundary of the City of London at this point, though its historical length...

, London. His father died in 1631, and Anne eventually married her husband's successor in the crown office, Thomas Agar. Edward Phillips and his younger brother, John

John Phillips (author)

John Phillips was an English author, the brother of Edward Phillips, and a nephew of John Milton.Anne Phillips, mother of John and Edward, was the sister of John Milton, the poet. In 1652, John Phillips published a Latin reply to the anonymous attack on Milton entitled Pro Rege et populo anglicano...

, were educated by Milton. Edward entered Magdalen Hall, Oxford, in November 1650, but left the university in 1651 to work as a bookseller's clerk in London.

Although he did not share Milton's religious and political views, and seems, to judge from the free character of his Mysteries of Love and Eloquence (1658), to have undergone a certain revulsion from his Puritan

Puritan

The Puritans were a significant grouping of English Protestants in the 16th and 17th centuries. Puritanism in this sense was founded by some Marian exiles from the clergy shortly after the accession of Elizabeth I of England in 1558, as an activist movement within the Church of England...

 upbringing, he remained on affectionate terms with his uncle to the end. He was tutor to the son of John Evelyn

John Evelyn

John Evelyn was an English writer, gardener and diarist.Evelyn's diaries or Memoirs are largely contemporaneous with those of the other noted diarist of the time, Samuel Pepys, and cast considerable light on the art, culture and politics of the time John Evelyn (31 October 1620 – 27 February...

, the diarist, from 1663 to 1672 at Sayes Court

Sayes Court

Located in Deptford, in the London Borough of Lewisham and on the Thames Path, Sayes Court once attracted throngs to visit its celebrated garden created by the seventeenth century diarist John Evelyn...

, Deptford

Deptford

Deptford is a district of south London, England, located on the south bank of the River Thames. It is named after a ford of the River Ravensbourne, and from the mid 16th century to the late 19th was home to Deptford Dockyard, the first of the Royal Navy Dockyards.Deptford and the docks are...

, and in 1677-1679 in the family of Henry Bennet, 1st Earl of Arlington

Henry Bennet, 1st Earl of Arlington

Henry Bennet, 1st Earl of Arlington KG, PC was an English statesman.- Background and early life :He was the son of Sir John Bennet of Dawley, Middlesex, and of Dorothy Crofts. He was the younger brother of John Bennet, 1st Baron Ossulston; his sister was Elizabeth Bennet who married Robert Kerr,...

, a prominent Roman Catholic. The date of Phillips' death is unknown but his last book is dated 1696.

Works

His most important work is Theatrum poetarum (1675), a list of the chief poets of all ages and countries, but principally of the English poets, with short critical notes and a prefatory Discourse of the Poets and Poetry, which has usually been traced to Milton's hand. He also wrote The New World of English Words

The New World of English Words

The New World of English Words, or, a General Dictionary is a dictionary compiled by Edward Phillips and first published in London in 1658. It was the first folio English dictionary.-Contents:...

(1658), which went through many editions; a new edition of Baker

Richard Baker (chronicler)

Sir Richard Baker was the English author of the Chronicle of the Kings of England and other works.-Life:He was probably born at Sissinghurst in Kent, the grandson of Sir John Baker, the first Chancellor of the Exchequer. He entered Hart Hall, Oxford, as a commoner in 1584...

's Chronicle, of which the section on the period from 1650 to 1658 was written by himself from the royalist standpoint; a supplement (1676) to John Speed

John Speed

John Speed was an English historian and cartographer.-Life:He was born at Farndon, Cheshire, and went into his father's tailoring business where he worked until he was about 50...

's Theatre of Great Britain; and in 1684 Enchiridion linguae latinae, said to have been taken chiefly from notes prepared by Milton. John Aubrey

John Aubrey

John Aubrey FRS, was an English antiquary, natural philosopher and writer. He is perhaps best known as the author of the collection of short biographical pieces usually referred to as Brief Lives...

states that all Milton's papers came into Phillips's hands, and in 1694 he published a translation of his Letters of State with a valuable memoir.

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Further reading

• Brent L. Nelson, "The Social Context of Rhetoric, 1500-1660," The Dictionary of Literary Biography, Volume 281: British Rhetoricians and Logicians, 1500-1660, Second Series, Detroit: Gale, 2003, pp. 355–377.
• J. Milton French, "Milton, Ramus, and Edward Phillips," Modern Philology, vol. 47, no. 2, 1949, pp. 82–87.

External links