Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 45.djvu/213

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Phillips
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Phillips

stood by those who speak Manx at the present day.’

James Chaloner [q. v.] is authority for the statement that Phillips translated also the whole Bible into Manx, as the result of twenty-nine years' labour, with help from others. Of this work there is no trace. Bishop Wilson doubted the statement, and his doubt is endorsed by Mr. Moore. It is certain that in 1658 Chaloner, then governor of Man, gave to ‘sir’ Hugh Cannell, vicar of Kirk Michael, an addition of 14l. to his salary on this ground among others, that he had been ‘assistant to the late reverend father in God, John Phillips, Bishopp of this isle, in translatinge of the Bible.’

Phillips died on 7 Aug. 1633 at Bishop's Court, in the parish of Ballaugh; he could not have been less than seventy-three years of age. He was buried in St. Germans Cathedral, Peel; a later bishop, Richard Parr or Parre [q. v.], was buried in the same grave, but the site is unknown. His son Samuel, born in Yorkshire in 1589, matriculated at St. John's College, Oxford, on 16 Nov. 1610, graduated B.A. on 22 Nov. 1610, M.A. on 6 July 1617, and succeeded his father as rector of Slingsby in 1619 (see above).

[Wood's Athenæ Oxon. (ed. Bliss), ii. 883; Wood's Fasti (ed. Bliss), i. 212, 226, 341; Foster's Alumni Oxonienses, 1891, iii. 1157, 1159; Moore's Diocesan Hist. of Sodor and Man, 1893, pp. 123 sq., 135 sq., 140 sq.; information from the Rev. D. P. Chase, D.D., principal of St. Mary Hall; from the Rev. E. W. Kissack, Ballaugh; from John Quine, esq., Douglas; and from the Rev. S. E. Gladstone, Hawarden.]

A. G.

PHILLIPS, JOHN (1631–1706), author, younger brother of Edward Phillips (1630–1696?) [q. v.], was born in the autumn of 1631, after the death of his father (Edward Phillips, of the crown office), and was godson of his mother's brother, John Milton, the poet. From infancy he lived with his uncle, from whom he derived all his education. He became a good classical scholar and a ready writer. He obtained a license to print, on 31 Dec. 1649, at the precocious age of eighteen, ‘Mercurius Pæd., or a short and sure way to the Latin Tongue.’ In 1651, when his uncle became Latin secretary to Cromwell, he was in the habit of reading aloud to him, and acted as his assistant secretary. In 1652 he displayed a keen controversial spirit and command of coarse wit in his ‘Joannis Philippi Angli Responsio ad Apologiam Anonymi cujusdam Tenebrionis pro rege et populo Anglicano infantissimam.’ It is a defence of his uncle, written under his uncle's guidance, against the ‘Pro Rege et Populo Anglicano,’ an anonymous attack, really made by John Rowland, but wrongly ascribed by Milton and Phillips to Bishop Bramhall. Next year Phillips contributed a commendatory poem to Henry Lawes's ‘Ayres.’ In the spring of 1654 he was in Edinburgh, seeking information concerning crown lands in Scotland, at the suggestion of Andrew Sandelands, Milton's friend. He was apparently in hope of securing regular political employment (Thurloe, ii. 226–7). The mission proved abortive, and Phillips returned to his uncle's roof. He soon chafed against his uncle's strict discipline and principles, and, abandoning all pretence of acquiescence, he made a reputation, late in 1655, by a scathing satire on puritanism, entitled ‘Satyr against Hypocrites.’ It is a smart attack upon the religion of Cromwell and his friends, almost worthy of the author of ‘Hudibras.’ It is sometimes wrongly ascribed to the brother Edward. A new edition in 1661 bore the changed title ‘The Religion of the hypocritical Presbyterians, in meeter.’ Other editions are dated 1674, 1677, 1680, and 1689, and in 1700 a publisher reprinted it as ‘Mr. John Milton's Satyre.’

Phillips, having once broken bounds, developed in his literary work a licentious temper which affords a suggestive commentary on the practical value of his uncle's theories of education. On 25 April 1656 the council of state summoned John Phillips of Westminster, with Nathaniel Brook, his publisher, to answer a charge of producing a licentious volume called ‘Sportive Wit: The Muses Merriment. A New Spring of Lusty Drollery, &c.’ Phillips edited the book, copies of which are in the Bodleian Library and at Britwell, and it was ordered to be burnt. But Brook and Phillips lost no time in supplying its place with a similar venture called ‘Wit and Drollery: Jovial Poems never before printed by Sir J[ohn] M[ennes], J[ames] S[mith], Sir W[illiam] D[avenant], J. D[onne], and other admirable wits,’ London, for Brook, 1656. J. P. signs an epistle to the courteous reader. This catchpenny collection of indelicate verse largely plagiarised the ‘Musarum Delitiæ’ of Mennes and Smith of the previous year. In 1656 Phillips also issued ‘The Tears of the Indians … from the Spanish of B. de las Casas,’ and contributed a good ‘song on the Tombs in Westminster Abbey’ to his brother's ‘Mysteries of Love and Eloquence,’ 1658. At the end of 1659 he published, in ridicule of the antimonarchical views and the astrological almanacs of William Lilly [q. v.], ‘Montelion, 1660; or the Prophetical Almanack: being a True and Exact Account of all the Revolutions that are to