X-Nico

6 unusual facts about Ambrose Philips


Ambrose Philips

His contemporary reputation rested on his pastorals and epistles, particularly the description of winter addressed by him from Copenhagen (1709) to the Earl of Dorset.

He worked for Jacob Tonson the bookseller, and his Pastorals opened the sixth volume of Tonson's Miscellanies (1709), which also contained the pastorals of Alexander Pope.

Chrononhotonthologos

Pope had been a consistent enemy of Ambrose Philips's, and Philips was a stand-in for an entire slate of Whig political views.

John Gay

Pope had urged him to undertake this task in order to ridicule the Arcadian pastorals of Ambrose Philips, who had been praised by a short-lived contemporary publication The Guardian, to the neglect of Pope's claims as the first pastoral writer of the age and the true English Theocritus.

Tommy Thumb's Pretty Song Book

Henry Carey's 1725 satire on Ambrose Philips, Namby Pamby, quotes or alludes to some half-dozen or so nursery rhymes.

William Abbot

He was Pylades to William Charles Macready's Orestes in Ambrose Philips's Distressed Mother when Macready made his first appearance at that theatre (1816).


Leonard Welsted

He contributed to Steele's and Ambrose Philips's respective newspapers in the coming years, and he wrote a prologue and epilogue to Steele's The Conscious Lovers of 1722.


see also

Chrononhotonthologos

Henry Carey was a Tory, or an anti-Walpolean, and he identified with Alexander Pope, in particular, in his stance on the 18th century's cultural polemic (see Augustan poetry for the issues behind Ambrose Philips and Alexander Pope's poison pen battle).