PHILIPPUS, MARCUS JULIUS, Roman emperor A.D. 244 to 249, often called "Philip the Arab," was a native of Bostra in Arabia Trachonitis. Having entered the Roman army, he rose to be praetorian praefect in the Persian campaign of Gordian III., and, inspiring the soldiers to slay the young emperor, was raised by them to the purple (244). Of his reign little is known except that he celebrated the secular games with great pomp in 248, when Rome was supposed to have reached the thousandth year of her existence. A rebellion broke out among the legions of Moesia, and Decius, who was sent to quell it, was forced by the troops to put himself at their head and march upon Italy. Philip was defeated and slain in a battle near Verona. According to Christian writers, he was a convert to Christianity.
See Aurelius Victor, Caesares, 28; Eutropius, ix. 3; Zonaras, xii. 19.
PHILIPS, AMBROSE (c. 1675-1749), English poet, was born in Shropshire of a Leicestershire family. He was educated at Shrewsbury school and St John's College, Cambridge, of which he became a fellow in 1699. He seems to have lived chiefly at Cambridge until he resigned his fellowship in 1708, and his pastorals probably belong to this period. He worked for Jacob Tonson the bookseller, and his Pastorals opened the 6th volume of Tonson's Miscellanies (1709), which also contained the pastorals of Pope. Philips was a stanch Whig, and a friend of Steele and Addison. In Nos. 22, 23, 30 and 32 (1713) of the Guardian he was injudiciously praised as the only worthy successor of Spenser. The writer of the papers, who is supposed to have been Thomas Tickell, pointedly ignored Pope's pastorals. In the Spectator Addison applauded him for his simplicity, and for having written English eclogues unencumbered by the machinery of classical mythology. Pope's jealousy was roused, and he sent an anonymous contribution to the Guardian (No. 40) in which he drew an ironical comparison between his own and Philip's pastorals, censuring himself and praising Philips's worst passages. Philips is said to have threatened to cane Pope with a rod he kept hung up at Button's coffee-house for the purpose. It was at Pope's request that Gay burlesqued Philips's pastorals in his Shepherd's Week, but the parody pleased by the very quality of simplicity which it was intended to ridicule. Samuel Johnson describes the relations between Pope and Philips as a "perpetual reciprocation of malevolence." Pope lost no opportunity of scoffing at Philips, who figured in the Bathos and the Dunciad, as Macer in the Characters; and in the "Instructions to a porter how to find Mr Curll's authors" he is a "Pindaric writer in red stockings." In 1718 he started a Whig paper, The Freethinker, in conjunction with Hugh Boulter, then vicar of St Olave's, Southwark. He had been made justice of the peace for Westminster, and in 1717 a commissioner for the lottery, and when Boulter was made archbishop of Armagh, Philips accompanied him as secretary. He sat in the Irish parliament for Co. Armagh, was secretary to the lord chancellor in 1726, and in 1733 became a judge of the prerogative court. His patron died in 1742, and six years later Philips returned to London, where he died on the 18th of June 1749.
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. In T. H. Ward's English Poets, however, he is represented by two of the simple and charming pieces addressed to the infant children of Lord Carteret and of Daniel Pulteney. These were scoffed at by Swift as "little flams on Miss Carteret," and earned for Philips from Henry Carey the nickname of "Namby-Pamby."
Philips's works are an abridgment of Bishop Hacket's Life of John Williams (1700); The Thousand and One Days; Persian Tales (1722), from the French of F. Pétis de la Croix; three plays: The Distrest Mother (1712), an adaptation of Racine's Andromaque; The Briton (1722); Humfrey, duke of Gloucester (1723). Many of his poems, which included some translations from Sappho, Anacreon and Pindar, were published separately, and a collected edition appeared in 1748.
PHILIPS, JOHN (1676-1708), English poet and man of letters, son of Dr Stephen Philips, archdeacon of Shropshire, was born at his father's vicarage at Bampton, Oxfordshire, on the 30th of December 1676. He was educated at Winchester and Christ Church, Oxford. He was a careful reader of Virgil and of Milton. In 1701 his poem, The Splendid Shilling, was published without his consent, and a second unauthorized version in 1705 induced him to print a correct edition in that year. The Splendid Shilling, which Addison in The Tatler called "the finest burlesque poem in the British language," recites in Miltonic blank verse the miseries consequent on the want of that piece of money. Its success introduced Philips to the notice of Robert Harley and Henry St John, who commissioned him to write a Tory counterblast to Joseph Addison's Campaign. Philips was happier in burlesquing his favourite author than in genuine imitation of a heroic theme. His Marlborough is modelled on the warriors of Homer and Virgil, he rides precipitate over heaps of fallen horses, changing the fortune of the battle by his own right arm. Cyder (1708) is modelled on the Georgics of Virgil. Cerealia, an Imitation of Milton (1706), although printed without his name, may safely be ascribed to him. In all his poems except Blenheim he found an opportunity to insert a eulogy of tobacco. Philips died at Hereford on the 15th of February 1708/9. There is an inscription to his memory in Westminster Abbey.
See The Whole Works of . . . John Philips . . . To which is prefixed his life, by Mr [G.] Sewell (3rd ed., 1720); Johnson, Lives of the Poets; and Biographia Britannica.
PHILIPS, KATHARINE (1631-1664), English poet, daughter of John Fowler, a merchant of Bucklersbury, London, was born on the 1st of January 1631. Her father was a Presbyterian, and Katharine is said to have read the Bible through before she was five years old. On arriving at years of discretion she broke with Presbyterian traditions in both religion and politics, became an ardent admirer of the king and his church policy, and in 1647 married James Philips, a Welsh royalist. Her home at the Priory, Cardigan, became the centre of a "society of friendship," the members of which were known to one another by fantastic names, Mrs Philips being "Orinda," her husband "Antenor," Sir Charles Cotterel "Poliarchus." The "matchless" Orinda, as her admirers called her, posed as the apostle of female friendship. That there was much solid worth under her affectations is proved by the respect and friendship she inspired. Jeremy Taylor in 1659 dedicated to her his "Discourse on the Nature, Offices and Measures of Friendship," and Cowley, Henry Vaughan the Silurist, the earl of Roscommon and the earl of Cork and Orrery all celebrated her talent. In 1662 she went to Dublin to pursue her husband's claim to certain Irish estates, and there she completed a translation of Corneille's Pompée, produced with great success in 1663 in the Smock Alley Theatre, and printed in the same year both in Dublin and London. She went to London in March 1664 with a nearly completed translation of Corneille's Horace, but died of smallpox on the 22nd of June. The literary atmosphere of her circle is preserved in the excellent Letters of Orinda to Poliarchus, published by Bernard Lintot in 1705 and 1709. "Poliarchus" (Sir Charles Cotterel) was master of the ceremonies at the court of the Restoration, and afterwards translated the romances of La Calprenède. Mrs Philips had two children, one of whom, Katharine, became the wife of Lewis Wogan of Boulston, Pembrokeshire. According to Mr Gosse, this lady may have been "Joan Philips," the author of a volume of Female Poems . . . written by Ephelia, which are in the style of Orinda, and display genuine feeling with very little reserve.
See E. W. Gosse, Seventeenth Century Studies (1883). Poems, By the Incomparable Mrs K. P. appeared surreptitiously in 1664 and an authentic edition in 1667. Selected Poems, edited with an appreciation by Miss L. I. Guiney, appeared in 1904; but the best modern edition is in Saintsbury's Minor Poets of the Caroline Period (vol. i., 1905).
PHILISTINES,[1] the general name for the people of Philistia (Ass. Palaštu, Piliśtu; Eg. p-r-s-t), a district embracing the rich lowlands on the Mediterranean coast from the neighbourhood
- ↑ "Philistine," as a term of contempt, hostility or reproach, appears first in English, in a sense equivalent to "the enemy," as early as the beginning of the 17th century, and later as a slang term for a bailiff or a sheriff's officer, or merely for drunken or vicious people generally. In German universities the townsfolk
