John Phillips (author)

John Phillips (1631–1706) was an English author, the brother of Edward Phillips, and a nephew of John Milton.

Life

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. He appears to have acted as unofficial secretary to Milton, but, unable to obtain regular political employment, and (like his brother) chafing against the discipline he was under, he published in 1655, a bitter attack on Puritanism titled a Satyr against Hypocrites (1655). In 1656, he was summoned before the privy council for his share in a book of licentious poems, Sportive Wit, which was suppressed by the authorities, but almost immediately replaced by a similar collection, Wit and Drollery.

In Montelion (1660) he ridiculed the astrological almanacs of William Lilly. Two other skits of this name, in 1661 and 1662, also full of coarse royalist wit, were probably by another hand. In 1678, he supported the agitation of Titus Oates, writing on his behalf, says Anthony Wood, many lies and villanies. Dr Oates's Narrative of the Popish Plot indicated it was the first of these tracts. In the same year he published the first English translation of Jean-Baptiste Tavernier's 'Six Voyages' recounting a lifetime of travel in the Middle East and South Asia [1].

He began a monthly historical review in 1688, entitled Modern History or a Monthly Account of all considerable Occurrences, Civil, Ecclesiastical and Military, followed in 1690, by The Present State of Europe, or a Historical and Political Mercury, which was supplemented by a preliminary volume giving a history of events from 1688. He executed many translations from the French language, and a version (1687) of Don Quixote, which has been called by Quixote translator Samuel Putnam the worst English translation ever made of the novel. Putnam goes so far as to say in his Translator's Preface that Phillips's version "cannot be called a translation". This is largely because Phillips actually changes the novel by substituting references to famous English locales in place of the original Spanish ones, and including references to things British not found in the original novel.

An extended account of the brothers is given by Wood in Athenæ Oxononienses (ed. Bliss, iv. 764 seq.), where a long list of their works is dealt with. This formed the basis of William Godwin's Lives of Edward and John Phillips (1815), with which was reprinted Edward Phillips's Life of John Milton.

gollark: That could be solved with multiple off-topics.
gollark: You have to see *some small amount* of them, which is much more manageable.
gollark: Oh, NOW it pings me somehow?
gollark: You have a reasonable point that you can be nice to people inside a conversation but (possibly inadvertently) non-nice to those outside it. I think niceness within conversations is more important, as people outside them can more easily choose not to participate in them, but this doesn't work excellently. Banning discussion of anything some people do not like reading is *a* fix for some of this, but I don't like the tradeoffs, given the wide range of things in this category. Isolating that elsewhere is also not good for various reasons I indicated before. A generalized rule-4-y approach could end up doing basically the same thing as preemptively banning it, and people seem dissatisfied with "ignore the channel for a bit". Thus, I'm unsure of how the issue can be solved nicely and it's worth actually investigating the options.
gollark: What a strange name.

References
  1. Dictionary of National Biography, 1885-1900, Volume 45, Phillips, John (1631-1706)
  • Lee, Sidney (1896). "Phillips, John (1631-1706)" . In Lee, Sidney (ed.). Dictionary of National Biography. 45. London: Smith, Elder & Co.
  • Campbell, Gordon. "Phillips, John (1631–1706?)". Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (online ed.). Oxford University Press. doi:10.1093/ref:odnb/22161. (Subscription or UK public library membership required.)
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