That the nephews still hovered about Milton, and resided with him occasionally, together or by turn, giving him their services as amanuenses, appears to be certain.  Edward Phillips was now twenty-five years of age, and John Phillips twenty-four; but neither of them had taken to any profession, or had any other means of subsistence than private pedagogy, with such work for the booksellers as could be obtained by their own ability or through their uncle’s interest.  The younger, as we know, had made some name for himself by his Joannis Philippi, Angli, Responsio of 1652, written in behalf of his uncle, and under his uncle’s superintendence; and it is probable that both the brothers had in the interval been doing odds and ends of literary work.  There are verses by both among the commendatory poems prefixed to the first two parts of Henry Lawes’s Ayres and Dialogues for one, two, or three Voices, published in 1653, as a sequel to that previous publication of 1648, entitled Choice Psalmes put into musick for three Voices, which had contained Milton’s own sonnet to Lawes; and in the Divine Poems of Thomas Washbourne, a Gloucestershire clergyman, published in 1654, there are “Verses to his friend Thomas Washbourne” by Edward Phillips.  In this latter year, I find, John Phillips must have been away for some time in Scotland, for in a letter to Thurloe dated “Wood Street, Compter, 11th April, 1654”, the writer—­no other than Milton’s interesting friend Andrew Sandelands, now back from Scotland himself—­mentions Phillips as there instead.  Sandelands had not ceased, under the Protectorate, to try to make himself useful to the Government, and so get restored to his Rectory; and, as nothing had come of his grand proposal about the woods of Scotland, he had interested himself in a new business:  viz. “the prosecution of that information concerning the Crown Lands in Scotland which his Highness and the late Council of State did refer to the Commissioners at Leith.”  Assuring Thurloe that he had been diligent in the affair, he says, “I have employed Mr. John Phillips, Mr. Milton’s kinsman, to solicit the business, both with the Judges at Edinburgh and with the Commissioners at Leith; who by his last letter promiseth to give me a very good account very speedily.”  Whether this means that Sandelands had himself sent Phillips from London to Scotland on the business, or only that, knowing Phillips to be already in Scotland, he had put the business into his hands, in either case one discerns an attempt on Milton’s part to find some public employment, other than clerkship under himself, for the unsteady Phillips.  The attempt, however, must have failed; for in 1655 Phillips was back in London, still a Bohemian, and apparently in a mood that boded ill for his ever being anything else.[1]