containing the Terms, Etymologies, Definitions, and
Perfect Interpretations, of the proper Significations
of hard English words throughout the Arts and Sciences:
such is the title of a folio volume published by him
in 1657, and for the purposes of which he was afterwards
accused of having plagiarized largely from the Glossographia
of one Thomas Blount, published in the preceding year.
In this piece of labour, which was doubtless a bookseller’s
commission, he must have had, the question of plagiarism
apart, his uncle’s thorough good-will; but it
cannot have been the same with his Mysteries of
Love and Eloquence: or the Arts of Wooing and
Complimenting, as they are managed in the Spring Garden,
Hide Park, the New Exchange, and other eminent Places.
That performance, which appeared in August 1658, with
a Preface “To the Youthful Gentry,” and
which must have been in progress at our present date,
was much more in the vein of his brother John, and
indeed was done to the order of Nathaniel Brooke,
the bookseller who had published John’s Satyr
against Hypocrites, and also the more questionable
Sportive Wit or the Muses’ Merriment.
“The book,” says Godwin, “is put
together with conspicuous ingenuity and profligacy,
and is entitled to no insignificant rank among the
multifarious productions which were at that time issued
from the press to debauch the manners of the nation
and bring back the King. It consists of imaginary
conversations and forms of address for conversation,
poems, models of letters, questions and answers, an
Art of Logic with examples from the poets, and various
instructions and helps to the lover for the composition
of his verses; and, if we could overlook the gross
provocations to libertinism and vice which everywhere
occur in the book, it might be mentioned as no unentertaining
illustration of the manners of the men of wit and
gallantry in the time when it was published.”
To Godwin’s description we may add that the
book includes a Rhyming Dictionary, “useful
for that pleasing pastime called Crambo,” also
a collection of parlour-games, and a number of other
clever things. The poems and songs interspersed
with the prose were mostly old ones reprinted, some
of them chosen with fine taste; but one or two were
Phillips’s own. Of the model phrases or
set expressions which form one of the prose parts
of the volume, by way of instruction in the language
of gallantry and courtship, specimens are these,—“With
your ambrosiac kisses bathe my lips;” “You
are a white enchantress, lady, and can enchain me
with a smile;” “Midnight would blush at
this;” “You walk in artificial clouds
and bathe your silken limbs in wanton dalliance.”
What could Milton do, so far as such a production came
within his knowledge, but shake his head and mingle
smiles with a frown? Clearly the elder nephew
too had slipped the Miltonic restraints. He had
not lapsed, however, so decidedly as his brother;
and we may partly retract in his case the statement
that Milton could have little comfort from him.
He still went and came about Milton, very attentively.[1]