th prevented the
hopes of the world in that respect, yet the passages of that kind, which
we find in his Poem on Cyder, may convince us of the niceness of his
observations in natural causes. Besides this, he was particularly
skilled in antiquities, especially those of his own country; and part
of this study too, he has with much art and beauty intermixed with his
poetry.

While Mr. Philips continued at the university, he was honoured with the
acquaintance of the best and politest men in it, and had a particular
intimacy with Mr. Edmund Smith, author of Phaedra and Hippolitus. The
first poem which got him reputation, was his Splendid Shilling, which
the author of the Tatler has stiled the best burlesque poem in the
English Language; nor was it only, says Mr. Sewel, 'the finest of that
kind in our tongue, but handled in a manner quite different from what
had been made use of by any author of our own, or other nation, the
sentiments, and stile being in this both new; whereas in those, the jest
lies more in allusions to the thoughts and fables of the ancients, than
in the pomp of expression. The same humour is continued thro' the whole,
and not unnaturally diversified, as most poems of that nature had been
before.

Out of that variety of circumstances, which his fruitful invention must
suggest to him, on such a subject, he has not chosen any but what are
diverting to every reader, and some, that none but his inimitable dress
could have made diverting to any: when we read it, we are betrayed
into a pleasure which we could not expect, tho' at the same time the
sublimity of the stile, and the gravity of the phrase, seem to chastise
that laughter which they provoke.' Mr. Edmund Smith in his beautiful
verses on our Author's Death, speaks thus concerning this poem;

'In her best light the comic muse appears,
When she with borrowed pride the buskin
wears.'

This account given by Mr. Sewel of the Splendid Shilling, is perhaps
heightened by personal friendship, and that admiration which we
naturally pay to the productions of one we love. The stile seems to
be unnatural for a poem which is intended to raise laughter; for that
laboured gravity has rather a contrary influence; disposing the mind to
be serious: and the disappointment is not small, when a man finds he
has been betrayed into solemn thinking, in reading the description of a
trifle; if the gravity of the phrase chastises the laughter, the purpose
of the poem is