iterary industry of his more sedate
and likeable elder brother, Edward, there is authentic evidence. _A
New World of Words, or a General Dictionary, 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 express