Life
He was the son of Edward Phillips of the crown office in chancery, and his wife Anne, only sister of John Milton, the poet. Edward Phillips the younger was born in the Strand, London. His father died in 1631, and Anne eventually married her husband's successor in the crown office, Thomas Agar. Edward Phillips and his younger brother, John, were educated by Milton. Edward entered Magdalen Hall, Oxford, in November 1650, but left the university in 1651 to work as a bookseller's clerk in London.
Although he did not share Milton's religious and political views, and seems, to judge from the free character of his Mysteries of Love and Eloquence (1658), to have undergone a certain revulsion from his Puritan upbringing, he remained on affectionate terms with his uncle to the end. He was tutor to the son of John Evelyn, the diarist, from 1663 to 1672 at Sayes Court, Deptford, and in 1677-1679 in the family of Henry Bennet, 1st Earl of Arlington, a prominent Roman Catholic. The date of Phillips' death is unknown but his last book is dated 1696.
Read more about this topic: Edward Phillips
Famous quotes containing the word life:
“This death’s livery which walled its bearers from ordinary life was sign that they have sold their wills and bodies to the State: and contracted themselves into a service not the less abject for that its beginning was voluntary.”
—T.E. (Thomas Edward)
“Who shall describe the inexpressable tenderness and immortal life of the grim forest, where Nature, though it be midwinter, is ever in her spring, where the moss-grown and decaying trees are not old, but seem to enjoy a perpetual youth.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)