Poems attempted in the style of Milton. By Mr. John Philips, Student of Christ-Church, Oxon. With his life by Dr Sewell
London: printed for E. Curll, in Covent-Garden, MDCCXLIV. [1744]. Full Calf. 12mo: xxx,42;72pp, with frontispiece portrait of the poet, frontispiece to the separately paginated Cyder, woodcut head- and tailpieces. Contemporary speckled calf, covers framed with double fillets in gilt, spine with five raised bands ruled in gilt, recent red morocco lettering piece gilt, edges speckled red. A Fine—indeed exceptional—copy. Foxon, p. 570. Fine. Item #BB0761
Tenth Edition (but first under this title), collecting The Splendid Shilling; Blenheim, An Ode (in Latin and English), and, most importantly, Cyder—A Poem in Two Books (Fourth Edition, printed for J. and R. Tonson, and S. Draper, 1744). Many of Philips's poems, including his first, the Splendid Shilling (which The Tatler commended as "the finest Burlesque Poem in the British Language"), were composed in Miltonic blank verse. "Philips's greatest poem, the two-book georgic Cyder (1708), begun at Oxford, celebrates his native land (and in particular Herefordshire) with a combination of accurate knowledge of apples and cider making and a ‘sketch of our National History.' The botanist Philip Miller told [Dr.] Johnson that ‘there were many books written on the same subject in prose, which do not contain so much truth as that poem.' . . . Philips taught Pope, who drew on Cyder in Windsor Forest, how to use Paradise Lost for un-Miltonic purposes, and to suggest that paradise might still be found in England's green and pleasant land." (ODNB).
Price: $364.00