Ambrose Philips

Ambrose Philips 1674-1749, English author. After resigning his fellowship from Cambridge in 1708, he moved to London and became known in the literary Whig coterie of Addison. He is principally remembered for his quarrel with Pope about the relative merits of their pastorals that appeared in the 1709 edition of Jacob Tonson's miscellany. He wrote three verse tragedies, of which only The Distrest Mother (1712), adapted from Racine's Andromaque, had any success. In 1718 he began the Freethinker, a periodical in imitation of the Spectator. His nickname "Namby-Pamby" was given to him by Henry Carey because of the cloying sentimentality of his poems in praise of childhood.

Philips, Ambrose (1674–1749), poet, is remembered chiefly for his quarrel with Pope over the relative merits of their pastorals. Pope drew, in the Guardian (No. 40, 1713), ‘a comparison of Philips's performance with his own, in which, with an unexampled and unequalled artifice of irony…he gives the preference to Philips’ ( Johnson, Lives of the English Poets). Philips's ‘Epistle to the Earl of Dorset’ (1709) memorably evokes the frozen landscape of Denmark. His infantile trochaics addressed to children earned him the nickname of ‘Namby Pamby’.

Philips, Ambrose (1674–1749), English dramatist, son of a draper in Shrewsbury, well educated, and a member of Addison's circle. His chief claim to fame is that in The Distrest Mother (1712), an adaptation of Racine's Andromaque (1667), he wrote one of the best pseudo-classical tragedies in English, second only to Addison's Cato (1713). Henry Fielding parodied it in The Covent Garden Tragedy (1732), proving that it still held the stage in his day. Philips, who was nicknamed Namby-Pamby by Swift for his poor verses, wrote two other undistinguished tragedies, The Briton (1722) and Humfrey, Duke of Gloucester (1723).