ABSTRACT
Ambrose Philips (1675?-1749) was educated at St John's College, Cambridge, of which he became a Fellow. His famous quarrel with Pope was occasioned by the publication of The Guardian No. 40 (q.v.), where Pope ironically answers previous material on pastoral, and all at Philip's expense. His pastoral poetry is affectedly Spenserian, though Addison thought highly enough of him to hope that his Pastorals, like those of Virgil and Spenser, would be the prelude to something greater (see Addison's Letters, ed. W. Graham (Oxford, 1941), pp. 229-30).
