and the poem was published on the 29th (Daily Courant). It has some fine descriptive passages with an exact account of the culture of the apple tree and the manufacture of cider. It has many local allusions to Herefordshire, the County of his ancestors. Philip Miller the botanist told Johnson that "there were many books written on the same subject in prose which do not contain so much truth as that poem". Samuel Johnson objected that the blank verse of Milton, which Philips imitated, "could not `be sustained by images which at most can rise only to elegance". Pope said that Philips succeeded extremely well in his imitation of Paradise Lost, but was quite wrong in endeavouring to imitate it on such a subject. Philip's minor productions include a clever Latin "Ode ad Henricum S John" written in acknowledgement of a present of wine and tobacco, which was translated by Thomas Newcomb. Philips also contemplated a poem on the "Last Day", but his health grew worse. After a visit to Bath, Somerset he died aged 33 of tuberculosis at his mother's house in Hereford. Memorials and testimonials Thomas Tickell in his Oxford (1707) had compared Philips with Milton, saying he "equals the poet, and excels the man". After the poet's death, a monument in his memory was erected in 1710 by Simon Harcourt, 1st Viscount Harcourt in Westminster Abbey, between the monuments to Chaucer and Drayton, with the motto "Honos erit huic quoque pomo" from the title page of Cyder. In February 1710 Edmund Smith printed a "Poem to the Memory of Mr John Philips" which was later described by Samuel Johnson as "a poem, which justice must place among the best elegies which our language can shew". In the same year Leonard Welsted published "A Poem to the Memory of the Incomparable Mr Philips" with a dedication to St John. In 1713, William Diaper paid his tribute by including the episode of Pomona mourning Thyrsis near the beginning of his Dryades; or, the Nymphs Prophecy (1713). References Attribution External links John Philips at the Eighteenth-Century Poetry Archive (ECPA) Selected poetry of John Philips 1676 births 1709 deaths People from Bampton, Oxfordshire People educated at Winchester College Alumni of Christ Church, Oxford English male poets