Leucas
Ambrose Philips, whose Winter Piece appeared in No. 12 of the
Tatler
, and whose six Pastorals preceded those of Pope. Philips's Pastorals had appeared in 1709 in a sixth volume of a Poetical Miscellany issued by Jacob Tonson. The first four volumes of that Miscellany had been edited by Dryden, the fifth was collected after Dryden's death, and the sixth was notable for opening with the Pastorals of Ambrose Philips and closing with those of young Pope which Tonson had volunteered to print, thereby, said Wycherley, furnishing a Jacob's ladder by which Pope mounted to immortality. In a letter to his friend Mr. Henry Cromwell, Pope said, generously putting himself out of account, that there were no better eclogues in our language than those of Philips; but when afterwards Tickell in the
Guardian
, criticising Pastoral Poets from Theocritus downwards, exalted Philips and passed over Pope, the slighted poet took his revenge by sending to Steele an amusing one paper more upon Pastorals. This was ironical exaltation of the worst he could find in Philips over the best bits of his own work, which Steele inserted (it is No. 40 of the