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In the sub-title of the poem, it is declared to be “Occasion’d by an Epistle of Mr. Pope’s on that Subject” [i.e. “Taste”]. This was what is now known as No. 4 of the Moral Essays, “On the Use of Riches.” But its first title In 1731 was “Of Taste”; and this was subsequently altered to “Of False Taste.” It was addressed to Pope’s friend, Richard Boyle, Earl of Burlington; and, under the style of “Timon’s Villa,” employed, for its chief illustration of wasteful and vacuous magnificence, the ostentatious seat which James Brydges, first Duke of Chandos, had erected at Canons, near Edgware. The story of Pope’s epistle does not belong to this place. But in the print of The Man of Taste, William Hogarth, gratifying concurrently a personal antipathy, promptly attacked Pope, Burlington, and his own bete noire, Burlington’s architect, William Kent. Pope, to whom Burlington acts as hodman, is depicted whitewashing Burlington Gate, Piccadilly, which is labelled “Taste,” and over which rises Kent’s statue, subserviently supported at the angles of the pediment by Raphael and Michelangelo. In his task, the poet, a deformed figure in a tye-wig, bountifully bespatters the passers-by, particularly the chariot of the Duke of Chandos. The satire was not very brilliant or ingenious; but its meaning was clear. Pope was prudent enough to make no reply; though, as Mr. G.S. Layard shows in his Suppressed Plates, it seems that the print was, or was sought to be, called in by those concerned. Bramston’s poem, which succeeded in 1733, does not enter into the quarrel, it may be because of the anger aroused by the pictorial reply. But if–as announced on its title-page,–it was suggested by Pope’s epistle, it would also seem to have borrowed its name from Hogarth’s caricature.

It was first issued in folio by Pope’s publisher, Lawton Gilliver of Fleet Street, and has a frontispiece engraved by Gerard Vandergucht. This depicts a wide-skirted, effeminate-looking personage, carrying a long cane with a head fantastically carved, and surrounded by various objects of art. In the background rises what is apparently intended for the temple of a formal garden; and behind this again, a winged ass capers skittishly upon the summit of Mount Helicon. As might be anticipated, the poem is in the heroic measure of Pope. But though many of its couplets are compact and pointed, Bramston has not yet learned from his model the art of varying his pausation, and the period closes his second line with the monotony of a minute gun. Another defect, noticed by Warton, is that the speaker throughout is made to profess the errors satirised, and to be the unabashed mouthpiece of his own fatuity, “Mine,” say the concluding lines,–

Mine are the gallant Schemes of Politesse,
For books, and buildings, politicks, and dress.
This is True Taste, and whoso likes it not,
Is blockhead, coxcomb, puppy, fool, and sot.

One is insensibly reminded of a quotation from P.L. Courier, made in the Cornhill many years since by the once famous “Jacob Omnium” when replying controversially to the author of Ionica, ” Je vois “–says Courier, after recapitulating a string of abusive epithets hurled at him by his opponent–” je vois ce qu’il veut dire: il entend que lui et moi sont d’avis different; et c’est la sa maniere de s’exprimer.” It was also the manner of our Man of Taste.

The second line of the above quotation from Bramston gives us four of the things upon which his hero lays down the law. Let us see what he says about literature. As a professing critic he prefers books with notes:–

Tho’ Blackmore’s works my soul with raptures fill,
With notes by Bently they’d be better still.