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Swift he detests–not of course for detestable qualities, but because he is so universally admired. In poetry he holds by rhyme as opposed to blank verse:–

Verse without rhyme I never could endure,
Uncouth in numbers, and in sense obscure.
To him as Nature, when he ceas’d to see,
Milton’s an universal Blank to me …
Thompson write blank, but know that for that reason
These lines shall live, when thine are out of season.
Rhyme binds and beautifies the Poet’s lays
As London Ladies owe their shape to stays.

In this the Man of Taste is obviously following the reigning fashion. But if we may assume Bramston himself to approve what his hero condemns, he must have been in advance of his age, for blank verse had but sparse advocates at this time, or for some time to come. Neither Gray, nor Johnson, nor Goldsmith were ever reconciled to what the last of them styles “this unharmonious measure.” Goldsmith, in particular, would probably have been in exact agreement with the couplet as to the controlling powers of rhyme. “If rhymes, therefore,” he writes, in the Enquiry into Polite Learning,[3] “be more difficult [than blank verse], for that very reason, I would have our poets write in rhyme. Such a restriction upon the thought of a good poet, often lifts and encreases the vehemence of every sentiment; for fancy, like a fountain, plays highest by diminishing the aperture.”[4]

[Notes:

3: Ed. 1759, p. 151.

4: Montaigne has a somewhat similar illustration: “As Cleanthes The Man of Taste’s idol, in matters dramatic, is said, that as the voice being forciblie pent in the narrow gullet of a trumpet, at last issueth forth more strong and shriller, so me seemes, that a sentence cunningly and closely couched in measure-keeping Posie, darts it selfe forth more furiously, and wounds me even to the quicke”. ( Essayes, bk. i. ch. xxv. (Florio’s translation).]

The Man of Taste’s idol, in matters dramatic, is Colley Cibber, who, however, deserves the laurel he wears, not for The Careless Husband, his best comedy, but for his Epilogues and other Plays.

It pleases me, that Pope unlaurell’d goes,
While Cibber wears the Bays for Play-house Prose,
So Britain’s Monarch once uncover’d sate,
While Bradshaw bully’d in a broad-brimmed hat,–

a reminiscence of King Charles’s trial which might have been added to Bramston stock quotations. The productions of “Curll’s chaste press” are also this connoisseur’s favourite reading,–the lives of players in particular, probably on the now obsolete grounds set forth in Carlyie’s essay on Scott.[5] Among these the memoirs of Cibber’s “Lady Betty Modish,” Mrs. Oldfield, then lately dead, and buried in Westminster Abbey, are not obscurely indicated.

[Note:

5: “It has been said. ‘There are no English lives worth reading except those of Players, who by the nature of the case have bidden Respectability good-day.'”]

In morals our friend–as might be expected circa l730–is a Freethinker and Deist. Tindal is his text-book: his breviary the Fable of the Bees;–

T’ Improve In Morals Mandevil I read,
And Tyndal’s Scruples are my settled Creed.
I travell’d early, and I soon saw through
Religion all, e’er I was twenty-two.
Shame, Pain, or Poverty shall I endure,
When ropes or opium can my ease procure?
When money’s gone, and I no debts can pay,
Self-murder is an honourable way.
As Pasaran directs I’d end my life,
And kill myself, my daughter, and my wife.