The Rev. James Bramston was born in 1694 or 1695 at Skreens, near Chelmsford, in Essex, his father, Francis Bramston, being the fourth son of Sir Moundeford Bramston, Master in Chancery, whose father again was Sir John Bramston, Lord Chief Justice of the King's Bench, generally known as "the elder."[5]James Bramston was admitted to Westminster School in 1708. In 1713 he became a scholar at Christ Church, Oxford, proceeding B.A. in 1717, and M.A. in 1720. In 1723 he was made Vicar of Lurgashall, and in 1725 of Harting, both of which Sussex livings he held until his death in March 1744, ten weeks before the death of Pope. His first published verses (1715) were on Dr. Radcliffe. In 1729 he printed _The Art of Politicks_, one of the many contemporary imitations of the _Ars Poetica_; and in 1733 _The Man of Taste_. He also wrote a mediocre variation on the _Splendid Shilling_ of John Philips, entitled _The Crooked Sixpence_, 1743. Beyond a statement in Dallaway's _Sussex_ that "he [Bramston] was a man of original humour, the fame and proofs of whose colloquial wit are still remembered"; and the supplementary information that, as incumbent of Lurgashall, he received an annual _modus_ of a fat buck and doe from the neighbouring Park of Petworth, nothing more seems to have been recorded of him. Notes: [4] Whose _grand tenue_ or holiday wear--Cervantes tells us--was "a doublet of fine cloth and _velvet breeches_ and shoes to match." (ch. 1). [5] Sir John Bramston, the younger, was the author of the "watery incoherent _Autobiography_"--as Carlyle calls it--published by the Camden Society in 1845. _The Crooked Sixpence_ is, at best, an imitation of an imitation; and as a Miltonic _pastiche_ does not excel that of Philips, or rival the more serious _Lewesdon Hill_ of Crowe. _The Art of Politicks_, in its turn, would need a fairly long commentary to make what is only moderately interesting moderately intelligible, while eighteenth-century copies of Horace's letter to the Pisos are "plentiful as blackberries." But _The Man of Taste_, based, as it is, on the presentment of a never extinct type, the connoisseur against nature, is still worthy of passing notice.