Sure wretched _Wren_ was taught by bungling _Jones_, To murder mortar, and disfigure stones! (p. 10) Here the stylistic habit of antithesis works against the meaning instead of reinforcing it. But there are many good things in the poem; Bramston's treatment of the idea of the stage as a "school of morality," for example, is clever and amusing. His hero derives his "Hereditary Taste" from being "tragi-comically got" by a player-poet and an orange-woman (p. 6). This gives point to his later claim: _Oxford_ and _Cambridge_ are not worth one farthing, Compar'd to _Haymarket_, and _Convent-garden_: Quit those, ye British Youth, and follow these, Turn players all, and take your Squires degrees. (p. 18) There are also a number of verbal successes, such as: Nor barb'rous birch e'er brush'd my brawny bum. (p. 6) Here insistent alliteration and strong rhythm are combined to excellent onomatopoeic effect. Another couplet: Tho' _Blackmore's_ works my soul with raptures fill, With notes by _Bently_ they'd be better still. (p. 7) shows considerable appreciation of the Art of Sinking; the second line especially is fine bathos. The poem as a whole provides an interesting portrait of contemporary fashionable "taste" that supplements, at a lower social level, Pope's portraits of such magnates of tastelessness as Timon. Bramston's Man of Taste is an odd amalgam of the singular and the trite. He begins by professing to despise laws, and ends by attempting to enact his own. In drawing a character whose tastes are at one moment shamelessly perverse, at another servilely imitative, and in depicting a wide range of "tastes," Bramston has developed significantly the idea that he took from the _Epistle to Burlington_, which is largely concerned with false taste in building. This is not to deny that most of the victims of Bramston's satire are somewhere Pope's too. At times one even begins to suspect that Bramston's knowledge of London derives as much from the _Dunciad Variorum_ as from first-hand experience of the city. There is certainly a strong traditional element in some of his themes. The ironic praise of Sir Cloudesley Shovell's tomb, for example (p. 12), was probably suggested by the _Spectator_ (No. 26) rather than a visit to Westminster Abbey; the tomb had offended Addison because it portrayed the admiral in an alien character. But the traditional is combined with the topical. If Sir Cloudesley's tomb had been a butt for twenty years, Sir Balaam is an allusion to Pope's _Epistle to Bathurst_, only published in February, 1733, the month before the _Man of Taste_. Further evidence that Bramston was making additions to the poem as late as February 1733 (the poem was published on 8 March) are the lines: Not so my mind, unsatisfied with hints, Knows more than _Budgel_ writes, or _Roberts_ prints. (p. 10)