ong 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)

These lines hit at a new readers' digest, _The Bee: or, Universal
Weekly Pamphlet. Containing Something to Hit Every Man's Taste and
Principles_, which was edited by Budgell and published by Roberts. The
first number came out in February 1733. There is a similar mixture of
past and current with the musical satire (p. 13). Handel's _Esther_ and
the novelty of oratorio were as recent as 1732; Heidegger's ugliness
("Prince _Phyz_!") was proverbia