The Art of Politicks

(1729)
Introduction by William Kinsley
PUBLICATION NUMBER 177 WILLIAM ANDREWS CLARK MEMORIAL LIBRARY Universiy of California, Los Angeles
GENERAL EDITORS William E. Conway, William Andrews Clark Memorial Library George Robert Guffey, University of California, Los Angeles Maximillian E. Novak, University of California, Los Angeles David S. Rodes, University of California, Los Angeles
ADVISORY EDITORS James L. Clifford, Columbia University Ralph Cohen, University of Virginia Vinton A. Dearing, University of California, Los Angeles Arthur Friedman, University of Chicago Louis A. Landa, Princeton University Earl Miner, Princeton University Samuel H. Monk, University of Minnesota Everett T. Moore, University of California, Los Angeles Lawrence Clark Powell, William Andrews Clark Memorial Libr James Sutherland, University College, London H. T. Swedenberg, Jr., University of California, Los Angeles Robert Vosper, William Andrews Clark Memorial Library
CORRESPONDING SECRETARY Beverly J. Onley, William Andrews Clark Memorial Library

Horace's Ars Poetica was one of the most fertile sources for eighteenth-century imitations and adaptations. Some were completely serious attempts to marry one art to another or to show that all arts share the same fundamental principles; an example of this type is John Gwynn's Art of Architecture (1742; ARS 144). Others, like William King's Art of Cookery (1708) are downright burlesques.
Bramston's usual method falls somewhere between these extremes. He often uses the dignity of poetry to show up the indignity of politics or political writing, as on pp. 5-6 where Horace's advice on choice of subject is transformed into advice to Weekly Writers of seditious News , or on page 7, where the rise and fall of South Sea stock fills the place of Horace's famous comparison of archaic and new-coined words to the leaves of the forest. But Bramston's poem more often aspires to the same level as its model; in this respect it resembles Absalom and Achitophel more than Mac Flecknoe .