The publication of Pope's Epistle to Burlington in December 1731 was a literary event of some importance, especially since it was his first poem since the Dunciad Variorum of 1729. The Epistle gave "taste" a renewed currency as a vogue word. "Of Taste" is found only on the half-title of the first edition. But, significantly changed to "Of False Taste" for the second edition, this designation found its way onto the title-page of the third edition, and became the poem's popular title (it is so described on the advertisement leaf of Bramston's The Man of Taste).
Several attacks on Pope and his poem were published in the following year or so. A Miscellany on Taste (1732) reprinted Pope's Epistle with combative critical notes. Pope himself was attacked, as "Mr. Alexander Taste," in an anonymous pamphlet Mr. Taste the Poetical Fop (1732), reissued in 1733 as The Man of Taste, apparently borrowing the title of Bramston's poem.[4] Bramston's The Man of Taste (1733) is an early example of the more positive reaction to Pope's Epistle, joining him rather than attempting to beat him. Bramston's poem in its turn occasioned an anonymous The Woman of Taste (1733), and suggested some details for the character of Lord Apemode in James Miller's comedy The Man of Taste (1735). Pope himself borrowed an idea from it (see p. 14, 11. 5-6) for a passage in the Dunciad (the allusion to Free-Masons and F.R.S.; IV, 567-71).
The cluster of works provoked by Pope's Epistle is evidence of the topicality of "taste" at the time Bramston wrote his poem, and it is his Man of Taste that retains most interest today. The later history of "taste" in eighteenth-century aesthetics and satire can only briefly be glanced at here. Important philosophical discussions are Hume's essay "Of the Standard of Taste" (in Four Dissertations, 1757), Burke's Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757; a "Discourse Concerning Taste" was prefaced to the second edition, 1759), and Alexander Gerard's Essay on Taste (1759). Foote's farce Taste (1752) exposed the sham taste for the antique. There are numerous satiric portraits of the "Man of Taste": Mr. Sterling in The Clandestine Marriage (1766) is a good example clearly in the tradition of Pope's Timon, as is General Tilney in Northanger Abbey (1818, but written much earlier).
By the time of Jane Austen, of course, "taste" had developed away from the Addisonian rules, and indeed the whole tenor of the aesthetics of the imagination had changed. What had happened can be suggested by juxtaposing two significant statements about "taste" as metaphor. In his Spectator essay (No. 409) Addison speaks of "a very great Conformity between that Mental Taste, which is the Subject of this Paper, and that Sensitive Taste which gives us a Relish of every different Flavour that affects the Palate." But in the Preface to Lyrical Ballads (1802), Wordsworth deprecates those "who will converse with us as gravely about a taste for Poetry, as they express it, as if it were a thing indifferent as a taste for Rope-dancing, or Frontiniac or Sherry."[5] But the breakdown of the metaphor of "taste" is too large a subject to be explored here.
James Bramston (?1694-1743) was educated at Westminster School and at Christ Church, Oxford, where he took his B.A. in 1717 and his M.A. in 1720. He took orders, and was for a time a military chaplain. In 1724 he obtained the living of Lurgashall, and in 1739 those of Harting and Westhampnett.[6] He published (all anonymously) only three poems in English:
1. The Art of Politicks, in Imitation of Horace's Art of Poetry. London: Lawton Gilliver, 1729.
2. The Man of Taste. Occasion'd by an Epistle of Mr. Pope's on that Subject. London: Lawton Gilliver, 1733.
3. The Crooked Six-pence. With a Learned Preface Found among Some Papers Bearing Date the Same Year in which Paradise Lost Was Published by the Late Dr. Bently. London: Robert Dodsley, 1743.
Bramston also wrote Latin verses, and at least two unpublished poems survive; but his reputation rests on The Art of Politicks and The Man of Taste. Both poems are of interest to the political and cultural historian, but from a literary point of view The Man of Taste is probably the better poem. This is largely because of Bramston's success in creating the persona of a self-consciously affected Man of Taste, who, however, exposes himself more than he intends. Joseph Warton mistook this effect for a failure of technique when he called Bramston "guilty of the indecorum and absurdity of making his hero laugh at himself and his own follies."[7] The poem is deliberately the "confessions" of a self-styled Man of Taste. It begins in a casual, cynical tone, but as the speaker is gradually seduced by his own rhetoric (especially when he imagines himself a nobleman) he strikes an almost rhapsodic note, so that he is revealed as the victim, not the exploiter, of "taste."