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._
Lo