The Man of Taste — A Reader’s Guide

A Catalogue of Affected Preferences

The poem operates as a satirical catalogue, each couplet adding a new item to the speaker's list of fashionable choices. He boasts of owning a 'japan Bureau' where he shows 'Cæsars' to Lady Gripeall, yet admits a 'copper Otho, or a Scotch Baubee' is equal to him. His musical taste runs to Bononcini, but he confesses he has 'without Italian, or without an ear.' The speaker's aesthetic is entirely external: he values things for their social currency, not their intrinsic qualities. Bramston's satire works through accumulation—the sheer number of affectations exposes the speaker's lack of any coherent standard.

The Economics of False Refinement

Bramston links the speaker's taste to a specific economic program: 'To give is wrong, but it is wronger still, / On any terms to pay a tradesman's bill.' The man of taste spends lavishly on 'French embroid'ry and in Flanders lace' while refusing to settle debts. He would 'set lands, woods, and rivers, at a throw' at White's gambling house. This connection between aesthetic pretension and financial dishonesty was a pointed critique in a period when conspicuous consumption often masked insolvency. The speaker's final fantasy—buying a barony and bullying the poor—reveals taste as a tool of social aggression rather than cultivation.

Parody of Popean Authority

The poem's epigraph from Pope's Epistle to Burlington signals its debt to Pope's own satires on false taste, but Bramston's speaker is a more vulgar, less self-aware figure than Pope's Timon or Villario. Where Pope's satiric voice maintains moral clarity, Bramston's speaker blurts out his absurdities without irony: 'I'm English born, and love a grumbling noise.' The poem's couplets mimic Pope's heroic measure while undercutting it with bathetic content. F. P. Lock's introduction notes that 'taste' had become a contested term; Bramston's poem dramatizes its degradation into a mere commodity.

Readers approaching The Man of Taste should attend to the gap between the speaker's self-presentation and the poem's satiric frame. Bramston never breaks character, forcing the reader to infer the norms from which the speaker deviates. The poem rewards attention to its specific cultural references—to operatic rivalries, gambling dens, and fashion houses—which ground its satire in the material world of 1730s London.

Years spent shelving have taught me that Bramston’s brittle gentleman, all snuff and sneers, might have found a kinder mirror in More Nonsense — Key Ideas to Explore. One relishes absurdity with a wink, the other with a scalpel. I often think they’d have enjoyed a quiet tea together, trading jests, neither needing the last word.