Though he does not pretend to Pope's image of himself as a new Horace bringing the whole weight of Roman tradition to bear on contemporary society, Bramston is very clever on the local level at transposing Horace for his own purposes. Horace recounts the increasing complexity and sophistication of theatrical music, Bramston the increasingly elaborated musical celebrations of victorious candidates (pp. 22-23), and Horace's implication that the sophistication of taste is really a decline--"an impetuous style brought in an unwonted diction" (217)--constitutes an unspoken comment on Bramston's subject.[E] Bramston's page 27 corresponds to Horace's brief history of the theatre, from Thespis's tragedies that he staged on wagons to the silencing of the excessively outspoken chorus of Old Comedy (275-84). Bramston replaces Thespis with Defoe, and the wagon-mounted stage with the cart and pillory. Instead of deploring the silencing of the chorus, Bramston applauds the silencing of Woolston. The contrast between Thespis and Defoe is clearly mock-heroic, but Bramston implies that Woolston's similarity to an ancient satyr is a decline from the character expected of a modern clergyman.
Sometimes the mere fact of changing from a poetic to a political context produces the satire or humour. What is praiseworthy in a poet--the ability to mingle fact and fiction skillfully (151)--becomes highly ironic when applied to a politician who
In Falsehood Probability imploys, Nor his old Lies with newer Lies destroys. (p. 16)
Horace's "ut pictura poesis" (361) produces this bland but destructive couplet:
Not unlike Paintings, Principles appear, Some best at distance, some when we are near. (p. 36)
More humourous than satirical is the relation between Horace's declaration that there's no place for a mediocre poet (372-73) and Bramston's
The Middle way the best we sometimes call. But 'tis in Politicks no way at all.
There is no Medium: for the term in vogue On either side is, Honest Man, or Rogue. (pp. 37-38)
The conclusion of the poem involves a somewhat more complex transformation. Horace closes with a humourously self-deprecating description of the "poetic itch": the afflicted poet stumbles into ditches as he babbles his verses aloud; people flee from him, and with good reason; if he catches anyone, he hangs on like a leech and reads his victim to death. Bramston describes another "sort of itch," parliamenteering. Sir Harry Clodpole knows better than to make speeches to the electors; he solicits their votes by feasting them, and they run _towards_ him (or his table), not away. They, not he, are the leeches; "they never leave him while he's worth a groat" (p. 45).