But his treatment of the subject was too palpably imitative of one poetic model, already stale from repetition.

Not only did he choose Pope's couplet, with all its familiar antitheses and other mannerisms, but frankly avowed it by parodying whole passages from the _Essay on Man_ and _The Dunciad_, the original lines being duly printed at the foot of the page.
There is little of Crabbe's later accent of sympathy.

Epigram is too obviously pursued, and much of the suggested acquaintance with the habits of the upper classes-- "Champagne the courtier drinks, the spleen to chase, The colonel Burgundy, and Port his grace" is borrowed from books and not from life.

Nor did the satire gain in lucidity from any editorial care.

There are hardly two consecutive lines that do not suffer from a truly perverse theory of punctuation.