His style is rough, full of improprieties, in expressions often Scotch, and often such as are used by the meanest people.[1] He discovers a great scarcity of words and phrases, by repeating the same several hundred times, for want of capacity to vary them.

His observations are mean and trite, and very often false.

His secret history is generally made up of coffeehouse scandals, or at best from reports at the third, fourth, or fifth hand.

The account of the Pretender's birth, would only become an old woman in a chimney-corner.
His vanity runs intolerably through the whole book, affecting to have been of consequence at nineteen years old, and while he was a little Scotch parson of forty pounds a year.

He was a gentleman born, and, in the time of his youth and vigour, drew in an old maiden daughter of a Scotch earl to marry him.[2] His characters are miserably wrought, in many things mistaken, and all of them detracting,[3] except of those who were friends to the Presbyterians.