was withheld from him in 1749 owing to his defiance of the university authorities and the offence caused by an address that is said to have begun "Doctors without doctrine, artless masters of arts, and bachelors more worthy of the rod than the laurel..."[3][4][n 1] He joined the Middle Temple in 1746, but was not called to the bar.

[1] Following a period of depression aggravated by ill health after the death of a beloved sister in 1760, Anstey was advised to take the waters at the fashionable spa of Bath.

Other suggested themes occasioned published works of some length, but the connection did his reputation more damage than otherwise and was ended with the death of the coterie's patroness, Anna, Lady Miller, in 1781.

This was Eligia Scripta in Coemeterio Rustico Latine reddita, a version of Thomas Gray's already celebrated "Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard" of 1751, on which they worked in consultation with the author himself.

Commenting on the draft sent him, Gray remarked that "Every language has its idiom, not only of words and phrases, but of customs and manners, which cannot be represented in the tongue of another nation, especially of a nation so distant in time and place, without constraint and difficulty; of this sort, in the present instance, are the curfew bell, the Gothic Church, with its monuments, organs and anthems, the texts of Scripture, &c. There are certain images, which, though drawn from common nature, and every where obvious, yet strike us as foreign to the turn and genius of Latin verse; the beetle that flies in the evening, to a Roman, I guess, would have appeared too mean an object for poetry."

Preferring the latter's approach, for the most part, Anstey's version tries to remain faithful to Gray's text and certainly retains the historical English names rather than making Roman substitutes.

[18] Secondly, there was the résumé of the themes in his later The Election Ball in a 1777 Latin epistle to its would-be illustrator Coplestone Warre Bampfylde,[19] of which an English adaptation, 'translated and addressed to the ladies', appeared separately in the same year.

[24] Indeed, in an unfinished poem preserved by his son, he had declared himself Unskill'd in flattery's softer arts, Unfit for satire's pointed darts, Else would my faithful muse reveal What wights bestride the commonweal.

[25] Instead he made his subject matter the familiar follies of the landed squirearchy in a poem that, "while it includes a number of particular and topical Bath references to give the flavour of the place and time, has sufficient scope and is written from enough of a detached viewpoint to make its critique of manners and morals of enduring application.

The Guide relates the misadventures of the three naïve children of a Northern squire, as reported by them over the course of fifteen letters to friends and parents, and incidentally give a comic picture of life in the spa.

In a far departure from the Augustan manner common until then, the style is colloquial and written in loose anapaestic tetrameters, later to be characterised as the "Anstey measure" or "Bath-guide verse".

Such naming, an aspect of the work which was widely admired, derives from theatrical practice at the time and gives a clue to the person's character, but in the case of the main protagonists there is added irony too.

She most imprudently allows herself to be seduced by a Methodist imposter with the expressive name of Roger, the slang meaning of which is sexual intercourse, while in dialect it refers to a tricky person.

Thus Simkin's shocked account of female hairdressing in "Letter XII" of the Guide was expanded to outright farce in An Election Ball and had an immediate effect.

In Samuel Hoare's conversation piece portrait of him (see above), his daughter is shown trying to draw his attention to the extravagant doll in her hand, in reality the kind of lay figure sent from Paris to guide dressmakers in the latest styles.

"[37] It was this episode too, featuring Madge Inkle as she confects a hair ornament from the purloined tail feathers of the rooster, that Anstey's friend Coplestone Warre Bampfylde chose as the first scene to illustrate in An Election Ball.

Arriving too late for inclusion in the revised edition of 1776, they were first used instead in the Latin epistle that Anstey addressed to Bampfylde, including mention of all the scenes the artist had chosen to picture.

[39] It was followed by a youthful imitation of Anstey's manner by Richard Brinsley Sheridan, first published in The Bath Chronicle as a satirical account of the opening ball at the New Assembly Rooms in 1771.

The convoluted title of this occasional piece was "The Ridotto of Bath, a Panegyrick written by a Gentleman, resident in that City: Being an Epistle from Timothy Screw, Under Server to Messrs Kuhf and Fitzwater, to his brother Henry, Waiter at Almack's" and was dependent on Anstey's work in several particulars.

[43] But other health resorts than Bath were coming into vogue, and to these Anstey's manner began to be applied by other authors, one of the earliest being the Tunbridge Epistles from Lady Margaret to the Countess of B, mentioned in The Monthly Review for May 1767.

It too deployed Anstey's almost obligatory jogtrot rhythm in what a contemporary review summed up as "ten letters, humorously describing in lively verse the usual diversions of that place and the company who resort to it.

In the political sphere there was George Watson-Taylor's The Cross-Bath Guide, being the Correspondence of a Respectable Family upon the subject of a late unexpected Dispensation of Honours (1815), although a reviewer found that "the imitation is not quite the equal, in point of wit, to the original" model by Anstey.

[53] There were also surveys of newly developing resort towns: by Barbara Hofland in A Season in Harrogate, in a series of poetical epistles by Benjamin Blunderhead Esquire to his mother in Derbyshire (1812)[54] and by William Henry Halpin in The Cheltenham Mailbag: or letters from Gloucestershire, edited by Peter Quince the Younger (1820).

Their various characters and points of view are reflected in more varied verse measures, in which the anapaestics of the family’s younger generation contrast with the iambics of their elders, and the politics treated are those that followed the Congress of Vienna.

Just as important for the more straight-laced audience of the time, the love interest provided by Biddy Fudge and her suitor replaces with farcical social satire the coarseness once deplored in Anstey's treatment of Prudence Blunderhead.

[69] A modern judgment, comparing Moore's original work and its sequel, finds that while "in the first Fudge saga, the influence of Anstey is less evident", the story line of the second is much more derivative.