No copy remains of the first of his poems to be published, “The Perjured Lover or tragical adventures of Alexis and Boroina, in heroic verse, from the story of Inkle and Yarico” (Sheffield 1736).

The poet Robert Southey facetiously remarked in his brief notes on Cawthorn that “He was fond of riding other horses besides that which he borrowed of the Muses,”[2] and it was remembered of him that, as an admirer of concerts and operas, he had been known to ride to London in order to be present at a musical performance, returning in time for the start of school at seven next morning.

Sometimes, it was noted in Alexander Chalmers' General Biographical Dictionary, "his imitations are so close as to appear the effect rather of memory than of judgment".

However, his other attempt at an Ovidian heroic epistle, "Lady Jane Grey to Lord Guildford Dudley" (1753), suggests the influence of his real model in its very first line: "From these dark cells in sable pomp arrayed", which echoes that of Pope's epistle, "In these deep solitudes and awful cells".

Though his poem "On Taste" takes the fourth of Pope's "Moral Essays" as its starting point, the examples he gives make original fun of the contemporary fad for chinoiserie: The independent observation there has been quoted by later critics as acute evidence of the change in fashion since the Classicism of Pope's day.

[7] By 1781 it had joined Pope's original in John Hughes’ The Letters of Abelard and Heloise: with a particular account of their lives, amours, and misfortune,[8] a work that, with later additions, continued in print not only in Britain but in Europe and the United States well into the 19th century.