[1] In 1721, the year he commenced his M.A., he edited a collection of Carmina Comitialia which contains, among the Miscellanea at the end, some verses of his own, including his tripos poem on Androcles.
In a letter to his wife, written shortly before his death, he summed up his feelings: "I own and declare that the importance of so great a charge, joined with a mistrust of my own sufficiency, made me fearful of undertaking it: if I have not in that capacity assisted in the salvation of souls, I have not been the means of losing any; if I have not brought reputation to the function by any merit of mine, I have the comfort of this reflection — I have given no scandal to it by my meanness and unworthiness.
[3] His will mentions two children: a daughter named Lucia after her mother and his son Thomas, who was a lieutenant in the marines and about to sail for India.
William Cowper's too partial assessment of Bourne's poetry, in a letter to the Reverend John Newton dated 10 May 1781, frequently prefaced the various editions of his work.
His work shows the final and complete emancipation of the eighteenth-century Latin poet from the theory of imitating the classics which had dominated the Renaissance.
His playfulness is particularly apparent in treating animal subjects such as a jackdaw inhabiting a steeple, a snail, or sparrows feeding in a Cambridge college, all poems translated by Cowper.
The theme is further imitated by repetition within the text: Nevertheless, despite the elegance and adaptability of Bourne's style, the essayist A. C. Benson comments that "an exhaustive account of his Latinity would be a long enumeration of minute mistakes arising from the imperfect acquaintance of the scholars of the day with the principles of correct Latinity",[12] Bourne's final 19th century editor having enumerated these at some length.
[13] But, Benson concludes, his former popularity as a poet rested on the fact that he was "a man with a warm heart and a capacious eye, finding any trait of human character, any grouping of the grotesque or tender furniture of life, interesting and memorable....Absent-minded he may have been, but observant he was to a peculiar degree, and that not of broad poetical effects, but of the minute detail and circumstance of every-day life.