Since there is no modern critical edition of Paul Whitehead's verse, the present text is not modernized, with the following exceptions: apostrophes have been regularized according to modern usage; quotation marks have been modernized where they appear in the original (lines 1-22, 50, and 186-189); the capitalization of the first word of every verse paragraph has been abandoned except at line 55. Otherwise, the text reproduces the first edition, published by Robert Dodsley on February 6, 1739.

The motto on the titlepage, "Paulus vel Cossus vel Drusus MORIBUS esto," comes from Juvenal, Satire 8, line 21; "Be Paulus or Cossus or Drusus in behaviour." These were three models of the good soldier. In this satire, Juvenal is addressing a young man who is proud of his pedigree, and trying to persuade him that it is not his ancestry but his conduct that matters. In contrast to the passages wich precede and follow, which attack politics and the culture of the court in a stridently anti-Walpole strain, lines 93 to 185 are inspired by Juvenal's poem, and attack young noblemen who fall short of their merits of their distinguished forebears, with contrasted praise of the Earl of Chesterfield, who fulfills the promise of his ancestors. This passage may have been inserted to bring the poem to a suitable length for independent publication in folio.

As was common practice in satirical writing, Whitehead "dashes" the names of his targets; that is, first and sometimes later or final letters are given, and the omitted letters are represented by a sometimes equivalent number of hyphens. This was a defence against prosecution, and a source of obscurity to contemporaries not familiar with the political scene. The importance of dashing was demonstrated by what happened in the days immediately following publication, since the name of Bishop Sherlock was, alone among the names persons attacked, not dashed but written out in full.

Sherlock rose in the House of Lords on February 9 to denounce Manners as a gross breach of privilege, and author and publisher were summoned to appear to explain themselves on February 12. Dodsley appeared, but Whitehead did not; a messenger reported that he was not at home. Dodsley was remanded in custody, and there matters rested for several days. Dodsley, whose shop was in Pall Mall, in the heart of the fashionable part of London, was well known to many of the lords, and their carriages crowded the streets near the sponging house where he was confined. Finally the Earl of Essex, who had been mildly aspersed in the poem, rose to propose that the House deal with the matter. On February 22 Dodsley was brought to the bar of the House, where, kneeling, he was admonished by the Lord Chancellor, and dismissed.

Six months earlier, Dodsley had published the second Dialogue of a two-part poem by Alexander Pope entitled One Thousand Seven Hundred and Thirty-Eight. The two dialogues "something like Horace" comprised Pope's most critical comments on the current political scene, though written with all his exquisite art so as to frustrate prosecution. It was widely assumed that he would publish a sequel for the following year even more damaging to the administration of Sir Robert Walpole. That sequel never appeared; the two dialogues were subsequently retitled Epilogue to the Satires, and Pope refrained from publishing political poetry thereafter (the expanded Dunciad of 1742-43 focuses on culture rather than politics). It has been generally assumed, following the comments of Dr. Johnson in his life of Pope, that the prosecution of Manners was intended as a warning to Pope, one which he heeded.

The persons attacked in Manners were members of the House of Lords, in contrast with the State Dunces, which castigates lords and M.P.s equally. And, except for Bishop Sherlock and Lord Hervey, the lords most severely attacked in Manners were not particularly eminent supporters of Walpole: Cowper was a young man who clearly lacked the powerful mind and personality of his father; Marlborough too was young, and his switch of allegiance to Walpole was rewarded by a series of appointments to largely ceremonial offices, but he was not a major player; Albemarle likewise was a secondary figure. They were in Walpole's camp, but as followers rather than leaders. The targets are courtiers rather than politicians: Albemarle, Cowper, Essex and Marlborough were all Gentlemen of the Bedchamber. Concentration on lords favoured the response to the poem as an action by the House of Lords, which had freedom to act as it pleased; in this case, causing Dodsley some expense and inconvenience, but not harming him in any material way. So convenient was the content and publication of the poem for such a prosecution, the possibility must be considered that Whitehead was hired to write the poem in such a way as to facilitate the kind of prosecution that occurred.

The prosecution of course made it impossible for Dodsley to have anything further to do with the poem, which enjoyed considerable popularity during the rest of 1739 in a number of unauthorized reprints with various fraudulent or missing imprints. Whitehead may have had some concern in the two London reprints that also reprint the State Dunces, but no changes were made to Manners. The same is true of the 1747 collection of Whitehead's satires. The posthumous edition of Whitehead's collected poems was based on printed editions; Whitehead destroyed all his personal papers before his death.