Edwards was able to live a life of leisure, devoting himself to writing poetry, reading, and gardening, having inherited a large estate on his father's early death. In 1740 he moved to a small farm. His attack on Warburton's edition of Shakespeare made him famous, eliciting SJ's well-known defence of Warburton as a ‘stately horse’ being stung by a fly. Edwards became renowned as a writer of Miltonic sonnets, for which he was highly praised in the Monthly Review.