What does "mannered whimsy" mean in the following passage taken from Eucharist and the Poetic Imagination in Early Modern England by Sophie Read?
Marvell does, it is true, come off better from this particular comparison: Crashaw's little bit of mannered whimsy cannot compete with the liquid grace of Marvell's simile, even if one acknowledges that this crystallisation (or, perhaps more accurately here, this dissolution—Ricks's choice of term recalls once more the bon-bons of fond critical memory) is a deliberate rhetorical ploy.
(More context available via Google Books.)