The lowing herd winds o’er the lea:
The ploughman homeward plods his way
And leaves the world to gloom and me.
In this respect he must have been rather hard on Johnson, whose poetry in many respects is “the hubbub of words,” which Wordsworth so scornfully terms some of it. The first couplet of the doctor’s great satire has one superfluous line—
Let observation, with extended view,
Survey mankind from China to Peru—
The poem would have started better from “Survey.”
Johnson, indeed, used to ridicule the taste that came up with the Percy Ballads. They had “a false gallop of verses,” in his opinion, and he said he could go on making such stanzas for an hour together, thus:
As with my hat upon my head,
I walked along the Strand,