It seems to have been generally assumed when Crabbe’s Village appeared, that it was of the nature of a rejoinder to Goldsmith’s poem, and the fact that Crabbe quotes a line from The Deserted Village, “Passing rich on forty pounds a year,” in his own description of the village parson, might seem to confirm that impression.  But the opening lines of The Village point to a different origin.  It was rather during those early years when George’s father read aloud to his family the pastorals of the so-called Augustan age of English poetry, that the boy was first struck with the unreality and consequent worthlessness of the conventional pictures of rural life.  And in the opening lines of The Village he boldly challenges the judgment of his readers on this head.  The “pleasant land” of the pastoral poets was one of which George Crabbe, not unjustly, “thought scorn.”

  “The village life, and every care that reigns
  O’er youthful peasants and declining swains,
  What labour yields, and what, that labour past,
  Age, in its hour of languor, finds at last;
  What form the real picture of the poor,
  Demand a song—­the Muse can give no more. 
    Fled are those times when in harmonious strains
  The rustic poet praised his native plains: 
  No shepherds now, in smooth alternate verse,
  Their country’s beauty or their nymphs’ rehearse;
  Yet still for these we frame the tender strain,
  Still in our lays fond Corydons complain,
  And shepherds’ boys their amorous pains reveal,
  The only pains, alas! they never feel.”

At this point follow the six lines which Johnson had substituted for the author’s.  Crabbe had written:—­

  “In fairer scenes, where peaceful pleasures spring,
  Tityrus, the pride of Mantuan swains, might sing. 
  But charmed by him, or smitten with his views,
  Shall modern poets court the Mantuan muse? 
  From Truth and Nature shall we widely stray,
  Where Fancy leads, or Virgil led the way?”

Johnson substituted the following, and Crabbe accepted the revised version:—­

  “On Mincio’s banks, in Caesar’s bounteous reign,
  If Tityrus found the Golden Age again,
  Must sleepy bards the flattering dream prolong,
  Mechanic echoes of the Mantuan song? 
  From Truth and Nature shall we widely stray,
  Where Virgil, not where Fancy, leads the way?”

The first four lines of Johnson are beyond question an improvement, and it is worth remark in passing how in the fourth line he has anticipated Cowper’s “made poetry a mere mechanic art.”