Johnson, partly by his own admiration for the artistic traditions of
the classicists. He despised looseness of style, considered blank verse
unfinished, and cultivated what seemed to him the more polished elegance
of the heroic couplet. The vacillation of his views appears in the
difference between the sentiments of _The Traveller_ and those of _The
Deserted Village_. The former is a survey of the nations of Europe, the
object being to discover a people wholly admirable. Merit is found in
Italians, Swiss, French, Dutch, and English,--but never perfection; even
the free and happy Swiss are disgusting in the vulgar sensuality of their
pleasures; happiness is nowhere. One is not surprised to learn that Dr.
Johnson contributed at least a few lines to a poem with so orthodox a
message.

In _The Deserted Village_, on the other hand, Goldsmith employed the
classical graces to point a moral which from the classical point of view
was false. His sympathetic feelings had now been captivated by the notion
of rural innocence. The traits of character which he attributed to the
village inhabitants,--notably to the immortal preacher who, entertaining
the vagrants,

Quite forgot their vices in their woe,--

are those exalted in the literature of sentimentalism, as, for example,
in his contemporary, Langhorne's _Country Justice_. _The Deserted
Village_ was in point of fact an imaginative idyll,--the supreme idyll of
English poetry; but Goldsmith insisted that it was a realistic record
of actual conditions. Yet he could never have observed such an English
village, either in its depopulated and decayed state (as Macaulay has
remarked), or in its rosy prosperity and unsullied virtue; his economic
history and theory were misleading. Like Macpherson, but through