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." But in the concluding couplet, Crabbe's meaning seems to lose in clearness through the change.

Crabbe intended to ask whether it was safe to desert truth and nature for one's own self-pleasing fancies, even though Virgil had set the example.

Johnson's version seems to obscure rather than to make clearer this interpretation.

Crabbe, after this protest against the conventional, which, if unreal at the outset, had become a thousand times more wearisome by repetition, passes on to a daring presentation of real life lived among all the squalor of actual poverty, not unskilfully interspersed with descriptions equally faithful of the barren coast-scenery among which he had been brought up.

It has been already remarked how Crabbe's eye for rural nature had been quickened and made more exact by his studies in botany.