Dr. Johnson was singularly deficient in aesthetic sensibility. He had no ear for music and no eye for the beauty of nature. He found the music of Lucida harsh, and, “one blade of grass”, for him “was like another”.

He could appreciate only the regular, mechanical and monotonous beat of the “heroic couplet” and blank verse for him was a verse only to the eye. All his criticism is marred by his lack of appreciation of those who treat of nature or the life lived in the midst of nature. Similarly, the highest flights of poetry were beyond him. In Molten, he admired the power of his mind and the elevation of his character, and not all his purely poetic gifts.