Note 378 — Chapter I · WORDSWORTH AND COLERIDGE: THEIR COMPANIONS AND ADVERSARIES.

This perhaps should, and can very shortly, be demonstrated:—Observation may be either broad and sweeping, or minute and concentrated; Johnson specifies the former kind in the last half of the first line. Observation may be directed to men, to things, &c.; it is to mankind that he wishes it directed, and he says so in the first half of the second. Further, as this is too abstract, he gives the poetic and imaginative touch by filling in the waste atlas, with “China” and “Peru,” with the porcelain and the pigtails, the llamas and the gold associated with mankind in these countries. And in the name of Logic, and Rhetoric and Poetry into the bargain, “What for no?”