of the work thirty years after its first publication was a response to the omission of any female poets from the recent collection. The 1785 editor does not say as much in the "Advertisement" and it is only by a comparison of the contents lists of the two that it becomes apparent that the new edition gives a less comprehensive choice of works in order to include more authors. Breadth of coverage in the 1785 edition demonstrates the variety of women poets rather than, as in the 1755 edition, the variety of writing by individual authors. Between 1821 and 1824 Henry Francis Cary published several essays in The London Magazine, collected and posthumously published in 1846 under the title Lives of English poets, from Johnson to Kirke White, designed as a continuation of Johnson's Lives. These were unaccompanied by the works of the seventeen poets covered, apart from excerpts quoted in discussing their writing. The essays follow Johnson's tripartite exposition of biographical detail, character study and descriptive survey of the poetry, and begin with Johnson himself, at ninety pages in length by far the longest essay in the book. There his prose works as well as his poetry are discussed; in fact more pages are devoted to the Lives of the Poets than to Johnson's own performance as a poet. Oliver Goldsmith appears midway through the book and is given only twenty-four pages, less than those awarded William Mason and Erasmus Darwin, who precede and follow him. Where it is pertinent, Johnson's critical opinions are quoted (although not always approved), and in Goldsmith's case Johnsonian anecdotes are introduced. A body of the standard English poets Robert Anderson prefaced his A complete edition of the poets of Great Britain (1795) with the statement that "When a new collection of English poetry is offered to the public, it will doubtless be inquired what are the deficiencies of preceding collections." To answer the question he went on to survey such anthologies over two centuries, noting in what ways they fell short of the completeness that he proposed. The ‘Johnson edition’ had failed in extensiveness by starting the English canon only in the second half of the 17th century. When it was augmented with the work of fourteen more poets in 1790, it still failed in inclusiveness, even over its allotted time-span; in addition, the biographical details of the added poets were skimped. What