Anderson now proposed was a more ambitious set of poets, extending from Chaucer and covering the Tudor and early Stuart poets previously omitted, although in the event he was unable to include all that he wished. The selection also included more Scottish poets (though excluding dialect poetry) and two volumes of translations from the Classical writers. The accompanying biographies of the poets were written by Anderson himself. From the point of view of comprehensive coverage, Alexander Chalmers advanced little beyond his predecessor in his The Works of the English Poets, from Chaucer to Cowper (1810). The main difference is that for those poets who appeared in the 'Johnson edition', Johnson's lives are retained. At this date it is conceded in the preface that, "after all the objections that have been offered, [they] must ever be the foundation of English poetical biography." By including them also there is an implied continuity between the volumes to which Johnson contributed and Chalmers' "work professing to be a Body of the Standard English Poets". Later critical interpretations Matthew Arnold, in his Six Chief Lives from Johnson's "Lives of the Poets" (1878), considered the Lives of Milton, Dryden, Pope, Addison, Swift, and Gray as "points which stand as so many natural centres, and by returning to which we can always find our way again" and also as a model for Arnold's "ideal of liberal education", representing "a crucial century and a half in English literature". For Arnold the whole work, focusing on these six, formed a "compendious story of a whole important age in English literature, told by a great man, and in a performance which is itself a piece of English literature of the first class". In mentioning this reading of Johnson's Lives at the start of his own article in The Cambridge Companion to Samuel Johnson, Greg Clingham describes the topics covered there as "like a list of most of the important issues in literary history during the years 1600–1781" as well as something like a social, philosophical and political history of that era. But Philip Smallwood, commenting on the Lives in The Oxford Handbook of British Poetry, 1660-1800, nuances this by pointing out that Johnson did not set out to produce a literary history. His main preoccupation is with how literary work is in a state of flux and advanced by individuals writing within a historical context. Consideration of their lives is