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Sentence-length and Authorship

Attribution: the Case of Oliver
Goldsmith
David Mannion
Formerly of Royal Holloway, University of London, UK
Peter Dixon
Formerly of Queen Mary, University of London, UK

Abstract
The sentence-lengths of sixteen essays by Goldsmith are examined in relation to
data from ten essays (we call these doubtfuls) which have been attributed to
him. Comparisons between the doubtfuls and the known Goldsmiths are
made with reference to the 2 goodness-of-fit test, and the method of reciprocal
averaging. The Goldsmith essays form a close group, with four of the doubtful
essays well outside, two less remote and four within the Goldsmith cluster.
Comparison with fifty essays by nine of Goldsmiths contemporaries reveals the
distinctiveness of his sentence-length patterns, and strengthens the probability
that the four least doubtful essays are his. In the case of Goldsmith, then,
sentence-length may be considered a reliable stylistic marker.

1 The Problem
A rather dense cloud of uncertainty hangs over the canon of Goldsmiths
prose works. Which, if any, of the myriad pieces published anonymously
(as was the norm) in the essay-journals and magazines may plausibly be
assigned to him? In the belief that all types of evidence should be
scrutinized, we propose to see whether an analysis of sentence-length
might help at least to thin the cloud.

2 The Texts

Correspondence:
David Mannion, 30 St Margarets
Road, Oxford OX2 6RX, UK
Email:
david.mannion@btinternet.com

Our investigation is based on the pieces of miscellaneous journalism, first

published anonymously in no fewer than eight periodicals, which Goldsmith included in his Essays (1765), together with the two items which he
added to the second edition in the following year. We have discarded the
parodic Specimen of a Magazine, and three essays which are largely
translated from French sources, since a translator will be influenced to some
(probably considerable) extent by the sentence-patterns of the original.

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With some hesitation we have retained The Story of Alcander and Septimius, though it is supposedly Translated from a Byzantine Historian.
No such historian has been traced. We suspect that he is a fiction,
invented to give some credibility to a far-fetched tale. The sixteen essays
we have examined are listed in the Appendix.
We have returned to the original unrevised texts of the essays in order
to compare like with like; none of the attributed essays which we shall
consider, and which we label doubtfuls, received the benefit of revision.
We have removed (i) all quotations of more than a phrase in length; (ii)
abnormal portions of text, such as the rules of the society of moral philosophers;1 (iii) all passages of rapid dialogue in which each participant has
no more than one or two sentences per speech.
How Goldsmith himself would have defined a sentence is impossible
to determine. The punctuation of his letters is remarkably haphazard,
and if the printers of the magazines imposed their own pointing on his
manuscripts they did so inconsistently. Where we expect a full stop we
may find a colon, a semicolon, or even a comma. We began by defining a
sentence as any grammatically self-sufficient clause, but subsequently
decided not to allow sentences to begin with the conjunction and. Conversely we oblige them, when grammar permits, to begin with but or yet.
We have repunctuated accordingly, except in the case of three-part
sentences (there are ten in all) consisting of units of similar length and
structure, with the second and third linked by and: One writer, for
instance, excels at a plan, or a title-page, another works away the body
of the book, and a third is a dab at an index (Works, i. p. 354). Since
spelling was at least as much the compositors province as the authors,
we have modernized it throughout (thus every body becomes a single
word), and have expanded the titles of monarchs: Alexander VI becomes
Alexander the Sixth. Our sixteen essays have a combined total of 1,293
sentences.
We have applied the same rules to the texts of ten essays selected from
the hundred or so which have been attributed to Goldsmith at various
times and with varying degrees of conviction. Four of our doubtfuls
have already strong canonical claims since they contain convincing
parallels in language and idea with Goldsmiths known work: The Revolution in Low Life (Dl), almost a prose version of parts of The Deserted
Village; A True History for the Ladies (D2), apparently based on Goldsmith family history; Some Thoughts Preliminary to a General Peace
(D3), and On Public Rejoicings for Victory (D4). All four are included
in Arthur Friedmans edition of the Collected Works. Excluded from that
edition, because not yielding similar parallels, is a large group of essays
which first appeared in the British Magazine, and reappeared in Essays
and Criticisms, by Dr. Goldsmith (3 vols., London, 1798). They have more
recently been championed by James Basker (Basker, 1988, pp. 19496).
We have examined five of them: On Pride (D5); On the Imprudent
Fondness of Parents (D6); Essay on National Union (D7); Reflections
on National Prejudices (D8), and A Proposal for Augmenting the Forces
of Great Britain (D9). We have added The Description of a Wowwow in
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1 Collected Works of Oliver

Goldsmith, ed. Arthur
Friedman, 5 vols. (Clarendon
Press, Oxford, 1966), iii.
1516. This edition is cited as
Works from now on.

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the Country (D10), an essay from the Public Ledger frequently ascribed to
Goldsmith (though not by Friedman).

3 Statistical Analysis
We wish to establish whether a distinctive pattern of sentence-length is
discernible in Goldsmiths essays, and whether any of our doubtful
group, D1D10, conform sufficiently to that pattern to allow us to
propose the likelihood of his being their author. We base the decisions on
comparisons with 16 essays Gi, i  1, . . . ,16, known to have been written
by Goldsmith. We regard these essays as landmarks, representing
Goldsmiths style, and extract from them an image of Goldsmiths
preferred sentence-length pattern. We use two methods of comparison:
M1: the 2 goodness-of-fit test; and M2: reciprocal averaging (also known
as correspondence analysis). Though there is considerable agreement
between the sets of results, M2, a graphical solution, gives somewhat
greater insight than M1.

3.1 Method M1: Goodness-of-fit test

We examine the Goldsmith material essay by essay, on the assumption
that he would modify sentence-length according to subject-matter, tone,
rhetorical purpose, and the character of his various narrators. We group
the sentences of a particular essay, E, according to their lengthsand
count the number of sentences in each group. We choose eight groups.
The 1st group, (0,9], contains those sentences that have fewer than 10
words and z1 is the number of sentences of E in this group. The 2nd
group, (9,13], contains those sentences that have more than nine and
fewer than fourteen words and z2 is the number of sentences in this
group. And so on, the remaining six groups being: (13,17], (17,20],
(20,24], (24,29], (29,36], (36,), and z3, z4, z5, z6, z7, z8 being the
corresponding group scores.
In the case E  G, we find z1  162, z2  158, z3  174, z4  153, z5
 153, z6  177, z7  152, z8  164. N  1293 is the number of
sentences in G, so pk  zkN is the proportion of sentences of G in the
kth group: p1  0.125, p2  0.122, p3  0.135, p4  0.118, p5 
0.118, p6  0.137, p7  0.118, p8  0.127 (3 d.p.). The boundary
values for the groups 9, 13, 17, 20, 24, 29, 36 were chosen so that the 1293
sentences of G are shared in approximately equal numbers between the
eight groups.
For an essay, E, zk is the number of sentences of E in the kth group. We
compare E with G using the 2 goodness-of-fit measure z  1  k  8
(zk  npk)2/npk, where n  z1 + z2 + . . . + z8 is the number of sentences in
E. The p-value for E is p  P[Z  z], where Z is a 2 random variable on
7 degrees of freedom. A value p  0.05 suggests that that the author of E
was unlikely to have been Goldsmith. D5, D6, D7, D8, D9, D10 have
p-values 0.087, 0.000, 0.000, 0.000, 0.000, 0.078 (3 d.p.) respectively
(Table 1). So D6, D7, D8, D9 are unlikely Goldsmith essays, while D5,
D10 are borderline. Goldsmith essays G1, G6, G14 stand out as unusual
within the Goldsmith collection (Table 2).
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Table 1
1

2

p-value

4
8
6
8
4
35
3
1
0
5

3
8
2
10
2
26
0
2
0
7

8
4
7
12
3
24
2
1
3
8

4
1
4
8
2
4
3
3
3
2

5
4
3
9
7
12
3
1
2
1

2
4
9
11
5
10
2
1
7
6

4
5
6
2
8
3
4
2
3
2

7
7
7
13
10
6
18
15
17
10

37
41
44
73
41
120
35
26
35
41

5.570
8.097
5.539
7.479
12.431
63.606
49.956
48.920
47.565
12.751

0.591
0.324
0.594
0.381
0.087
0.000
0.000
0.000
0.000
0.078

Sample
D1
D2
D3
D4
D5
D6
D7
D8
D9
D10

3.2 Method M2: Reciprocal averaging

We denote by zkj the number of sentences of Gj in the kth group, j  1, . . . ,

16, k  1, . . . ,8. Z  [zkj] is the 8  16 matrix shown in Table 3. ykj is the
number of sentences of Dj in the kth group, j  1, . . . ,10. Y  [ykj] is the
8  10 matrix shown in Table 4.
The idea of reciprocal averaging (also known as correspondence analysis)
is to assign a score rk to the kth row of Z, and a related score sj to the jth
column of Z. Z is a contingency table whose elements are frequency counts
of sentences of different lengths. The rows indicate the lengths of the
sentences. The jth column tells us something about the pattern of short,
medium, long sentences of the corresponding essay, Gj. We require that sj
be a measure of preference for long sentences, so that a large value sj would
indicate that Gj has a relatively large number of long sentences, while a
small value of sj would indicate a relatively large number of short sentences. If we suppose that we know the rk, then a sensible choice for the sj is:
(1)
sj  1 1  k  8 zkj rk/z.j,
where z.j  1  k  8 zkj, j  1, . . . ,16 and 1 is a constant of proportionality. Similarly, if we suppose that we know the sj, then a sensible choice
for the rk is:
(2)
rk.  2, 1  j  16 zkj sj/zk.,
where zk.  1  j  16 zkj, k  1, . . . ,8 and 2 is a constant of proportionality. Let s  (s1, . . . ,s16), r  (r1, . . . ,r8), A  diag(zk.), (the 8  8
diagonal matrix whose diagonal elements are zk.) and B  diag(z.j),
(the 16  16 diagonal matrix whose diagonal elements are z.j). Then,
combining (1) and (2), we get
s  1B1Zr; r  2A1Zs;
s  12B1ZA1Zs; r  12A1ZB1Zr.
So r is an eigenvector of A1ZB1Z, and s is an eigenvector of B1ZA1Z.
The largest eigenvalue of either A1ZB1Z or B1ZA1Z is 1, corresponding to the uninteresting eigenvector of ones: (1, . . . ,1). The other
eigenvalues are less than 1. A two-dimensional graphical representation
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Sentence-length and Authorship Attribution

Table 2
1

2

61
77
54
100
80
40
132
41
96
37
269
93
62
40
53
58

16.229
9.382
9.956
3.844
6.523
13.218
10.794
9.321
8.859
8.649
10.989
1.607
4.218
13.068
3.640
5.444

p-value

Sample
G1
G2
G3
G4
G5
G6
G7
G8
G9
G10
G11
G12
G13
G14
G15
G16

3
10
7
10
11
10
16
8
17
3
41
10
4
0
9
3

2
7
11
11
9
5
9
7
18
3
38
12
7
5
8
6

6
4
9
11
14
5
22
2
11
4
42
13
10
3
9
9

12
14
3
15
6
2
13
5
9
5
30
12
8
8
6
5

7
12
10
11
8
9
12
2
8
5
33
8
10
6
4
8

11
10
4
15
15
4
22
3
13
2
27
15
10
8
7
11

13
12
6
10
5
2
13
6
7
9
36
11
5
2
6
9

7
8
4
17
12
3
25
8
13
6
22
12
8
8
4
7

0.023
0.226
0.191
0.798
0.480
0.067
0.148
0.230
0.263
0.279
0.139
0.978
0.754
0.070
0.820
0.606

(a biplot) of the Goldsmith scores s, and the sentence-length scores r is

obtained as follows. Let 1, 2 be the two largest eigenvalues less than 1,
and let ra  (ra1, . . . ,ra8)
and sa  (sa1, . . . ,sa16)
be the corresponding
eigenvectors, a1,2. The reciprocal averaging calculation is based on
Z (the Goldsmith data), while the doubtfuls data, Y, is treated as
supplementary. Accordingly, the coordinates (t1j,t2j) for the doubtfuls
are worked out using equation (1)
(5)

taj  1  k  8 ykj rak/yj

where 1  0.0407, 2  0.0239 (4 d.p.). The other eigenvalues are

3  0.0148, 4  0.0111 , 5  0.0071, 6  0.0054, 7  0.0019.
The first two components thus account for 61.55% of the total mass of
the eigenvaluessufficiently large for us to base our judgements on just
these first two components, ignoring the others.
The points with coordinates (r1k,r2k), k1, . . . ,8, correspond to the 8
sentence-length categories; the points with coordinates (s1j,s2j), j  1, . . . ,
16, correspond to the 16 Goldsmith essays; the points with coordinates
(t1j,t2j), j  1,,10, correspond to the doubtfuls. Figure 1 is a plot of
the Goldsmith points, labelled g, and the doubtful points, labelled
d1, . . . ,d10. To interpret more easily the interaction between the essay
points and the sentence-length category points, the ath coordinate of a
point is divided by the square root of the ath eigenvalue, a1,2. We note
that only d6, d7, d8, d9, d10 stand outside the Goldsmith cluster.
Figure 2 is a plot of the doubtful points and the sentence-length
category points, labelled 1, . . . ,8. d7, d8, d9 are positioned in the
direction of 6 and 8 (categories that represent long sentences), so D7,
D8, D9 are different from the Goldsmith essays in having more long
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Table 3
3
2
6
12
7
11
13
7

10
7
4
14
12
10
12
8

7
11
9
3
10
4
6
4

10
11
11
15
11
15
10
17

11
9
14
6
8
15
5
12

10
5
5
2
9
4
2
3

16
9
22
13
12
22
13
25

8
7
2
5
2
3
6
8

17
18
11
9
8
13
7
13

3
3
4
5
5
2
9
6

6
2
7
4
3
9
6
7

8
10
12
8
9
11
2
13

4
2
3
2
7
5
8
10

35
26
24
4
12
10
3
6

3
0
2
3
3
2
4
18

1
2
1
3
1
1
2
15

0
0
3
3
2
7
3
17

5
7
8
2
1
6
2
10

41
38
42
30
33
27
36
22

Table 4
4
3
8
4
5
2
4
7

8
8
4
1
4
4
5
7

sentences (and fewer shorter sentences) than we would expect if their

styles with regard to sentence-length were similar to that of Goldsmith.
d6 is in the direction of 1, 2 and 3, each representing relatively short
sentences. So D6 is different from the Goldsmith essays in so far as it has
more short sentences (and fewer long sentences) than we would expect if
Goldsmith were the author. d10 is in the opposite direction to the
directions of 4, 5 and 7. So D10 is different from the Goldsmith essays in
so far as it has fewer sentences of categories 4, 5 and 7it has only two
sentences of categories 4 and 7, and only one of category 5, when one
would expect about five sentences in each of these categories were
Goldsmith the author.
In both tests Fondness of Parents (D6), National Union (D7),
National Prejudices (D8), and Augmenting the Forces (D9) fall so far
outside the Goldsmith cluster as to cast serious doubt on his authorship.
Sentence-length measures therefore reinforce Morris Goldens strong
arguments, on other grounds, against National Union and National
Prejudices (Golden, 1955 and 1959), as well as Edward Pitchers decision
to assign none of the four essays to Goldsmith (Pitcher, 2000, pp. 68, 85,
95, 99). The Description of a Wowwow (D10), though a borderline case
in test M1, is decisively outside the Goldsmith group according to the
reciprocal averaging test (see Fig. 1), a result which tends to confirm our
own earlier scepticism (Dixon and Mannion, 2001). The essay On Pride
(D5), however, is very close to the Goldsmith essays in Fig. 1, and borderline in test M1; our evidence suggests that Goldsmith could be its author.
The remaining essays, D1D4, all of which are included in Collected
Works, display sentence patterns which conform closely to Goldsmiths.
But before we can invoke this conformity to support Friedmans attributions we need some reassurance that it is not merely a matter of chance.
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10
12
13
12
8
15
11
12

4
7
10
8
10
10
5
8

0
5
3
8
6
8
2
8

9
8
9
6
4
7
6
4

3
6
9
5
8
11
9
7

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This possibility can never be eliminated, but we can perhaps narrow

the odds by studying periodical essays by a number of Goldsmiths
contemporaries.

4 The Contemporaries
We selected for comparison fifty essays from the 1750s and early 1760s,
by nine authors. Johnson is represented twice (five essays from the
Adventurer , and five from the Idler ), the remaining authors by five pieces
each: Hugh Kelly (from the Babler), Arthur Murphy (the Grays Inn
Journal); Joseph Warton (the Adventurer); Edward Moore, Horace

Fig. 1

Fig. 2
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Fig. 3 Method M2 Goldsmith

and his contemporaries.

Fig. 4 Method M2 The

contemporaries and sentence
categories.

Walpole, Richard Owen Cambridge, and the Earl of Chesterfield (all

from the World). We added five essays from the Connoisseur, written
jointly by George Colman and Bonnell Thornton, a periodical which
Goldsmith reviewed admiringly (Works, i. l415), and which influenced
him (Taylor, 1993, pp. 5051, 175). The punctuation and spelling of
these essays, which are listed in the Appendix, have been modified in the
same way as the Goldsmith and doubtful material.
The results of the two methods applied to Goldsmiths contemporaries are shown in Table 5, and Figs. 3 and 4. We see that the results
are consistent with each other and illustrate very clearly that sentence504

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Sentence-length and Authorship Attribution

Table 5 Method M1
Author

Sample

2

p-value

Cambridge

a
a
a
a
a
b
b
b
b
b
c
c
c
c
c
d
d
d
d
d
e
e
e
e
e
f
f
f
f
f
h
h
h
h
h
i
i
i
i
i
j
j
j
j
j
k
k
k
k
k

52
46
33
52
56
58
51
43
47
48
46
57
54
49
39
43
55
49
58
64
32
54
46
30
49
37
38
44
41
37
44
32
41
42
38
42
35
40
65
35
46
50
53
50
62
48
37
38
57
32

28.388
24.393
35.556
47.489
41.448
58.109
58.045
30.584
15.004
24.932
47.536
10.983
14.592
60.021
18.512
20.919
36.345
28.543
19.068
10.152
15.336
3.601
5.155
5.974
2.668
23.430
12.320
29.505
31.593
34.165
11.055
57.009
43.562
26.284
53.990
38.175
27.403
15.968
4.820
18.122
12.207
16.569
16.262
19.106
32.394
6.461
53.326
29.401
19.197
53.643

0.000
0.001
0.000
0.000
0.000
0.000
0.000
0.000
0.036
0.001
0.000
0.139
0.042
0.000
0.010
0.004
0.000
0.000
0.008
0.180
0.032
0.824
0.641
0.543
0.914
0.001
0.091
0.000
0.000
0.000
0.136
0.000
0.000
0.000
0.000
0.000
0.000
0.025
0.682
0.011
0.094
0.020
0.023
0.008
0.000
0.487
0.000
0.000
0.008
0.000

Chesterfield

The Connoisseur

Johnson, Adventurer

Johnson, Idler

Kelly

Moore

Murphy

Walpole

Warton

*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*

*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*

Essays with small p-values are highlighted by *

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length is indeed an effective discriminator in this case. Figure 4 tells us

that the contemporaries are different from Goldsmith mainly because
they have more sentences of categories 6 and 8 and fewer of categories 1,
2, 3, and 5 than one would expect were Goldsmith the author.
None of the essays by Cambridge (a), Chesterfield (b), and Warton (k)
is close to the central Goldsmith cluster. More interesting is the fact that
only one of the Connoisseur essays (c) approaches that cluster; Goldsmith
was susceptible to the manner and content of the Connoisseur, but not to
its sentence-patterns. Single essays by Moore (h), Murphy (i) and
Walpole (j), and two by Kelly (f) fall inside the Goldsmith group, as does
one of Johnsons Adventurer pieces (d). Most striking is the presence
within the group of two of Johnsons Idlers (e), with two others on its
periphery. This proximity of Johnson and Goldsmith urges caution:
measures of sentence-length could not, by themselves, satisfactorily
assign an essay if both men were candidates for its authorship. But since
Johnson has never been considered a possible author of The Revolution
in Low Life, A True History for the Ladies, Thoughts Preliminary
to Peace, or Rejoicings for Victory, and since these four doubtfuls
are inside or very close to the main Goldsmith group, the evidence of
sentence-length supports the other evidence of his authorship adduced
by Friedman.
Of the Goldsmith essays themselves we note:
(i) the place of Alcander and Septimius (Gl6 in Fig. 3) in the central
group, which lends colour to our suspicion that the Byzantine
Historian is a pious fraud.
(ii) the substantial distance between Gl4 and Gl5. Both pieces are Letters
submitted to the Public Ledger by one Lawrence Grogan, recognizably the same mildly comic character in both, addressing the
proprietor of the journal as Mr. Ledger, referring complacently
to his family, and conscious of his status as a Common-CouncilMan. But Goldsmith has made no effort to link the pieces by means
of sentence-length, presumably because he has not considered
sentence-length as a possible index of character.
(iii) Conversely the close proximity of Gl2, The Distresses of a Common
Soldier, and Gl3, Remarks on Preaching, makes the same point.
The two essays are certainly differentiated, the one modest in
vocabulary and artless in syntax, the other allusive, confident, at
times exclamatory. But in sentence-length they are remarkably
alike.
(iv) Similarly the light-hearted Description of Clubs (G4) is a neighbour of the rather heavy-handed On Education (G7).
It would seem that Goldsmith is consistent in sentence-length from
essay to essay because he is indifferent to its expressive possibilities. His
practice is in marked contrast to that of the author of The Imprudent
Fondness of Parents (D6), a cri de coeur whose abundance of short
sentences makes a significant contribution to its pathos: Nobody knows
me now. Nobody cares what becomes of me. I am alone, disunited from
every tranquillity. The world is to me a desert.
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Sentence-length and Authorship Attribution

5 Conclusions
Attribution studies have increasingly and convincingly focused on socalled unconscious features of text, especially on such function words as
prepositions and conjunctions. The general principle has been firmly
stated by Ian Lancashire: Attribution is possible only when we can
identify reliable markers of authoring. To be reliable, markers must be
habitual, difficult for the author to observe, to edit in, and to cut, and
unambiguous. They must be ones of which the author is not conscious
(Lancashire, 1998, p. 299). It is questionable whether even the smallest
textual element is properly speaking unconscious. We should perhaps
rather think in terms of a spectrum running from scarcely conscious
through to fully conscious, with sentence-length normally standing very
close to the fully conscious end of the spectrum. To hammer home an
argument we may deliberately develop a sequence of short sentences; to
describe a ceremonial occasion a more leisurely manner, with a panoply
of relative clauses, could seem appropriate. As we have seen, Goldsmith
does not adjust sentence-length to suit subject or narrator; our initial
assumption was mistaken. Since in his case sentence-length does not vary
as much as one might expect from essay to essay, since it is not at the
forefront of his attention in the process of composition, it can qualify as
an habitual feature of his writing, to use Lancashires word. We can
accept it as a possible, because reliable, marker of his style where deattribution is concerned, more cautiously where positive ascription is in
question.
It is axiomatic that no single test can be successfully applied to every
authorship problem. Measures of sentence-length were of no help with
the disputed Federalist papers (Mosteller and Wallace, 1984, pp. 67),
nor in identifying Junius (Ellegrd, 1962, p. 10). It is also axiomatic that
such problems cannot be resolved by the study of a single feature of an
authors style. But in Goldsmiths case we would argue that an analysis of
sentence-length merits inclusion in any battery of tests designed to
investigate the canon of his miscellaneous essays.

References
Basker, J. G. (1988). Tobias Smollett: Critic and Journalist. Newark: University of
Delaware Press.
Dixon, P. and Mannion, D. (2001). Goldsmith and the Public Ledger. Language
and Literature, 10: 30723.
Ellegrd, A. (1962). A Statistical Method for Determining Authorship: The Junius
Letters, 17691772. Gothenburg Studies in English vol. xiii. Acta Universitatis
Gothenburgensis, Gteborg.
Golden, M. (1955). Goldsmith and National Concord. Notes and Queries, 200:
43638.
Golden, M. (1959). Two essays erroneously attributed to Goldsmith. Modern
Language Notes, 74: 1316.
Lancashire, I. (1998). Paradigms of authorship. Shakespeare Studies, 26: 296301.
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David Mannion and Peter Dixon

Mosteller, F. and Wallace, D. L. (1984). Applied Bayesian and Classical Inference:

The Case of The Federalist Papers. New York: Springer-Verlag.
Pitcher, E. W. R. (2000). The British Magazine, January 1760December 1769: An
Annotated Index of Signatures, Ascriptions, Subjects and Titles of Literary Prose.
Studies in British and American Magazines, vol. viii. Lewiston, New York:
Edwin Mellen Press.
Taylor, R. C. (1993). Goldsmith as Journalist. Cranbury, NJ: Associated
University Presses.

Appendix
The Goldsmith essays we have examined are:
(1) Introduction [to the Bee]; (2) On Dress; (3) Happiness . . . dependent
on Constitution; (4) A Description of Various Clubs; (5) On the Use of
Language; (6) A City Night-Piece; (7) On Education; (8) On the
Instability of Worldly Grandeur; (9) The Proceedings of Providence
Vindicated; (10) Serious Reflections on the Life and Death of . . .
T[heophilus] C[ibber]; (11) A Reverie at the Boars Head Tavern; (12)
The Distresses of a Common Soldier; (13) Some Remarks on the Modern
Manner of Preaching; (14) From a Common-Council-Man; (15) To the
Printer [on the Coronation of George III]; (16) The Story of Alcander
and Septimius.
The essays by Goldsmiths contemporaries are as follows. The years cited
are those in which the sample essays appeared.
Richard Owen Cambridge, The World, nos. 107, 108, 116, 123, 206
(17546).
The Earl of Chesterfield, The World, nos. 24, 49, 100, 105, 111 (17535).
George Colman and Bonnell Thornton, The Connoisseur, nos. 8, 57, 80,
114, 131 (17546).
Samuel Johnson, The Adventurer, nos. 45, 67, 84, 99, 102 (1753).
Samuel Johnson, The Idler, nos. 2, 26, 53, 83, 100 (175860).
Hugh Kelly, The Babler, nos. 9, 17, 19, 46, 66 (17634).
Edward Moore, The World, nos. 75, 128, 138, 173, 194 (17546).
Arthur Murphy, The Grays Inn Journal, nos. 68, 76, 79, 84, 91 (1754).
Horace Walpole, The World, nos. 6, 10, 14, 28, 103 (17534).
Joseph Warton, The Adventurer, nos. 109, 127, 129, 133, 139 (1754).

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