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. 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 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”.