"Nullum fere scribendi genus non tetigit, nullum quod tetigit non ornavit." ("There was scarcely any kind of writing that he did not touch, none that he touched that he did not adorn.") Samuel Johnson's epitaph to Oliver Goldsmith is displayed on the monument in the Poets' Corner in Westminster Abbey; the list of Goldsmith's titles justifies the first clause in the epitaph. Essays, poems, plays, a novel, biographies, histories, memoirs, translations and compilations on such nonliterary subjects as natural history and philosophy, anthologies and prefaces to other writers' works--these diverse "kinds" are evidence of a crowded and varied literary career. They are also typical of the canon of a hack, "a man whose trade is writing," as Goldsmith once characterized himself. What distinguishes them from the vast bulk of eighteenth-century hackwork is that, as Johnson asserts in the epitaph, Goldsmith "adorned" the miscellaneous species of writing that he...