Periodicals such as these here presented formed the background for the career of the foremost of hackwriters, Oliver Goldsmith. Bibliographies of his work indicate that in the years 1757 to 1762 Goldsmith contributed to at least ten periodicals of differing kinds. The serial miscellany he wrote, The Bee (1759), ran to omly eight weekly numbers, but these early years of magazine writing in general served him well. He made many friends, and in 1764, when his first signed work, The Traveller, was published, he was already one of the original members of Dr. Johnson´s Club. The magazines and reviews, however, were not sufficiently lucrative, and once his reputation was stablished Goldsmith took to translation and compilation as a means of further income. Among the many works in which he was concerned at least as reviser may be listed an abridgment of Plutarch´s Lives in five volumes (1762), a History of England (1764) in two volumes, another in four volumes (1771), The Roman History in two volumes (1769), The Beauties of English Poesy in two volumes (1767), The Grecian History in two volumes (1774) and, most extensive and perhaps most interesting of his compilations, An History of the Earth and Animated Nature (1774) in eight volumes. During the fifteen years that elapsed between his first original book, his Enquiry into the Present State of Polite Learning in Europe (1759), and his death, Goldsmith must have either written, revised, translated, compiled or supervised over two score volumes. No one will accept Horace Walpole´s verdict that ‘Goldsmith was an idiot, with one or twice a fit of parts’; but it is evident that he was a professional maker of books, who affords high delight from a relative few of his writings.

References:
Routledge & Kegan P. (1967). A Literary History of England, U.K.: Edited by Albert C. Baugh 2nd edition