Samuel Johnson, Gregory Sharpe, and the Authorship of <i>Some Remarks on the Progress of Learning</i> (1746)
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Samuel Johnson wrote far more than he acknowledged or than his contemporaries could identify. Modern scholars have proposed many additions to the canon. Among the most recent of these is Some Remarks on the Progress of Learning (1746), a pamphlet ostensibly written to promote a new edition of Mario di Calasio’s concordance to the Hebrew Bible, then in preparation by William Romaine. The evidence adduced for Johnson’s authorship is partly circumstantial (his connections with the book trade) and partly internal (phrases and features of style that sound Johnsonian). No external evidence connects Johnson with the pamphlet. This article questions the attribution, arguing that neither the circumstantial nor the internal evidence is convincing. Further, the substance of the pamphlet itself, its politics, its religion (especially its view of the Reformation), and most of all its enthusiastic promotion of the study of Hebrew, are quite un-Johnsonian, and indeed contradict his known views. It therefore proposes a more credible candidate, Gregory Sharpe (1713–1771), an ‘enlightened’ cleric and a known enthusiast for Hebrew, and in support, cites parallels with his writings.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.008 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.009 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".