Excerpt from A Prospect of Society Is it necessary for me to apologise for publishing this fragment, and thus revealing the secrets of Goldsmith's methods of composition? Surely not: for it must be a matter of praise rather than of reproach to any author that he was solicitous to make his work as perfect as he could. That Goldsmith, always needy and pressed by duns as we know him to have been, had an artistic conscience which forbade him to publish hasty or undigested work was most honourable to him; and his reputation must gain rather than suffer from an exhibition of the careful manner in which he revised and polished his work. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.