Excerpt from The Life and Times of Oliver Goldsmith, Vol. 1 of 2 Whatever the work may be which a man undertakes to do, it is desirable that he should do it as completely as he can; and this is my reason for having endeavoured, amid employments that seemed scarcely compatible with such additional labour, to render this book more worthy of the favour with which the First Edition was received. With this remark these volumes should have been dismissed, to find what acceptance and appreciation the new facts and illustrations they contain may justly win for them, but for the circumstance of an attack made upon the writer by the author of a former life of Goldsmith, on grounds as unjustifiable and in terms as insolent as may be found in even the history of literature.* Briefly, Mr. Prior's charge against me was this. That I had taken all the facts relating to Goldsmith contained in the present biography from the book written by himself; that the whole of the original matter connected with the poet supplied in my work might have been comprised in two pages and that the additional seven hundred pages. 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.