PREFACE.

WHATEVER the work may be which a man undertakes
to do, it is desirable that he should do it as completely
as lie 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,

. * The letters in •which this charge was brought and answered, are printed ia the;
AtJienceim of the 10th June 1848, and in the Literary Gazette of the 29th J-uly,

1848.