ΤΟ

CHARLES DICKENS.

9409

F738

1855

GENIUS AND ITS REWARDS ARE BRIEFLY TOLD:

A LIBERAL NATURE AND A NIGGARD DOOM,

A DIFFICULT JOURNEY TO A SPLENDID TOMB.

NEW-WRIT, NOR LIGHTLY WEIGHED, THAT STORY OLD
IN GENTLE GOLDSMITH'S LIFE I HERE UNFOLD:

THRO' OTHER THAN LONE WILD OR DESERT-GLOOM,

IN ITS MERE JOY AND PAIN, ITS BLIGHT AND BLOOM,

* The original title of this Biography was the Life and Adventures of Oliver Goldsmith. Why it was altered I have explained at the close of the Preface to the Second Edition.

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PREFACE TO THE THIRD EDITION.

THIS Edition is not meant to displace its immediate predecessor, in two octavo volumes, of which it is an abridgment. But the favour extended to the book has suggested its publication in a form that may bring it within reach of a larger number of readers, and qualify it to accompany the many popular collections of those delightful writings to which its principal attraction is due. The chief omission in the present volume is of matter not immediately relating to Goldsmith himself, and of that large body of illustrative notes and authorities which may be referred to in the library edition; but in the preface referring exclusively to the latter, and here of necessity retained to dissipate certain charges brought against the writer, will be found a sufficient indication of the leading sources from which the facts of the biography were drawn. Mr. Carlyle has always blamed me for suppressing the woodcuts given in the first edition, and they are now accordingly restored.

J. F.

58, LINCOLN'S INN FIELDS,

October, 1855.

PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION,

(IN TWO VOLUMES).

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, in so far as they related circumstances in Goldsmith's life, and were not mere criticism,

* The letters in which this charge was brought and answered, are printed in the Athenæum of the 10th June 1848, and in the Literary Gazette of the 29th July 1848.