PREFACE. 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, * 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. in so far as they related circumstances in Goldsmith's life, and were not mere criticism, or reflection, or anecdotes of other persons, or illustrations of the time, were a wholesale abstraction from the Life by Mr. Prior. My answer (to describe it as briefly) was, that the charge so brought against me was in all its particulars unfounded and false; that I had mentioned Mr. Prior's name in connection with everything of which he could in any sense be regarded as the discoverer; that so far from my book being slavishly copied from his, I had largely supplied his deficiencies, and silently corrected his errors; and that, in availing myself with scrupulous acknowledgment of the facts first put forth by him, as well as of the far more important facts related in other books without which he never could have written his, I had contributed to them many new anecdotes and some original letters, had subjected them to an entirely new examination and arrangement, and had done my best to transform an indiscriminate and dead collection of details about a man, into a living picture of the man himself surrounded by the life of his time. The reader will observe that the accusation which thus unexpectedly placed me on my defence, implied neither more nor less on the part of the person who made it, than a claim to absolute property in certain facts. It was not pretended that my book contained a line of Mr. Prior's writing. Not even the monomania which suggested so extraordinary a charge could extend it into an imputation that a single word of original comment or criticism, literary or personal, had been appropriated by me; or that I had adopted a thought, an expression, a view of character, a construction of any particular circumstances, or a decision on |