Excerpt from The Miscellaneous Works of Oliver Goldsmith: With an Account of His Life and Writings There are few writers for whom the reader feels such personal kindness as for Oliver Goldsmith. The fascinating ease and simplicity of his style; the benevolence that beams through every page; the whimsical yet amiable views of human life and human nature; the mellow unforced humour, blended so happily with good feeling and good sense, throughout his writings; win their way i1 resistibly to the afi'ections and carry the author with them. While writers of greater pretensions and more sounding names are suffered to lie upon our shelves, the works of Goldsmith are cherished and laid in our bosoms. We do not quote them with Ostentation, but they mingle with our minds; they sweeten our tempers and harmonize our thoughts; they put us in good humour with ourselves and with the world, and in so doing they make us hap pier and better men. We have been curious therefore in gathering to gether all the heterogeneous particulars concerning poor Goldsmith that still exist; and seldom have we met with an author's life more illustrative of his works, or works more faithfully illustrative of the author's life.* His rambling biography displays him the same kind, artless, good humoured, excur sive, sensible, whimsical, intelligent being that he appears in his writings. Scarcely an adventure or a character is given in his page that may not be traced to his own parti - coloured story. Many of his most ludicrous scenes and ridiculous incidents have been drawn from his own blunders and mis chances, and he seems really to have been buffeted into almost every maxim imparted by him for the nstruction of his readers. 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.