This looks like a formidable indictment, and in the literal sense of the words it may be true.  I have compared the first five pages of the two editions, and there are a good many changes in the use of capitals and italics.  But except one obvious misprint of a single letter, “even” for “ever,” there is nothing which does “grave wrong” to the sense, or affects it in any way.  “And these pages,” as Mr. Norton says, with another meaning, “are not exceptional.”  The later reminiscences were not easy to decipher.  Carlyle’s handwriting was seriously affected by age, he wrote upon both sides of very thin paper, and I have seen several letters of his which bear out Froude’s assertion that, after his hand began to shake, “it became harder to decipher than the worst manuscript which I have ever examined.”  In preparing the book Froude had to use a magnifying glass, and in many cases the true reading was a matter of opinion.  In one case, however, it was not.  Sir Henry Taylor, the most serene and dignified of men, found himself charged in Carlyle’s sketch of Southey with the unpleasant attribute of “morbid vivacity,” and not only with morbid vivacity simpliciter, or per se, but “in all senses of that deep-reaching word.”  Mr. Norton restored the true reading, which was “marked veracity,” though, on the other hand, he replaced the statement, omitted by Froude, that Taylor, who had died between the two editions, was “not a well-read or wide-minded man.”  It must be admitted that in this instance Froude allowed a proof which made nonsense to pass, and that Mr. Norton did a public service by correcting the phrase.  Froude’s occasional carelessness in revision is a common failing enough.  What made it remarkable in him was the combination of liability to these lapses with intensely laborious and methodical habits.

Although Froude’s legal connection with Carlyle’s family ceased with the assignment to Carlyle’s niece of the copyright in the Reminiscences, the names of the two men are as inseparably associated as Boswell’s and Johnson’s, Lockhart’s and Scott’s, Macaulay’s and Trevelyan’s, Morley’s and Gladstone’s.  Some readers, such as Tennyson and Lecky, thought that Froude had revealed too much.  Others, such as John Skelton and Edward FitzGerald, believed that he had raised Carlyle to a higher eminence than he had occupied before.  Froude himself felt entire confidence both in the greatness of Carlyle’s qualities and in the permanence of his fame.  That was why he thought that the revelation of small defects would do more good than harm.  A faultless character, even if he himself could have reconciled it with his conscience to draw one, would not have been accepted as genuine, would not have been treated as credible.  The true character, in its strength and its weakness, would command belief, and admiration too.  If Froude were alive, he would say that the time had not yet come for a final judgment, and might not come for a hundred years.  Still,