What chiefly struck too many of them was that he did not get on with his wife.
Froude's defence is first Carlyle's precept, and secondly his own conviction that the truth would be advantageous rather than injurious to Carlyle.

Carlyle's way of writing about other people, for instance Charles Lamb, Saint Charles, as Thackeray called him, is sometimes unpardonable; and if Froude had suppressed those passages he would have done well.

His own personal conduct is a lesson to us all, and that lesson is in Froude's pages for every one to read.

"What a noisy inanity is this world," wrote Carlyle in his diary at the opening of the year 1835.

Without the few great men who, like Carlyle, can lift themselves and others above it, it would be still noisier, still more inane.
Next year the gossips had a still richer feast.