In the first five pages of the printed text there were more than a hundred and thirty corrections to be made of words, punctuation, capitals, quotation marks, and such like; and these pages are not exceptional." 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.