Naturally working men come out best.

The worst show is made by idle and luxurious grandees.
Authors occupy a middle position, and in Froude's own books "chapter after chapter vanished away, leaving the paper clean as if no compositor had ever laboured in setting type for it.

Pale and illegible became the fine-sounding paragraphs on which I had secretly prided myself.

A few passages, however, survived here and there at long intervals.

They were those on which I had laboured least and had almost forgotten, or those, as I observed in one or two instances, which had been selected for special reprobation in the weekly journals." The hit at The Saturday Review is amusing enough, and Froude goes on to plead successfully that though he may have been ignorant, prejudiced, or careless, no charge of dishonesty could be established against him.