[199] In the case of Lord Campbell, his personal intimacy with Lords Lyndhurst and Brougham seems to have been a positive disadvantage, leading him to dwarf the excellences and to magnify the blots in their characters.
Again, Johnson says: "If a man profess to write a life, he must write it really as it was.

A man's peculiarities, and even his vices, should be mentioned, because they mark his character." But there is always this difficulty,--that while minute details of conduct, favourable or otherwise, can best be given from personal knowledge, they cannot always be published, out of regard for the living; and when the time arrives when they may at length be told, they are then no longer remembered.
Johnson himself expressed this reluctance to tell all he knew of those poets who had been his contemporaries, saying that he felt as if "walking upon ashes under which the fire was not extinguished." For this reason, amongst others, we rarely obtain an unvarnished picture of character from the near relatives of distinguished men; and, interesting though all autobiography is, still less can we expect it from the men themselves.

In writing his own memoirs, a man will not tell all that he knows about himself.

Augustine was a rare exception, but few there are who will, as he did in his 'Confessions,' lay bare their innate viciousness, deceitfulness, and selfishness.

There is a Highland proverb which says, that if the best man's faults were written on his forehead he would pull his bonnet over his brow.