Volume 1

Studies of a biographer / by Leslie Stephen.

  • Leslie Stephen
Date:
[1910]
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Studies of a biographer / by Leslie Stephen. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    (‘scuttled a poor little drummer-boy’s nob/ as Barham puts it) some years before. In Words¬ worth’s version, the murderer is not a c blood¬ thirsty swab/ but an amiable person, who f would not have robbed the raven of its food.’ He had been seized by a press-gang, and, finding on his return that his family were in distress, had robbed and murdered a miscellaneous traveller for their benefit; an act possibly excusable on Godwin’s principles. With this story Wordsworth com¬ bined another of the ‘female vagrant,’ whose cruel sufferings were due to her husband having been forced into the army. This represents, as he tells us, foreboding thoughts which came to him when watching the British Fleet at Spithead. He foresaw that the war was leading to ‘ misery beyond all possible calculation.’ Wretched men were being forcibly torn from their families, and plunged not only into misery, but into crime. The horrors of war are bad enough, but they involve also a difficult moral problem when the victims not only suffer, but are demoralised : and painful forebodings were combined with bewilder¬ ment as to ethical puzzles. Was the murderer most to blame, or the tyrants who had crushed his life ? and what are we to think of the Providential
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