Citation (2)
Mortals are easily tempted to pinch the life out of their neighbor’s buzzing glory, and think that such killing is no murder.
And yet from the story itself the reader sees that Dorothea’s ‘buzzing glory’ about Casaubon is misguided, that he is a senseless, selfish old twig, and not much of a scholar, either (even if he would read the Germans). Is that, then, still ‘murder’ to set aright one who has gone astray? Yes—if the temptation to reprove is itself misguided, and is born, as here, from selfishness and spite.