Feuerbach thinks that the murderer had made a shot at Kaspar's throat
with a razor, that Kaspar ducked cleverly, and got it on the brow, and
that the assassin believed his crime to be consummated, and fled,
after uttering words in which Kaspar recognised the voice of his
tutor, the possible albino. No albino or other suspicious character
was observed. Herr Daumer, before this cruel outrage, had remarked, in
Kaspar, 'a highly regrettable tendency to dissimulation and
untruthfulness,' and, just before the attack, had told the pupil that
he was a humbug. Lord Stanhope quoted a paper of Daumer's in the
_Universal Gazette_ of February 6, 1834 (_Allgemeine Zeitung_), in
which he says that 'lying and deceit were become to Kaspar a second
nature.' When did they begin to become a second nature? In any case
Daumer clove to the romantic theory of Kaspar's origin. Kaspar left
Daumer's house and stayed with various good people, being accompanied
by a policeman in his walks. He was sent to school, and Feuerbach
bitterly complains that he was compelled to study the Latin grammar,
'and finally even Caesar's Commentaries!' Like other boys, Kaspar
protested that he 'did not see the use of Latin,' and indeed many of
our modern authors too obviously share Kaspar's indifference to the
dead languages.
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