Billy Budd

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Yet in an aesthetic way he saw the charm of it,

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It served to augment a mental disturbance previously evident enough.

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...it seemed to indicate some capricious revulsion of thought or feeling...

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And, probably, had such a step been suggested to him, he would have been deterred from taking it by the...

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...though at bottom they dissented from some points Captain Vere had put to them,

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It was noted at the time and remarked upon afterwards, that in this final scene the good man evinced little or nothing of the perfunctory.

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Such an episode in the Island's grand naval story her naval historians naturally abridge; one of them (G.P.R. James) candidly acknowledging that fain would he pass it over did not "impartiality forbid fastidiousness."

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Billy's impetuous question

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Not without a sort of joy indeed he might have appreciated the brave opinion of him implied in his Captain's making such a confidant of him.

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When he spoke to his young topmates about it they were either lightly incredulous or found something comical in his unconcealed anxiety.

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Captain Vere in the end may have developed the passion sometimes latent under an exterior stoical or indifferent.

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...the official's self-possessed and somewhat ostentatious manner...

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Billy listened, but less out of awe or reverence perhaps than from a certain natural politeness;

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Claggart—-himself for the time liberated from the other's scrutiny—steadily...

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Meantime that functionary, resuming his path, must have momentarily worn some expression less guarded than that of the bitter smile, and usurping the face from the heart, some distorting expression perhaps; for a drummer-boy heedlessly frolicking along from the opposite direction and chancing to come into light collision with his person was strangely disconcerted by his aspect.

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...the patriotic zeal officially evinced by Claggart had...