Sir Walter Besant

Sir Walter Besant (1836–1901), born at Portsmouth, was a novelist and historian, educated at King’s College, London, and Christ’s College, Cambridge. He taught in Mauritius, and was for many years Secretary of the Palestine Exploration Fund.

His first book was Studies in Early French Poetry (1868). The song here comes from his novel Dorothy Forster and is taken from Edmund Clarence Stedman’s A Victorian Anthology, 1837–1895 (1895).