interest and understood far better than did the curate—­would have been exceedingly difficult to identify with the scheming, vindictive creature whom we have just followed up the church path.  But after all, that is the way of human nature, although it may not be the way of those who try to draw it and who love to paint the villain black as the Evil One and the virtuous heroine so radiant that we begin to fancy we can hear the whispering of her wings.  Few people are altogether good or altogether bad; indeed it is probable that the vast majority are neither good nor bad—­they have not the strength to be the one or the other.  Here and there, however, we do meet a spirit with sufficient will and originality to press the scale down this way or that, though even then the opposing force, be it good or evil, is constantly striving to bring the balance equal.  Even the most wicked men have their redeeming points and righteous instincts, nor are their thoughts continually fixed upon iniquity.  Mr. Quest, for instance, one of the evil geniuses of this history, was, where his plots and passions were not immediately concerned, a man of eminently generous and refined tendencies.  Many were the good turns, contradictory as it may seem, that he had done to his poorer neighbours; he had even been known to forego his bills of costs, which is about the highest and rarest exhibition of earthly virtue that can be expected from a lawyer.  He was moreover eminently a cultured man, a reader of the classics, in translations if not in the originals, a man with a fine taste in fiction and poetry, and a really sound and ripe archaeological knowledge, especially where sacred buildings were concerned.  All his instincts, also, were towards respectability.  His most burning ambition was to secure a high position in the county in which he lived, and to be classed among the resident gentry.  He hated his lawyer’s work, and longed to accumulate sufficient means to be able to give it the good-bye and to indulge himself in an existence of luxurious and learned leisure.  Such as he was he had made himself, for he was the son of a poor and inferior country dentist, and had begun life with a good education, it is true, which he chiefly owed to his own exertions, but with nothing else.  Had his nature been a temperate nature with a balance of good to its credit to draw upon instead of a balance of evil, he was a man who might have gone very far indeed, for in addition to his natural ability he had a great power of work.  But unfortunately this was not the case; his instincts on the whole were evil instincts, and his passions—­whether of hate, or love, or greed, when they seized him did so with extraordinary violence, rendering him for the time being utterly callous to the rights or feelings of others, provided that he attained his end.  In short, had he been born to a good position and a large fortune, it is quite possible, providing always that his strong passions had not at some period of