could we want more?  Some few attempted feebly to maintain that the book was a satire.  But this only moved the difficulty a single step; for the fact of the sympathy remained unimpaired, and if it was a satire we were ourselves the objects of it.  Others urged what we said above, that the story was only of poor animals that, according to Descartes, not only had no souls, but scarcely even life in any original and sufficient sense, and therefore we need not trouble ourselves.  But one of two alternatives it seemed we were bound to choose, either of which was fatal to the proposed escape.  Either there was a man hiding under the fox’s skin, or else, if real foxes have such brains as Reineke was furnished withal, no honest doubt could be entertained that some sort of conscience was not forgotten in the compounding of him, and he must be held answerable according to his knowledge.

What would Mr. Carlyle say of it, we thought, with his might and right?  “The just thing in the long run is the strong thing.”  But Reineke had a long run out and came in winner.  Does he only “seem to succeed?” Who does succeed, then, if he no more than seems?  The vulpine intellect knows where the geese live, it is elsewhere said; but among Reineke’s victims we do not remember one goose, in the literal sense of goose; and as to geese metaphorical, at least the whole visible world lies down complacently at his feet.  Nor does Mr. Carlyle’s expressed language on this very poem serve any better to help us—­nay, it seems as if he feels uneasy in the neighbourhood of so strong a rascal, so briefly he dismisses him.  “Worldly prudence is the only virtue which is certain of its reward.”  Nay, but there is more in it than that:  no worldly prudence would command the voices which have been given in to us for Reineke.

Three only possibilities lay now before us:  either we should, on searching, find something solid in this Fox’s doings to justify success; or else the just thing was not always the strong thing; or it might be, that such very semblance of success was itself the most miserable failure; that the wicked man who was struck down and foiled, and foiled again, till he unlearnt his wickedness, or till he was disabled from any more attempting it, was blessed in his disappointment; that to triumph in wickedness, and to continue in it and to prosper to the end, was the last, worst penalty inflicted by the divine vengeance.  Hin’ athanatos e adikos on—­to go on with injustice through this world and through all eternity, uncleansed by any purgatorial fire, untaught by any untoward consequence to open his eyes and to see in its true accursed form the miserable demon to which he has sold himself,—­this, of all catastrophes which could befal an evil man, was the deepest, lowest, and most savouring of hell, which the purest of the Grecian moralists could reason out for himself,—­under which third hypothesis many an uneasy misgiving would vanish away, and Mr. Carlyle’s broad aphorism be accepted by us with thankfulness.