t last his office as ghostly father obliged him to put in a
slight demurrer:--

Uncle, the badger replied, why these are the sins of your neighbours;
Yours, I should think, were sufficient, and rather more now
to the purpose.

But he sighs to think what a bishop Reineke would have made.

And now, for the present, farewell to Reineke Fuchs, and to the song in
which his glory is enshrined--the Welt Bibel, Bible of this world, as
Goethe called it, the most exquisite moral satire, as we will call it,
which has ever been composed. It is not addressed to a passing mode of
folly or of profligacy, but it touches the perennial nature of mankind,
laying bare our own sympathies, and tastes, and weaknesses, with as keen
and true an edge as when the living world of the old Swabian poet winced
under its earliest utterance.

Humorous in the high pure sense, every laugh which it gives may have its
echo in a sigh, or may glide into it as excitement subsides into
thought; and yet, for those who do not care to find matter there either
for thought or sadness, may remain innocently as a laugh.

Too strong for railing, too kindly and loving for the bitterness of
irony, the poem is, as the world itself, a book where each man will find
what his nature enables him to see, which gives us back each our own
image, and teaches us each the lesson which each of us desires to
learn.

FOOTNOTES:

[AB] _Fraser's Magazine_, 1852.

THE CAT'S PILGRIMAGE.

1850.

PART I.

'It is all very fine,' said the Cat, yawning, and stretching herself
against the fender, 'but it is rather a bore; I don't see the use of
it.' She raised herself, and arranging her tail into a ring, and seating
herself in the middle of it, with her fore paws in a straight line from
her shoulders, at right angles to the hearth-rug, she looked pensively
at the fire. 'It is very odd,' she went on, 'there is my poor Tom; he is
gone. I saw him stretched out in the yard. I spoke to him, and he took
no notice of me. He won't, I suppose, ever any more, for they put him
under the earth. Nice fellow he was. It is wonderful how little one
cares about it. So many jolly evenings we spent together; and now I seem
to get on quite as well without him. I wonder what has become of him;
and my last children, too, what has become of them? What are we here
for? I would ask the men, only they are so conceited and stupid they
can't understand what we say. I hear them dronin