orgotten 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, 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 the 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. [Greek: 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
might be accepted by us with thankfulness.

It appeared, therefore, at any rate, to have to come to this--that if we
wanted a solution for our sphinx enigma, no OEdipus was likely to rise
and find it for us; and that if we wanted help, we must take it for
ourselves.