man who with no labour of his
own has inherited a fortune, ranks higher in the world's esteem than his
father who made it. We take rank by descent. Such of us as have the
longest pedigree, and are therefore the farthest removed from the first
who made the fortune and founded the family, we are the noblest. The
nearer to the fountain, the fouler the stream; and that first ancestor,
who has soiled his fingers by labour, is no better than a parvenu.

And as it is with what we value, so it is with what we blame. It is an
old story, that there is no one who would not in his heart prefer being
a knave to being a fool; and when we fail in a piece of attempted
roguery, as Coleridge has wisely observed, though reasoning unwisely
from it, we lay the blame, not on our own moral nature, for which we are
responsible, but on our intellectual, for which we are not responsible.
We do not say what knaves, we say what fools, we have been; perplexing
Coleridge, who regards it as a phenomenon of some deep moral disorder;
whereas it is but one more evidence of the universal fact that _gifts_
are the true and proper object of appreciation; and as we admire men for
possessing gifts, so we blame them for their absence. The noble man is
the gifted man; the ignoble is the ungifted; and therefore we have only
to state a simple law in simple language to have a full solution of the
enigma of Reineke. He has gifts enough: of that, at least, there can be
no doubt; and if he lacks the gift to use them in the way which we call
good, at least he uses them successfully. His victims are less gifted
than he, and therefore less noble; and therefore he has a right to use
them as he pleases.

* * * * *

And, after all, what are these victims? Among the heaviest charges
which were urged against him was the killing and eating of that wretched
Scharfenebbe--Sharpbeak--the crow's wife. It is well that there are two
sides to every story. A poor weary fox, it seemed, was not to be allowed
to enjoy a quiet sleep in the sunshine but what an unclean carrion bird
must come down and take a peck at him. We can feel no sympathy with the
outcries of the crow husband over the fate of the unfortunate Sharpbeak.
Wofully, he says, he flew over the place where, a few moments before, in
the glory of glossy plumage, a loving wife sate croaking out her passion
for him, and found nothing--nothing but a little blood and a few torn
feathers--all else