ay 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,