siana.

Thus dreamed Barkilphedro. Such were the ragings of his soul. It is the
habit of the envious man to absolve himself, amalgamating with his
personal grievance the public wrongs.

All the wild forms of hateful passions went and came in the intellect
of this ferocious being. At the corners of old maps of the world of the
fifteenth century are great vague spaces without shape or name, on which
are written these three words, _Hic sunt leones_. Such a dark corner is
there also in man. Passions grow and growl somewhere within us, and we
may say of an obscure portion of our souls, "There are lions here."

Is this scaffolding of wild reasoning absolutely absurd? does it lack a
certain justice? We must confess it does not.

It is fearful to think that judgment within us is not justice. Judgment
is the relative, justice is the absolute. Think of the difference
between a judge and a just man.

Wicked men lead conscience astray with authority. There are gymnastics
of untruth. A sophist is a forger, and this forger sometimes brutalizes
good sense.

A certain logic, very supple, very implacable, and very agile, is at the
service of evil, and excels in stabbing truth in the dark. These are
blows struck by the devil at Providence.

The worst of it was that Barkilphedro had a presentiment. He was
undertaking a heavy task, and he was afraid that after all the evil
achieved might not be proportionate to the work.

To be corrosive as he was, to have within himself a will of steel, a
hate of diamond, a burning curiosity for the catastrophe, and to burn
nothing, to decapitate nothing, to exterminate nothing; to be what he
was, a force of devastation, a voracious animosity, a devourer of the
happiness of others, to have been created (for there is a creator,
whether God or devil), to have been created Barkilphedro all over, and
to inflict perhaps after all but a fillip of the finger--could this be
possible? could it be that Barkilphedro should miss his aim? To be a
lever powerful enough to heave great masses of rock, and when sprung to
the utmost power to succeed only in giving an affected woman a bump in
the forehead--to be a catapult dealing ruin on a pole-kitten! To
accomplish the task of Sisyphus, to crush an ant; to sweat all over with
hate, and for nothing at all. Would not this be humiliating, when he
felt himself a mechanism of hostility capable of reducing the world to
powder! To put into movement all the wheels within