ature, not even Scharfenebbe,
the crow's wife, when she came to peck his eyes out,
if he had not been hungry; and that gastros ananke,
that craving of the stomach, makes a difference quite
infinite. It is true that, like Iago, he rejoices in the
exercise of his intellect; the sense of his power, and the
scientific employment of his time are a real delight to
him; but then, as we said, he does not love evil for its
own sake; he is only somewhat indifferent to it. If the
other animals venture to take liberties with him, he will
repay them in their own coin, and get his quiet laugh
at them at the same time; but the object generally for
which he lives is the natural one of getting his bread
for himself and his family; and, as the great moralist
says, "It is better to be bad for something than for
nothing." Badness generally is undesirable; but badness
in its essence, which may be called heroic badness,
is gratuitous.

But this first thought served merely to give us a
momentary relief from our alarm, and we determined
we would sift the matter to the bottom, and no more
expose ourselves to be taken at such disadvantage.
We went again to the poem, with our eyes open, and
our moral sense as keenly awake as a genuine wish to
understand our feelings could make it. We determined
that we would really know what we did feel and what
we did not. We would not be lightly scared away from
our friend, but neither would we any more allow our
judgment to be talked down by that fluent tongue of
his; he should have justice from us, he and his biographer,
as far as it lay with us to discern justice and
to render it.

And really on this deliberate perusal it did seem
little less than impossible that we could find any
conceivable attribute illustrated in Reineke's proceedings
which we could dare to enter in our catalogue of
virtue, and not blush to read it there. What sin is
there in the Decalogue in which he has not steeped
himself to the lips? To the lips, shall we say? nay,
over head and ears--rolling and rollicking in sin.
Murder, and theft, and adultery, sacrilege, perjury,
lying his very life is made of them. On he goes to
the end, heaping crime on crime, and lie on lie, and
at last, when it seems that justice, which has been so
long vainly halting after him, has him really in her iron
grasp, there is a solemn appeal to heaven, a challenge,
a battle ordeal, in which, by means we may not venture
even to whisper, the villain pros