You see, he was
such a clever rogue, that he had a right." Another,
whom we pressed more closely with that treacherous
cannibal feast at Malepartus, on the body of poor
Lampe, said, off-hand and with much impatience of
such questioning, "Such fellows were made to be
eaten." What could we do? It had come to this,--
as in the exuberance of our pleasure with some dear
child, no ordinary epithet will sometimes reach to
express the vehemence of our affection, and borrowing
language out of the opposites, we call him little rogue
or little villain, so here, reversing the terms of the
analogy, we bestow the fulness of our regard on Reineke
because of that transcendantly successful roguery.

When we asked our friends how they came to feel
as they did, they had little to say. They were not
persons who could be suspected of any latent disposition
towards evil doing, and yet though it appeared as if
they were falling under the description of those
unhappy ones who, if they did not such things themselves,
yet "had pleasure in those who did them," they did not
care to justify themselves. The fact was so: arche to
hoti: it was a fact--what could we want more? Some
few attempted feebly to maintain that the book was a
satire. But this only moved the difficulty a single
step; for the fact of the sympathy remained unimpaired,
and if it was a satire we were ourselves the objects of it.
Others urged what we said above, that the story was
only of poor animals that, according to Descartes, not
only had no souls, but scarcely even life in any
original and sufficient sense, and therefore we need not
trouble ourselves. But one of two alternatives it
seemed we were bound to choose, either of which was
fatal to the proposed escape. Either there was a man
hiding under the fox's skin, or else, if real foxes have
such brains as Reineke was furnished withal, no honest
doubt could be entertained that some sort of conscience
was not forgotten 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; a