and is, in fact,
only cheating himself and his neighbours. This, of all
characters upon the earth, appears to us to be the one
of whom there is no hope at all--a character becoming,
in these days, alarmingly abundant; and the abundance
of which makes us find even in a Reineke an
inexpressible relief.

But what we most thoroughly value in him is his
capacity. He can do what he sets to work to do. That
blind instinct with which the world shouts and claps
its hand for the successful man, is one of those latent
forces in us which are truer than we know; it is the
universal confessional to which Nature leads us, and, in
her intolerance of disguise and hypocrisy, compels us
to be our own accusers. Whoever can succeed in a
given condition of society, can succeed only in virtue
of fulfilling the terms which society exacts of him; and
if he can fulfil them triumphantly, of course it rewards
him and praises him. He is what the rest of the world
would be, if their powers were equal to their desires.
He has accomplished what they all are vaguely, and
with imperfect consistency, struggling to accomplish;
and the character of the conqueror--the means and
appliances by which he has climbed up that great
pinnacle on which he stands victorious, the observed of all
observers, is no more than a very exact indicator of the
amount of real virtue in the age, out of which he stands
prominent.

We are forced to acknowledge that it was not a very
virtuous age in which Reineke made himself a great
man; but that was the fault of the age as much as the
fault of him. His nature is to succeed wherever he is.
If the age had required something else of him, then he
would have been something else. Whatever it had said
to him "do, and I will make you my hero," that
Reineke would have done. No appetite makes a slave
of him--no faculty refuses obedience to his will. His
entire nature is under perfect organic control to the one
supreme authority. And the one object for which he
lives, and for which, let his lot have been cast in
whatever century it might, he would always have lived, is
to rise, to thrive, to prosper, and become great.

The world as he found it said to him--Prey upon
us, we are your oyster; let your wit open us. If you
will only do it cleverly--if you will take care that we
shall not close upon your fingers in the process, you
may devour us at your pleasure, and we shall feel
ourselves highly honoured. Can we wonder at a fox of