at he could treat them
so, Mr. Carlyle would say, proves that he had a right.

But it is a mistake to say he is without a conscience.
No bold creature is ever totally without one. Even
Iago shows some sort of conscience. Respecting nothing
else in heaven or earth, he respects and even reverences
his own intellect. After one of those sweet interviews
with Roderigo, his, what we must call, conscience takes
him to account for his company; and he pleads to it in
his own justification--

"For I mine own gained knowledge should profane
Were I to waste myself with such a snipe
But for my sport and profit."

And Reineke, if we take the mass of his misdeeds,
preyed chiefly, like our own Robin Hood, on rogues who
were greater rogues than himself. If Bruin chose to
steal Rusteviel's honey, if Hintze trespassed in the
priest's granary, they were but taken in their own
evildoings. And what is Isegim, the worst of Reineke's
victims, but a great heavy, stupid, lawless brute?--fair
type, we will suppose, of not a few Front-de-Boeufs and
other so-called nobles of the poet's era, whose will to
do mischief was happily limited by their obtuseness; or
that French baron, Sir Gilbert de Retz, we believe, was
his name, who, like Isegrim, had studied at the universities,
and passed for learned, whose after-dinner pastime
for many years, as it proved at last, was to cut children's
throats for the pleasure of watching them die--we may
well feel gratitude that a Reineke was provided to be
the scourge of such monsters as they; and we have
a thorough pure, exuberant satisfaction in seeing the
intellect in that little weak body triumph over them and
trample them down. This, indeed, this victory of
intellect over brute force is one great secret of our
pleasure in the poem, and goes far, in the Carlyle
direction to satisfy us that, at any rate, it is not given to
mere base physical strength to win in the battle of life,
even in times when physical strength is apparently the
only recognised power.

We are insensibly failing from our self-assumed
judicial office into that of advocacy; and sliding into
what may be plausibly urged, rather than standing fast
on what we can surely affirm. Yet there are cases
when it is fitting for the judge to become the advocate
of an undefended prisoner; and advocacy is only
plausible when a few words of truth are mixed with
what we say, like the few drops of wine which colour
and faintly flavour the large dr