t of all unsuccessful men in every
sense, either divine, or human, or devilish, there is none equal to
Bunyan's Mr. Facing-both-ways--the fellow with one eye on heaven and one
on earth--who sincerely preaches one thing, and sincerely does another;
and from the intensity of his unreality is unable either to see or feel
the contradiction. Serving God with his lips, and with the half of his
mind which is not bound up in the world, and serving the devil with his
actions, and with the other half, he is substantially trying to cheat
both God and the devil, 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
impulses 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 organ