ld ourselves bound by no law. We say to them, _vos non vobis_, without
any uneasy misgivings. We rob the bees of their honey, the cattle of
their lives, the horse and the ass of their liberty. We kill the wild
animals that they may not interfere with our pleasures; and acknowledge
ourselves bound to them by no terms except what are dictated by our own
convenience. And why should Reineke have acknowledged an obligation any
more than we, to creatures so utterly below himself? He was so clever,
as our friend said, that he had a right. That 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.

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
Isegrim, 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. We remember that French
baron--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 these; 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 t