aught of water. Such
few grains or drops, whatever they may be, we must
leave to the kindness of Reynard's friends to distil for
him, while we continue a little longer in the same
strain.

After all it may be said, what is it in man's nature
which is really admirable? It is idle for us to waste
our labour in passing Reineke through the moral
crucible unless we shall recognise the results when we
obtain them; and in these moral sciences our analytical
tests can only be obtained by a study of our own
internal experience. If we desire to know what we
admire in Reineke we must look for what we admire in
ourselves. And what is that? Is it what on Sundays
and on set occasions, and when we are mounted on our
moral stilts, we are pleased to call goodness, probity
obedience, humility? Is it? Is it really? Is it not
rather the face and form which Nature made--the
strength which is ours, we know not how--our talents,
our rank, our possessions? It appears to us that we
most value in ourselves and most admire in our neighbour
not acquisitions, but gifts. A man does not praise
himself for being good. If he praise himself he is
not good. The first condition of goodness is forgetfulness
of self; and where self has entered, under however
plausible a form, the health is but skin-deep, and
underneath there is corruption--and so through everything
We value, we are vain of, proud of, or whatever you
please to call it, not what we have done for ourselves, but
what has been done for us--what has been given to us
by the upper powers. We look up to high-born men,
to wealthy men, to fortunate men, to clever men. Is it
not so? Who do we choose for the county member,
the magistrate, the officer, the minister? The good
man we leave to the humble enjoyment of his goodness,
and we look out for the able or the wealthy. And
again of the wealthy, as if on every side to witness to
the same universal law, the man who with no labour
of his own has inherited a fortune, ranks higher in the
world's esteem than his father who made it. We take
rank by descent. Such of us as have the longest pedigree,
and are therefore the farthest removed from the
first who made the fortune and founded the family, we
are the noblest. The nearer to the fountain the fouler
the stream; and that first ancestor, who has soiled his
fingers by labour, is no better than a parvenu.

And as it is with what we value, so it is with what
we blame. It is an old story, that there