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.”

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 draught 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.