BOOK ELEVENTH.


INITIAL CHAPTER.

ON THE IMPORTANCE OF HATE AS AN AGENT IN CIVILIZED LIFE.

It is not an uncommon crotchet amongst benevolent men to maintain that
wickedness is necessarily a sort of insanity, and that nobody would make
a violent start out of the straight path unless stung to such disorder by
a bee in his bonnet. Certainly when some very clever, well-educated
person like our friend, Randal Leslie, acts upon the fallacious principle
that "roguery is the best policy," it is curious to see how many points
he has in common with the insane: what over-cunning, what irritable
restlessness, what suspicious belief that the rest of the world are in a
conspiracy against him, which it requires all his wit to baffle and turn
to his own proper aggrandizement and profit. Perhaps some of my readers
may have thought that I have represented Randal as unnaturally far-
fetched in his schemes, too wire-drawn and subtle in his speculations;
yet that is commonly the case with very refining intellects, when they
choose to play the knave; it helps to disguise from themselves the
ugliness of their ambition, just as a philosopher delights in the
ingenuity of some metaphysical process, which ends in what plain men call
"atheism," who would be infinitely shocked and offended if he were called
an atheist.

Having premised thus much on behalf of the "Natural" in Randal Leslie's
character, I must here fly off to say a word or two on the agency in
human life exercised by a passion rarely seen without a mask in our
debonair and civilized age,--I mean Hate.