His pride, of late, on many occasions,
had taken alarm at the frequent encroachments of his comrade upon its
boundaries. The too much repeated display of that very mental
superiority in his companion, which had so much fettered him, had
aroused his own latent sense of independence; and the utterance of
sundry pungent rebukes on the part of Rivers had done much towards
provoking within him a new sentiment of dislike for that person, which
gladly availed itself of the first legitimate occasion for exercise and
development. The very superiority which commanded, and which he honored,
he hated for that very reason; and, in our analysis of moral dependence,
we may add, that, in Greece, and the mere Hob of the humble farmhouse,
Munro might have been the countryman to vote Aristides into banishment
because of his reputation for justice. The barrier is slight, the space
short, the transition easy, from one to the other extreme of injustice;
and the peasant who voted for the banishment of the just man, in another
sphere and under other circumstances, would have been a Borgia or a
Catiline.
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