his imprimatur, and, next, a judgment on the influence which it has had on the successive governments of China and on the Chinese people at large.

2. My readers have received, I hope, a distinct idea of the nature of the Work as made up of the briefest possible notices of Statement of the case. the events of the time which it covers, without any attempt to exhibit the connexion between them, or any expression of opinion as to the moral character which attaches to many of them. I have spoken of the disappointment which this occasions us, when we address ourselves to its perusal with the expectations which its general reputation and the glowing accounts of it given by Mencius have awakened. We cannot reconcile it with our idea of Confucius that he should have produced so trivial a Work; and we cannot comprehend how his countrymen, down to the present day, should believe in it, and set it forth as a grand achievement.

If there were no other attribute but this triviality belonging to it, we might dismiss it from our notice, and think of it only as of a mirage, which had from the cloudland lured us to it by the attractive appearances which it presented, all vanishing as we approached it and subjected it to a close examination. But there are other attributes of the Work which are of a serious character, and will not permit us to let it go so readily. On p. 13 I have applied the term colourlessness to the notices composing it, meaning thereby simply the absence of all indication of feeling or opinion respecting the subjects of them on the part of the writer or compiler. But are the things so dispassionately told correct in point of fact? Are all the notices really informing, or are many of them misleading? Is the very brief summary a fair representation of the events, or is it in many cases a gross misrepresentation of them?

In what I have said in the preceding sections, I have repeatedly intimated my own opinion that many of the notices of the Ch'un Ts'ëw are not true; and the proof of this is found in the contradictions which abound between them and the events as given in detail in the Chuen of Tso, contradictions which are pointed out in my notes in hundreds of cases. It may occur to some that the Classic itself is to be believed rather than the narratives of Tso and the other commentators on it. If we are to rest in this dictum, there is of course an end of all study of the Ch'un Ts'ëw period. From the Work of Confucius, confessedly, we learn nothing of interest, and now the relations of Tso which are

so rich in detail are not to be credited;--the two centuries and a half become a blank. But it is impossible to rest in this view. The multitude of details which Tso gives makes him the principal witness in the case; but Kung and Kuh, greatly differing as they do from him in the style of their commentaries, very often bear out his statements, and are equally irreconcileable with the notices of the sage and the inferences which we naturally draw from them. How is it that the three men, all looking up with veneration to Confucius, yet combine to contradict him as they do? Kung and Kuh have their praise-and-censure theory to explain the language which the master uses; but we have seen that it is inadmissible, and it supplies no answer to the question which I have just put. And the mass of Chinese scholars and writers, for nearly 2000 years, have not scrupled to accept the history of the Ch'un Ts'ëw period given by Tso as in the main correct, maintaining at the same time their allegiance to Confucius as 'the teacher of all ages,' the one man at whose feet the whole world should sit, accepting every paragraph from his stylus as a divine oracle. The thing is to me inexplicable. There have been many times when I have mused over the subject in writing the pages of this volume, and felt that China was hardly less a strange country to me than Lilliput or Laputa would be.

3. The scholars of China are ready, even forward, to admit that Chinese scholars admit that) Confucius in the Ch'un Ts'ëw often conceals1 the Classic conceals things. the truth about things. On V. i. 6 Kungyang says, 'The Ch'un Ts'ëw conceals [the truth] on behalf of the high in rank, out of regard to kinship, and on behalf of men of worth.22 On V. i. 1 Tso says that it was the rule for the historiographers to conceal any wickedness which affected the character of the State. But this 'concealing' covers all the ground occupied by our three English words-ignoring, concealing, and misrepresenting. [i] The Ch'un Ts'ëw often ignores facts, and of this I will content myself with adducing two instances. The first shall be It ignores facts. comparatively, if not quite, an innocent omission. The fifth Book, containing the annals of duke He, commences simply with the notice that 'it was his first year, the spring, the king's first month.'

1 The character employed for to conceal is, which is explained in various dictionaries by , to avoid;', 'to keep out of view,' and 'to shun,' 'to be cautious of.' 春

秋為尊者諱爲親者諱為賢者諱

諱國惡禮也

It is not said that 'he came to the [vacant] seat,' that is, that he did so with the formal ceremonies proper to celebrate his accession to the marquisate. Tso asks why this notice was not given, and says it was because the duke He had gone out of the State. 'The duke,' says he, had fled out of the State and now re-entered it; but this is not recorded, being concealed (i. e., being ignored). To conceal the wickedness of the State was according to rule.' On the murder of duke Chwang's son Pan, who should have succeeded to his father, Shin, who became duke He, had fled to the State of Choo, and a boy of eight years old, known as duke Min, was made marquis, and when, within less than two years, he shared the fate of Pan, Shin returned to Loo, and took his place. What connexion all this had with the omission of the usual pageantry or ceremonies, and whether we have in it the true explanation of the absence of the usual notice, I am not prepared to say; but we cannot see what harm. there could have been in mentioning duke He's flight from the State and subsequent return to it. A good and faithful chronicler would have been careful to do so, especially if the events did affect, as Tso says, the inauguration of the new rule.4

The second instance of ignoring shall be one of more importance. It is well known that the lords of the great States of Ts'oo and Woo usurped during the Ch'un Ts'ëw period the title of king, thus renouncing their allegiance to the dynasty of Chow which acknowledged them only as viscounts. It is by this style of viscount: that they are designated in the Ch'un Ts'ëw; but the remarkable fact is that it does not once notice the burial of anyone of all the lords of Ts'oo, or of Woo. The reason is that in such notices he must have appeared with his title of king. The rule was that every feudal lord, duke, marquis, earl, or baron, should after death be denominated as kung or duke, and to this was added the honorary or sacrificial epithet by which he was afterwards to be known. When a notice was entered in the Ch'un Ts'ëw of Loo, say of the burial of the marquis Ch'ung-urh of Tsin, the entry was that on such and such a month and day they buried duke Wăn of Tsin. But the officers, deputed for the purpose from Loo, had assisted at the burial not of any duke of Ts'oo or of Woo, but of king so and

4 It will be well for the student to read the long note of Kung Ying-tah on Too Yu's remarks on the Chuen here. He acknowledges that it is impossible to say when the rule for concealing

things was observed and when not. 或諱大不諱小或諱小不諱大皆 當時臣子率己之意而為之隱故無淺深常準

So. What were the historiographers to do? If they called the king when living a viscount, it would seem to us reasonable that they might have been satisfied to call him a duke when dead. But this would have been a direct falsification of the notification which they had received from the State of the deceased. They therefore ignored the burial altogether, and so managed to make their suzerain of Chow the only king that appeared in their annals. Confucius sanctioned the practice; or if he suppressed all the paragraphs in which the burials of the lords of Ts'oo and Woo were entered, either as dukes or kings, then specially against him lies the charge of thus shrinking from looking the real state of things fairly in the face, as if he could make it any better by taking no notice of it.

[ii] A large list of cases of ignoring might be made out by comparing the notes and narratives of Iso with the entries of the Ch'un Tsew, but the cases of concealing the truth are much more

It conceals the truth about things. numerous; and in fact it is difficult to draw the line in regard to many of them between mere concealment and misrepresentation. I have quoted, on p. 13, from Maou K'e-ling miny startling instances of the manner in which the simple notice 'he died' is used, covering almost every possible way of violent and unnatural death. It may be said that most of them relate to the deaths of princes of other States, and that the historiographers of Loo simply entered the notices as they were cominunicated to them from those States. Might we not have expected, however, that when their entries came under the revision of Confucius, he would have altered them so as to give his readers at least an inkling of the truth? But it is the same with the chronicling of deaths in Loo itself. Duke Yin was basely murdered, with the connivance of his brother who succeeded him, and all that is said about it in I. xi. 4 is-In winter, in the 11th month, on Jin-shin, the duke died.' His successor was murdered in turn, with circumstances of peculiar atrocity, and the entry in II. xviii. 2 is simply-In summer, in the 4th month, on Ping-tsze, the duke died in Ts'e.' In III. xxxii. three deaths are recorded. We read:-'In autumn, in the 7th month, on Kwei-sze, duke [Hwan's son] Ya died;' 'In the 8th month, on Kwei-hae, the duke died in the State-chamber;' 'In winter, in the 10th month, the duke's son Pan died.' Only the second of these deaths was a natural one. Ya was compelled to take poison by a half-brother Ke-yëw, under circumstances which are held by

many critics to justify the deed. Pan who was now marquis, though he could not be entered as such by the historiographers till the year had elapsed, was murdered by an uncle, who wished to seize the marquisate for himself, without any mitigating circumstances. How is it that these three deaths, so different in their nature and attendant circumstances, are described by the same word? Here it is said 'Ya died,' and 'Pan died;' and they did not die natural deaths. In I. v. 7 it is said—‘duke [Hëaou's] son K'ow died,' and in VIII. v. 13 we have 'Ke-sun Hang-foo died;' and they both died natural deaths. What are we to think of a book which relates events in themselves so different without any difference in its forms of expression? The Kang-he editors are fond of the solution of such perplexities which says that Confucius meant to set his readers inquiring after the details of the events which he indicated; but why did he not obviate the necessity for such inquiries altogether by varying his language as it would have been very easy to do? But for the Chuen we should entirely misunderstand a great number of the entries in the text.

To take two instances of a less violent kind than these descriptions of deaths,—in III. i. 2, we read that 'in the 3d month the [late duke Hwan's,] wife [Wăn Këang] retired to Ts'e,' and in X. xxv. 5 we read that 'in the 9th, month, on Ke-hae, the duke [Ch'aou] retired to Ts'e.' In both passages 'retired' is equivalent to 'fled.' Duke Hwan's widow was understood to have been an accomplice in the murder of her husband, and to have been guilty of incest with her half-brother, the marquis of Ts'e;—she found it unpleasant, probably dangerous, for her to remain in Loo, and so she fled to Ts'e, where she would be safe and could continue to follow her evil courses. All this the historiographers and Confucius thought it necessary to gloss over by writing that she withdrew or retired to Ts'e. The case of duke Ch'aou was different. He had been kept, like several of his predecessors, in a state of miserable subjection by the principal nobles of the State, especially by the Head of the Ke-sun family. Instigated by his sons, high-spirited young men who could not brook the restraints and shame of their condition, he attempted to cope with his powerful minister, and got the worst of it in the struggle. The consequence was that he fled to Ts'e; and the text is all that the Ch'un Ts'ëw tells us about these affairs, unless we accept its most important entry of the ominous fact that a few months before the duke's flight 'grackles came to Loo and built nests in trees! Every one will allow that