currence of a prosperous rule, in accordance with the regulation which has been preserved in the Le Ke. How it is that we have in Part I. odes of not more than a dozen of the States into which the kingdom was divided,' and that the odes of those States extend only over a short period of their history:-for these things we cannot account further than by saying that such were the ravages of time and the results of disorder. We can only accept the collection as it is, and be thankful for it. It was well that Confucius was a native of Loo, for such was the position of that State among the others, and so close its relations with the royal court, that the odes preserved in it were probably more numerous and complete than anywhere else. Yet we cannot accept the statement of the editor of the Suy catalogue adduced on page 2, that the existing pieces had been copied out and arranged by Che, the music-master of Loo, unless, indeed, Che had been in office during the boyhood of Confucius, when, as we have seen, the collection was to be found there, substantially the same as it is now.

7. The conclusions which I have sought to establish in the above paragraphs, concerning the sources of the She as a collection, have an important bearing on the interpretation of many of the odes. The remark of Sze-ma

Bearing of the Ts'een, that "Confucius selected

graphs on the

those

above para pieces which would be serviceable for the interpretation of illustration of propriety and righteousness," particular pieces. is as erroneous as the other, that the sage selected 305 pieces out of 3000. Confucius merely studied and taught the pieces which he found existing, and the collection necessarily contained odes illustrative of bad government as well as of good, of licentiousness as well as of a pure morality. Nothing has been such a stumbling-block in the way of the reception of Choo He's interpretation of the pieces as the readiness with which he attributes a licentious meaning to those of Book vii., Part I. But the reason why the kings in their progresses had the odes of the different States collected and presented to them, was "that they might judge from them of the

I might say not quite a dozen, for Books iii., iv., and v., all belong to Wei, and probably also xiii., as well as x., to Tsin.

1

manners of the people," and so come to a decision regarding the government and morals of their rulers. A student and translator of the odes has simply to allow them to speak for themselves, and has no more reason to be surprised at the language of vice in some of them than at the language of virtue in many others. The enigmatic saying of Confucius himself, that the whole of "the three hundred odes may be summed up in one sentence,-Thought without depravity," must be understood in the meaning which I have given to it in the translation of the Analects. It may very well be said, in harmony with all that I have here advanced, that the odes were collected and preserved for the promotion of good government and virtuous manners. The merit attaching to them is that they give us faithful pictures of what was good and what was bad in the political State of the country, and in the social habits of the people.

8. The pieces in the collection were of course made by individuals who possessed the gift, or thought that they possessed the gift, of poetical composition. Who The writers of they were we could tell only on the authority the odes.

of the odes themselves, or of credible historical accounts contemporaneous with them or nearly so. They would in general be individuals of some literary culture, for the arts of reading and writing even could not be widely diffused during the Chow dynasty. It is not worth our while to question the opinion of the Chinese critics, who attribute many pieces to the duke of Chow, though we have independent testimony only to his composition of a single ode,—the second of Book xv., Part I. We may assign to him also the 1st and 3rd odes of the same Book; the first 22 of Part II.; the first 18 of Part III.; and with two doubtful exceptions, all the sacrificial Songs of Chow.

Of the 160 pieces in Pt I. only the authorship of the 2nd of Book xv., which has just been referred to, can be assigned with certainty. Some of the others, of which the historical interpretation may be considered as sufficiently fixed, as the complaints of Chwang Keang, in Books iii., iv., v., are written in the first person; but the author

1 See the Ana. II. ii.

2 See the Shoo, V. vi. 15.

may be personating his subject. In Pt II., the 7th ode of Book iv. was made by a Këa-foo, a noble of the royal State, but we know nothing more about him; the 6th of Book vi., by a eunuch styled Măng-tsze; and the 6th of Book vii., from a concurrence of external testimonies, may be ascribed to duke Woo of Wei.

In Pt III., Book iii., the 2nd piece was composed by the same duke Woo; the 3rd by an earl of Juy in the royal domain; the 4th must have been made by one of Seuen's ministers, to express the king's feelings under the drought which was exhausting the kingdom; and the 5th and 6th claim to be the work of Yin Keih-foo, one of Seuen's principal officers.

The Preface.

9. In the preface which appeared along with Maou's text of the She, the occasion and authorship of many more of the odes are given; but I am not inclined to allow much weight to its testimony. The substance of it will be found in the notes prefixed to the pieces of the several Books, where I have shown in a multitude of cases the unsatisfactoriness of the view which it would oblige us to take of particular odes. There are few western Sinologues, I apprehend, who will not cordially concur with me in the principle of Choo He, that we must find the meaning of the odes in the odes themselves, instead of accepting the interpretation of them given by we know not whom, and to follow which would reduce many of them to absurd enigmas.

From the large space which the discussion of the Preface generally occupies, it is necessary that I should attempt a summary of what is said upon it ;-on no subject are the views of native scholars more divided.

According to Ch'ing K'ang-shing, what is now called "the Great preface" was made by Confucius' disciple Tsze-hea, and what is called "the Little preface" was made also by Tsze-hëa, but afterwards supplemented by Maou. In Maou, however, there is no distinction made. between a Great and a Little preface. As the odes came down to him, the Preface was an additional document by itself, and when he published his commentary, he divided it into portions, prefixing to every ode the portion which gave an account of it. In this way, however, the preface to the Kwan ts'eu, or the first ode of the collection, was

of a disproportionate length; and very early, this portion was separated from the rest, and called the Great Preface, But the division of the original preface thus made was evidently unnatural and inartistic; and Choo He showed. his truer critical ability by detaching only certain portions of the preface to the Kwan ts'eu, and dignifying them with the same name of the Great Preface. This gives us some account of the nature and origin of poetry in general, and of the different Parts which compose the She. But Choo should have gone farther. In what is left of the preface to the Kwan ts'eu, we have not only an account of that ode, but also what may be regarded as a second introduction to Part I., and especially to the first and second Books of it. To maintain the symmetry of the prefaces there ought to be corresponding sentences at the commencement of the introductory notices to the first odes of the other Parts. But there is nothing of the sort; and this want of symmetry in the preface as a whole is a sufficient proof to me that it did not all proceed from one hand.

the Preface to

In Section II. of last chapter I have traced the transmission of Maou's text from its first appearance until it got possession of the literary world of China. How it is atScholars try to trace it up to Tsze-hea, and tempted to trace consequently through him to Confucius; but Tsze-hea the evidence is not of an equally satisfactory character. The first witness is Seu Ching, an officer of the State or Kingdom of Woo in the period of " the Three Kingdoms (A.D. 229-264)," who says, as reported by Luh Tihming:- "Tsze-hëa handed down the She [which he had received from Confucius] to Kaou Hăng-tsze; Hăng-tsze to Sech Ts'ang-tsze; Ts'ang-tsze to Meen Meaou-tsze; and Mëaou-tsze to the elder Maou." Luh Tih-ming gives also another account of the connection between Maou and Tsze-hëa :-"Tsze-hëa handed down the She to Tsăng Shin; Tsăng Shin to Le K'ih; Le K'ih to Măng Chungtsze; Măng Chung-tsze to Kin Mow-tsze; Kin Mow-tsze to Seun K'ing; and Seun K'ing to the elder Maou." There is no attempt made, so far as I know, on the part of Chinese critics, to reconcile these two genealogies of of Maou's She; but there is no doubt that, during the Han dynasties, the school of Maou did trace their master's

text up to Tsze-hea. Yen Sze-koo states it positively in his note appended to Lew Hin's catalogue of the copies of the She; and hence, as the text and the preface came to Maou together, there arose the view that the latter was made by that disciple of the sage. It became current, indeed, under his name, and was published separately from the odes, so that, in the catalogue of the T'ang dynasty, we find "The Preface to the She by Puh Shang, in two Books," as a distinct Work.

gin of the Pre

face.

But there is another account of the origin of the Preface which seems to conflict with this. In par. 4 of the 2nd section of last chapter I have made mention of Wei Different ac King-chung or Wei Hwang, one of the great count of the ori- Han scholars who adopted the text of Maou. He serves as a connecting link between the western and eastern dynasties of Han; and in the account of him in the "Literary Biographies" we are told that "Hwang became the pupil of Seay Man-k'ing, who was famous for his knowledge of Maou's She; and he afterwards made the Preface to it, remarkable for the accuracy with which it gives the meaning of the pieces in the Fung and the Ya, and which is now current in the world." A testimony like this cannot be gainsayed. If we allow that, when Maou first made public his text, there were prefatory notes accompanying it, yet Hwang must have made large additions to these, as Maou himself, in the opinion of Ch'ing K'ang-shing, had previously done.

Since the time of Choo He, many eminent scholars, such as Yen Ts'an in the Sung dynasty, and Këang Pingchang in the present, adopt the first sentence in the introduction to each ode as what constituted the original preface, and which they do not feel at liberty to dispute. They think that so much was prefixed to the odes by the historiographers of the kingdom or of the States, when they were first collected, and they would maintain likewise, I suppose, that it bore the stamp of Tsze-hea. Keang calls these brief sentences "the Old preface and "the Great preface," and the fuller explanation which is often appended to them, and which he feels at liberty to question, he calls "the Appended preface," and "the Little preface."

After long and extensive investigation of the subject,