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sublimest utterance reminds us of Socrates. "To whom will you sacrifice?" said the disciples of Confucius, when the shadows of death fell. "I have already worshipped," was the simple answer. Socrates did not feel death, but perceived the New Life. "Now, my friends," he said, dying, to those who had doubtless pressed a similar request," Now, we owe a cock to Esculapius." The hold which Confucius has upon the Chinese people he owes to their stationary civilization, their immobile character. Let a new life once stir within the dry skin, let the vessel shiver, and the precious juice be spilled, and every temple to Confucius will die out of sight with the old usages, and his name be lost out of the memories of the people. We must look back to perceive him. He has not a fibre in common with the future. Yet his life will have interest and point, if too much be not claimed for it. We welcome these editions of the Chinese classics. They will do much to disabuse a certain class of critics of their errors. In the clear light of facts, theories will get

their own ghastly color,

Of the Four Books, the second is now commonly attributed to Tsăng Sin, his disciple; and the third is the work of a grandson of Confucius, Kung Keih. It will be perceived, that, dull as the Chinese may be, they have already begun to criticise their sacred books as we criticise the Pentateuch; to correct tradition, and judge for themselves of the divine right of their sage.

"Ears

Among the classics called Confucian, but much later than the time of Confucius, we find occasionally things that remind us of Emerson. "Let superiors live in harmony; inferiors, in concord.". "Sow first on the southern hill-side." line the walls of your chamber."-"When admonished or satirized, examine yourself."-" He who receives no guest will seldom find a host." "Friends at hand are better than relatives far away."-" The slow horse must feel the lash." "He would hide his track, yet he walks on the snow."—" Only the naked fear the light."-"If the escort go a thousand miles, it shall leave you at last!" Even in China, some women contrive to get an education; and among them the wife of

Commissioner Lin, whose duty it was in 1838 "to punish the consumers of opium." Commissioner Lin was a poet, but he has penetrated farther into the middle ages than Browning. We of the nineteenth century lose sight of him. His verses do not offer us one line. His love for his wife touches the human heart in us, in spite of the dull level of the page which records it. The tablet literature of China is little known to Europeans; but the whole country is filled with inscriptions, one day to be translated. Specimens may be found in the Proceedings of the Royal Asiatic Society for 1855. Confucius and Mencius were both born in the kingdom of Loo. At Tsow-hien are tablets in memory of both. There is also, a statue of Mencius, showing a man, thoughtful, resolute, and outspoken, who had known trial. It is curious that Mencius inscribed on his father's tablet these words: "The spirit's resting-place." The mother of Mencius was a famous woman, who cut a web she was weaving, to prove to him the folly of idleness, and left a costly house because a neighboring butcher steeled his childish heart. Mencius gave her a superb funeral; and the story of the web is exhibited on one of her tablets.

Kio-feu-hien is a larger city, the birth-place of Confucius, where eight families out of ten bear his surname. Here is a gnarled old cypress-tree, said to have been planted by Confucius himself. Here is the pavilion in which he taught. His temple is of richly carved marble, and its ornamented eaves are protected from the birds by a delicate wire work! Within it sits the statue of Confucius, eighteen feet high, holding the reed with which men wrote two thousand years ago. Statues of favorite disciples surround him. Among the beautiful incense pots, rare relics are preserved. One clay dish dates from the time of Taou, 2,300 B.C. A bronze censer is inscribed with the name of Shang, 1,500 B.C. Bronze elephants, and a carved red-wood table more than a thousand years old, speak volumes of the refinement which the arts had then reached and have since lost.

Confucius was not handsome. He had full, contemplative eyes, and projecting teeth. A hundred and twenty engraved

slabs, built into the temple wall, show in picture the story of his life, and exhibit the furniture, dress, and buildings of his period. The present head of the family lives near, in a house within whose walls the classics were found after a long sleep. They had been hidden from an illiterate emperor, 212 B.C.! Some of the tombs of the Chinese are pyramidal; trees are growing on their summits; but they instantly suggest the pyramids of Egypt. Such is the tomb of the ancient emperor, Sha-ou-Haou, near the temple of the Duke of Chow, the ideal statesman of Confucius. If avenues, and cypresses, and groves of ancient oak; if gateways, and carvings, and images of men and animals; if tablets and inscriptions and altars make a magnificent burial, — then is Confucius magnificently buried.

ART. IV.—THE WORCESTER ASSOCIATION.

The Worcester Association and its Antecedents: a History of Four Ministerial Associations, the Marlborough, the Worcester (Old), the Lancaster, and the Worcester (New) Associations. With Biographical Notices of the Members, accompanied by Portraits. By JOSEPH ALLEN, Senior Pastor of the First Congregational Society in Northborough. Boston: Nichols & Noyes, 1868.

THE County of Worcester has long been the largest and most populous of the interior counties of Massachusetts. The expression of the opinion of its people, when such an expression can be gained, is a more sure expression of the opinion of Massachusetts than is the opinion of any other county. With moderate advantages for agriculture, this county has been forward in the improvements of this century in what relates to the cultivation of land. Its great success in farming is in the raising of stock, in which department its most valuable triumphs have been in its care and improvement of the breed of men; a remark, indeed, which may be made of most New-England farming. The waters from its highlands flow into every considerable river in New England, reaching the sea by the Connecticut, the Thames, the Black

stone, the Charles, and the Merrimac. The Worcester-county affluents to these streams are all insignificant on the map, but sufficient to drive the wheels of the most varied manufactures. Indeed, Mr. Slater, the father of New-England cotton manufacture, said to the late Judge Merrick, that he would live to see the time when all the water of the town-brook in the town of Worcester would be needed to furnish steam for its factories; and Judge Merrick did live to see the poetical prophecy made well-nigh literally true. It has been said, that a circle of twenty miles drawn around the town of Worcester would inclose a greater variety of workshops, and of the varied forms of human industry, than any other circle of the same size in the world. We cannot verify the remark, but it seems probable. Railroads from every part of New England converge at two centres of travel,- one within this county, and the other close upon its frontier. A Catholic College, a Technological Institute or Scientific School, a number of endowed academies, and the unique library of the American Antiquarian Society, call to different parts of this county students of different grades of scholarship from all parts of New England. Its central geographical position has given to the range of its highlands the familiar name of the "Backbone of Massachusetts;" while the shire-town, Worcester, which gave the name to the county, bears on its seal the device of a heart, glad to assume the title of the "Heart of the Commonwealth."

The earliest settlements of the English in Worcester County were made in 1645, in Lancaster. The county was established by an act of the General Court of Massachusetts, passed April 2, 1731. The name of Worcester had been given to the township of Worcester as early as 1684. No tradition is preserved as to the cause of the selection of that name; but we suppose there can be little doubt that it was chosen as an insult to that royal government in England, which, at that very time, was striking its last blow at the Charter of the Colony. Judgment was entered in the English Court of Chancery for the vacating of the Charter of Massachusetts on the 23d of October in the same year.

"Massachusetts, as a body politic, was now no more," says Dr. Palfrey, describing this transaction in London. It is almost precisely contemporary with the act by which the Legislature of Massachusetts gave the name of Worcester, the name of Cromwell's "crowning mercy," to a district in Massachusetts which as yet had not one white inhabitant. No town-meeting was ever held in that town until the year 1722.

The law of the intellectual and moral culture of New England may be stated thus. Boundaries having been given to a particular town, which, as in the case of Worcester, may be named before it has an inhabitant, the people of that town, under the New-England system, become, for almost all the purposes of civilized life, an independent community. So much historical support of the very best kind can be given to General Cass's theory of "squatter sovereignty." The State assigns the place of residence, and names the first "freemen," and gives them a right to vote in the organization of their affairs. These "freemen" in practice admitted all other residents to the same franchise. The little community, thus established, made its own roads, receiving from the officers of the county directions for making those of them that were essential to the general interest; established its own schools; impounded its own stray cattle; and did any thing else which might be necessary for the welfare of a town. Such towns, for instance, when they saw the time coming when it might be necessary for them to engage in war against the British empire, each bought with its own money its own. supply of powder and ball, and stored them in its own magazines by way of preparation for the exigency.

These were the civic or social functions of the New-England township, and they are such still. But these details of administration are inspired by ideas; and these ideas, involv ing the whole spiritual and moral education of such communities, were, in every instance, provided for in the beginning. The measure or standard prescribed as sufficient for a new plantation, was, that a number of people, enough to maintain a minister, should be ready to unite under the proposed

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