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If they do not get what they love in their families, they will go on to be guilty of crime."

"Complete virtue allows no contemptuous familiarity. When a prince treats superior men with familiarity, they will not give him their hearts; when he so treats inferiors, they will not give him their strength. Be earnest, early and late. If you do not watch jealously over small matters, you will fail in great."

"I reflect on Heaven's severe punishments, but I do not murmur. Do not create complaints; do not use bad counsels nor uncommon ways. Decidedly, and with sincerity, give yourself to the imitation of active virtue. Give repose to your mind hereby, examine your virtue, send far forward your plans, and, by generous forbearance, conduct the people to repose.' "When sovereigns appointed inspec

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tors, they did so to govern the people, and said to them, 'Do not give way to violence or oppression; go on to show reverence for the weak, and to find connections for destitute women.'

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"The wise, not thinking, become foolish; and the foolish, by thinking, become wise."

66 "If you cannot reverently realize the harmony which I enjoin, do not hereafter murmur against me."-"By means of bold decision are future difficulties to be avoided. With rank, pride comes unperceived; with emolument comes extravagance. Let reverence and economy be real virtues, and do not hypocritically exhibit them in your affairs. Practise them as virtues, and you will daily become more admirable and more at ease. Practise them in hypocrisy, you will daily become more stupid, worn out with the toil."

"Perfect government is like piercing fragrance, and influences the spiritual Intelligences. It is not the millet which has this piercing fragrance it is bright virtue."

"Be not passionate with the obstinate, and so dislike them. The people are born good, and are changed. Seek not every quality in one individual.”

"In settling the five cases of error, there are dangers. To be warped by the influence of power, by a private grudge, by female solicitation, by bribes or by applications, is an offence equal to the crime before the court."

"In reproving others, there is no difficulty; but to receive reproof, and allow it to have free course, - this is difficult! There were my old counsellors. I said, 'They will not accommodate themselves to me;' and I hated them. There were my new counsellors;

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and for a time I trusted them. I have thought deeply, and concluded: Let me have but one resolute minister, plain and sincere, having a simple, complaisant mind, and possessed of generosity, regarding the talents of others as if he himself possessed them; and, when he finds wise and accomplished men, loving them more than he expresses, really showing himself able to bear them, such a man will indeed be a giver of benefits! The glory and tranquillity of a state may perhaps arise from the excellence of one man."

The tenth book of the fifth part contains what is called the "Announcement about Drunkenness." The Hea dynasty had come to an unfortunate end, through the drunkenness of sovereign and people. The Duke of Chow addresses his young brother in the name of the king, assuring him that spirits are to be used only in sacrifices; that if, in times of prosperity, calamity comes, it is the result of excess. Especially does the king desire to save his young people. "Spirits may be used to entertain guests, and at sacrifices; but let virtue preside, so that there be no intoxication." Spirits may be used after hard labor in the open air, after parents are made happy,

so long as the feasters maintain a watchful self-examination. He refers to the ancients. In their time, ministers respectfully discharged their helping duties, and dared allow themselves no idleness; how much less would they dare indulge in drinking! Even the inferiors kept themselves free of spirits. Not only did they not dare indulge in them, but they had not leisure, reverently attending to the affairs of the sovereign. Then, alluding to Yin, he says, " The rank odor of the people's resentments, and the drunkenness of his creatures, went up on high; so Heaven sent down ruin on Yin. There is not any cruel oppression of Heaven: people themselves accelerate their own punishment."-"Sternly keep yourselves from drink." On the whole, it is to be doubted whether antiquity has given us any thing more wonderful than this book.

These extracts bring us to the end of Dr. Legge's published translations. It would not be easy to exaggerate the service he has done; and we hope he will live to complete, with his own hand, the seven volumes he has projected. He will give us a laborious translation and a faithfully annotated text.

VOL. LXXXIV. -NEW SERIES, VOL. V. NO. III.

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Some educated Chinese will perhaps some day turn the barren paragraphs into idiomatic English. We have alluded to the sharpness with which the Doctor attacks Baron Bunsen; but we should hardly do him justice if we did not say, in conclusion, that scarcely another man could be found, of his habits and theological views, who would express himself as temperately.

ART. IV. - LOVE OF THE BEAUTIFUL.

WHENEVER the beautiful is present and discerned, the consciousness of it involves a sense of fitness and congruity. A sense of fitness and congruity may not in itself constitute the beautiful, but to the feeling or enjoyment of the beautiful it is a necessary condition. The violation of such condition either contradicts the beautiful, or puts it out of place. In the first case, the violation gives pain; in the second, it gives offence as well as pain. When we expect the beautiful, the absence of it disappoints us, the contrary of it shocks us: but when we find it where we neither expect nor want nor wish it, we look on it as abused, as desecrated; and we are not gratified, but indignant. To have true and full enjoyment of it, the object must not only be beautiful in itself, but beautiful in the right circumstances.

A simple incident, many years ago, originally awakened these ideas in my mind. The front of a mercantile building in Liverpool had an upper projection of massive granite resting on the shoulders of sculptured oxen. I used frequently, for two or three years, to pass by this building. The representation of animals, as they thus appeared, always oppressed me with a sense of pain. Whatever might have been the intention of the architect, or whatever might have been the impression on others, to me the situation of the figures robbed them of both dignity and beauty: it moved me with a sort of troubled sympathy. I had no philosophy of art; I had never read or reflected on the subject; the circumstance first startled me into thought. Much I mused and speculated on the feeling which it occasioned. The building was fine,

so were the figures: why, then, should not the feeling which they excited be one of pleasure? Why, I used to ask myself, am I concerned for these creatures? I know that they are merely stone, and that they suffer no more than they did unshaped within the quarry. True: still they gave me pain. They gave pain because, in looking on them, I could not help thinking of living brutes in a similar position, — a position doubly disagreeable, since, first, it implied hardship; and, secondly, it implied needless hardship. The burden was disproportioned to the strength of the animals; there seemed no reason why they should bear it; there seemed no reason why the burden on the animals should be there. I was led thence to inquire, "What conditions of mind accompany, if they do not constitute, a sense of the beautiful?" Whatever they are, they must include a sense of pleasure, — of pleasure which the object gives to the mind, by completeness in itself, and congruity in its relations. Here there was incompleteness in the objects, and incongruity in their relations: however admirable the art might have been mechanically, in vital and moral suggestions a painful impression was certainly its result. When I came to learn, as afterwards I did, that even the Greeks introduced such figures into sculpture, I began to doubt my judgment, and to fear that, in trusting to mere instinct, I had been led into a blunder and a heresy. But a writer in the last edition of the "Encyclopædia Britannica" has brought me back to confidence in my early faith. "The great artists," says this writer, "by making beauty the first quality in art, and by forming a system which, while it forbade extravagance, checked development, committed fewer faults than any others; but they did commit some faults. . . . Nothing could be more barbarous than to represent, not only a human figure, but that of a woman, sustaining a vast weight, and sustaining it with difficulty. If it be excusable to represent giants thus supporting great masses, can it be to put women in their places, as columns on which a building rests?"

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The line of observation which I propose to follow leads to no discussion on theories of beauty. I would speak on the

love of the beautiful, not as a topic of abstract philosophy, but as an element of social culture. I will take for granted, that a capacity to discern the beautiful is a constituent of man's nature, and that to discern the beautiful is in itself enjoyment. To perceive the beautiful is to have a direct, disinterested, immediate delight. So it is in essence; but in degree there is room for immeasurable differences. The beautiful pleases, independently of gain, profit, or reward: it pleases in the simple fact of being apprehended; and we enjoy it for its own sake. It associates itself with the sense of freedom, of harmony, of fitness, of serenity, of lovingness. Thus a star is beautiful. It has freedom, - the freedom of perfect law without hindrance or obstruction. It has fitness, has harmony; it has congruity with the infinite space in which it dwells; it is in concord with that celestial chorus, which the poetry of olden science called "the music of the spheres." It has serenity. It is bright and tranquil in the heavens, and no disorder violates its eternal peace. It has, or at least it suggests, lovingness. It is gracious in its brightness, and seems to love the worlds on which it shines. The idea admits of illustration through the various orders of form and life, to the heights of spiritual and divine attractiveness.

Of the beautiful in nature, objectively regarded, I do not speak. This is omnipresent, constant, boundless; throughout all space, all time; above, beneath, around; ever in each present Now; in objects, forms, appearances, changes, motions; in the small as in the vast,-in a rose-leaf as in the starry heavens, in the streamlet as in the ocean, in the dewdrop as in the cloud, in the shell or pebble as in the mountain whose head is hoary in the upper sky, and whose body is magnificent with all the glories of the lower world. In the midst of the beautiful we live, move, breathe. By every sense, by every faculty, it may be felt in all existence, a universal, loveable, pure, pleasurable presence. The existence, therefore, of the beautiful in nature, or the modes of its existence, is not our most important consideration; but rather the relation it bears to human consciousness. That, even negatively to this, it is a divine benefit and blessing, we must gratefully admit,

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