nese are famous for "machine poetry." The language favors its construction. It is not uncommon to meet with stanzas where each word in the line ends with the same sound. Like the following:

Liang kiang, siang niang, yang hiang tsiang

Ki ni, pi chi, li hi mi, etc.

In this way poems have been written upon the most unpoetical subjects. One, quite celebrated, on shipping a cargo of tea; another descriptive of an English steam-boat. There is a ballad arranged in the form of a cow and a herd-boy leading her. The bovine portion of the song is the supposed complaint made by a cow because of her lot in being worked hard and poorly fed while alive, and then cut up and eaten as soon as she is dead. The part formed by the boy sets forth the felicity of rural life. A common collection of prayers, a Buddhist tract, is arranged like a pagoda, with images of Buddha sitting in the windows of each story.

The brightest day in the history of Chinese poetry, its Augustan age, was in the 9th and 10th century. The poems of Li Taipeh are contained in 30 volumes; those of Su Tungpo in 115. There is a collection of poems written in the Tung dynasty, published by imperial command in 990 volumes.

Chinese literature is by no means wanting in the department of plays and dramas. The tone and tendency of works under this head is always moral. Pere Phemare translated in 1731 a play which he called "The Orphan of Chou." Voltaire took it as the groundwork of one of his dramas. Sir J. F. Davis translated "The Heir in Old Age," and "The Sorrows of Han." "The Circle of Chalk" was rendered into French by Julien, and "The Intrigues of an Abigail," "The Compared Tunic," "The Songstress," and "The Resentment of Tau Ngo" into the same language by Bazin.

The Chinese employ, in speaking and writing, many proverbs and aphorisms. They meet the eye everywhere; upon the walls of houses, on signs, banners, and carpets. The Ming Sin Pau Kien, or "Jewelled Mirror for Illuminating the Mind," is a collection of popular proverbs. The Ku Sz' Kiung Lin is a work of like character, only more elaborate. We quote the following from the latter as samples:

"While one misfortune is going, to have another coming, is like

driving a tiger out of the front door, while a wolf is entering the back."

“To cut off a hen's head with a battle-axe (unnecessary valor)." "A man with narrow thoughts and views is like a frog at the bottom of a well."

"If the blind lead the blind they will both go to the pit."
"He seeks the ass, and lo! he sits upon him."
"Speak not of others, but convict yourself."
"Prevention is better than cure."

"Better not be than be nothing."

"One thread does not make a rope, one swallow does not make a summer."

"If you love your son, give him plenty of the cudgel; if you hate him cram him with dainties."

"To sue a flea, and catch a bite; the results of litigation."

We have now finished our hurried and incomplete survey of the field of Chinese literature. There are several classes of books concerning which we have not written. Works on natural history, medicine, and physiology, are few and worthless. The authority in medicine at the present time is a book written long before Christ, entitled the Nei King, or "Book of the Insides." Chinese doctors to-day know next to nothing beyond what may be found in this text book. The Chinese are unacquainted with the geogra phy of foreign countries, and are ignorant of the languages, manners, customs, and history of other nations.

This great mass of literature, with the exception of the ten canonical books, has been accumulated since the year 247 B. C. In that year, or thereabouts, the emperor Tsin, who built the great wall, caused all the books in the empire to be destroyed. He did this in order that posterity might regard him as the first-emperor of China. The writings of Confucius and Mencius were particularly specified, and "more than 500 literati were buried alive, so that no one might remain to reproach the first emperor in their writings, for such a barbarous and insane act" (Williams). But after the death of Tsin all of the classics were reproduced from the memory of an old scholar. Years afterwards, when mutilated copies of the original works were discovered, they were found to diffor only in a few words from those recently made. There is nothing very strange in this to a Chinese. If the ten canonical

books were to be destroyed to-day, there are thousands of scholars in China who could replace them from memory. Children at school commit considerable portions of these works without knowing the meaning of a single word they pronounce. Just as if a school-boy were to memorize several books of Virgil, without being able to translate from Latin into English.

ART. VII. PIONEERS AND FOUNDERS.

THIS is the title of Miss Yonge's volume just published in Macmillan's Sunday Library; a serial, by the way, which deserves all praise. It is a book of missionary work and life, beginning with Eliot's first attempts in New England, in 1644, and ending with Bishop Mackenzie's death, on "the banks of the feverhaunted Zambesi," in 1862. It does not profess to be-indeed, it declares itself not to be-" a history of the missions of modern times." All the Jesuit Missions and all the Moravian Missions are passed by. With a single exception, the "narrations deal with men exclusively of British blood;" nor do the labors, however great, of any now living find a place in them. The writer's object "has been to throw together such biographies as are most complete, most illustrative, and have been found most inciting to stir up others-representative lives."

That Miss Yonge should give her readers a work full of interest was to be expected. But she has, it seems to us, done more. She has written missionary memoirs which have not been surpassed, and added to our stock of religious biography a volume thoroughly genuine and healthy, and free from exaggeration, unkindness or cant.

This is more than can be said of a good deal that goes under the name of religious biography. We need not pause upon those productions in this line, intended for the use of Sunday Schools, which by their exaggerated unreality simply stir up the old Adam in our young people; or lead children, otherwise well enough disposed, to fear that if they are very good they are doomed to an early grave; a fate scarcely compensated for, in their estimation, by a large and imposing funeral. Apart from all this, how much

there is in many so-called religious biographies that is absolutely shocking and repellant.

It is now more than sixty years since Sydney Smith wrote, in the Edinburgh Review, articles on Methodism and Missions, in which, with much that was very objectionable, there was not a little that was true and opportune. We wish there were any way. of estimating the mischief which the style of writing against which he inveighed, has done to the interests of religion, in the course of these sixty years. Unhappily there is none.

We have touched, in passing, a topic on which volumes might be written. At the risk, however, of an unwarrantable digression, we are going to pause upon it long enough to ask our readers to consider seriously those wretched errors, each involving hightreason against our holy religion, which pervade so many modern religious biographies.

The first is the so frequent substitution of impulse and emotion. as guides of conduct in the place of God's Law. It does not matter that these impulses and emotions are sometimes called convictions of conscience. Conscience is a word used very much at hap-hazard, and very often regarded as the source of any strong feeling. This is bad enough. But when strong feeling or impulse are first confounded with a conviction of conscience, and then such a supposed conviction is taken as a sufficient guide of conduct, irrespective of God's Law, who can estimate the evil that is wrought? "It is not," says Bishop Sanderson, "in the power of any man's judgment or conscience to alter the natural condition of anything whatsoever, either in respect of quality or degree; but everything which was good remaineth good, and everything which was evil remaineth evil."* Here, by the way, in this confusion about the office of conscience, fanaticism and popery touch hands. Not, however, to spend more words on this matter, the second error consists in separating religion, and, therefore, a religious life, from ordinary duties and common things. "Religion" and "the religious" meant, and we suppose mean still, in the Roman Church, Monasticism or Religious Orders, and Monks or Brethren. We are told that some persons in our own Church are aping this

* Sermon IV. ad clerum. See also Sir William Palmer, on Development and Conscience, C. V.

phraseology. These same words in certain quite opposite quarters, have a meaning very nearly as objectionable, and quite as much coming under the appellation of cant.

We know, for instance, of a man's objecting to his wife's confirmation on the ground that if she became "religious," she would neglect her household! An exceedingly silly mistake, no doubt, but due to this very false teaching about religion. Miss Yonge narrates an incident to the same purpose, in her Life of Eliot. Had she known as much of certain styles of religionism as some of us do in America, she would have omitted her parenthesis. "One of [Eliot's] friends objected (oddly enough, as it seems to us,) to his stooping to pick up a weed in his garden. Sir, you tell us we must be heavenly-minded.' 'It is true,' he said, 'and this is no impediment unto that; for, were I sure to go to heaven to-morrow, I would do what I do to-day.'" All honor to John Eliot! But we venture to say that few would have agreed with or understood him.

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Now, on the other side, and the true side, let us hear George Herbert:

"Teach me, my God and King,

In all things Thee to see;
And what I do in anything,
To do it as for Thee.

"All may of Thee partake;

Nothing can be so mean,

Which with this tincture, FOR THY SAKE,

Will not grow bright and clean.

"A servant with this claim,

Makes drudgery divine;

Who sweeps a room, as for Thy laws,

Makes that and th' action fine."

May we venture to add the well-known, but never hackneyed, lines of Keble?

The trivial round, the common task,
Would furnish all we need to ask;
Room to deny ourselves; a road
To bring us, daily, nearer God."

Nor may we omit those golden words that begin the Preface to the Christian Year: "Next to a sound rule of faith, there is nothing of so much consequence as a sober standard of feeling in matters of practical religion."