how far it was affected by his peculiar descent and by his contact with Foreigners; in brief, to give the rationale of his history. No special notice seems to have been taken of the fact, that though born within thirty miles of Canton, he was of the Hakka, a rude race, who are regarded as aliens by the Punti, the mass of the people of Kwangtung.* This itself goes some way to account for his opposition to the Imperial Government, and for the ease with which he formed the nucleus of his insurrection. There have been hatred and feud for nearly two centuries in Kwangtung between the Punti, or "Indwellers," and the Hakka, or "Strangers," who came down on the province from the mountains of Kiangsi and Fukien; and the latter are regarded by the former very much in the light of barbarians, or, say, as the Irish of Liverpool are by the English workmen of that city. Whether Hung Sew-tsuen's genealogy, as it was given to Mr Hamberg, was invented after he aimed at the empire or was literally true, is a matter of no consequence; he was a poor youth of a rude despised race; and, either from prejudice against him on that account, or from inability, never succeeded in taking a degree at Canton. Thus his start in life was on the opposition side; but the Kwangtungers, generally, would scoff at the notion of him and his confrères having had any special claim to represent the native patriotic element in China. At the same time the Hakkas are Chinese, less intelligent, and, consequently, more indifferent to the grander ruling ideas of the country, than are the rest of the agricultural population, but still pretty well imbued with these ideas. Bearing this in mind, it can easily be conceived that a

For a description of the Hakkas, and of a residence among them, see "Six Weeks in a Tower," by the author, in 'Blackwood's Magazine' for June 1862.

HIS HAKKA SUPERSTITIONS.

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man of Sew-tsuen's undeniable ability and wild visionary spirit, steeped to the lips in poverty, admired exceedingly by his immediate friends and neighbours, members of a despised but sturdy and numerous clan, moved, very likely, by traditions of illustrious ancestors, living in a portion of the country becoming more unsettled every day, hearing a rising undergrowl of discontent, and himself denied entrance at the door of admission to the ruling body,-would naturally cast about for some means of asserting, and perhaps avenging, his slighted family race and person. So far we have got circumstances and characteristics which cut him off from the mass of his countrymen; and to the characteristics may be added the fact that repeated failures to take his degree threw him, in 1837, into a state of madness, epilepsy, trance, ecstacy, or whatever else we may like to call it. But this disappointed youth was not an Englishman or a Hindu. Essentially a Chinese of the Chinese, his mind had a very wide circle of grotesque superstitions and solemn terrible thoughts in which it could find consolation. Was he the first in his country's history to mourn a distracted age, or be pursued by the demons? Might not "Heaven's exterminating decree be delivered to him also, as to so many "insignificant ones" before? This was the result into which his visions hardened; but in the first of them I can recognise only the ordinary grotesque figures which haunt the imaginations of southern Chinese of a low class. The tiger, the cock, the old woman who washed him in a river, the taking out his heart and putting in a new one, the old man in a black robe, whom he afterwards believed to have been God, and the demon-exterminating sword, are the ordinary stock-in-trade of the village geomancers of Kwangtung. The only things which give dignity to

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these visions are their connection with the old Chinese idea of the exterminating decree, and the biblical gloss he afterwards put upon them. These visions, and their change into loftier meanings as new ideas came to him, are exactly what might have been expected from a man of very powerful imaginative mind, brought up amid the ignorance, superstition, and squalor of a Hakka village. It should be added, however, that, looking at the verses he soon began to ejaculate, at his early but as yet harmless proclamation of himself as a heavenly king, and at his whole story, there is a certain something about him -that which Goethe used to call the daimonic-which defies analysis, and even description.

The elevation of character which Sew-tsuen obtained from the conviction his trances had given that he was a chosen instrument of Heaven, sustained him in quiet up to 1843, but naturally led him to seek to extend the sphere of his influence and knowledge. During these six years, though affairs in China were degenerating, yet they were not so bad as to afford an opening for a revolutionist; but in 1843, when he began seriously studying Christian tracts, the opium war had opened the flood-gates. It was natural that he should turn curiously towards the teaching of a people who had defied and so deeply injured the Government he hated; but the whole history of his relation to Christianity shows that his was a mind which, while it might incorporate foreign ideas with its own, would never suffer itself to be ruled by them. Neither at this time nor in 1847, when he went to Canton and put himself under the teaching of Mr Issachar Roberts, an uneducated American missionary, did he show any disposition to be a sober searcher after religious truth, but only sought that which would give force and shape to his own divine mission. To the

HIS RELATION TO CHRISTIANITY.

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grossly superstitious Hakka, and to the ardent student of the more ancient Chinese classics, there was now added a third person, so to speak, imbued with certain Hebrew and Christian beliefs. It is a proof of the extraordinary power of this man's mind, and depth of his convictions, that he could blend these three individuals so completely into one under the transmuting belief in his own mission. As the poor superstitions of the Chinese peasant were elevated into this egoism, so the sublime doctrines of Christianity were degraded into it. Who could the God of the Christians be but the old man, the very God who had appeared to him in his dreams? He must have been in heaven, and the middle-aged man who instructed him how to exterminate the demons was our Lord. But then the seer himself was a Son of Heaven, so Christ became the Elder, and Hung Sewtsuen was the Younger, Celestial Brother. There is no trace in any of the Tien Wang's productions of his having in the slightest degree appreciated the real spirit of Christianity; but the skill and completeness with which he turned some of its doctrines to his own use are really wonderful. These results were far beyond the power of a mere cunning impostor. From the hour when Hung arose from his sick-bed after his first forty days' trance, and, poor and nameless, proclaimed his avatar by fixing on his door-post the proclamation, "The noble principles of the Heavenly King, the Sovereign King Tsuen," on through success and defeat and Imperial opposition, up to the hour of his death at Nanking, when human flesh was selling in the market at so much per catty, he seems never to have wavered or abated one jot of his claim to supreme rule on earth. In ordinary times it might have been that Hung Sew-tsuen would have found an ordinary place as an able Man

darin, a village teacher, or a literary farmer, of more than average power and eccentricity. He might have lived and died the admiration or the wonder of his neighbourhood, but unknown beyond the Hwa district where he was born; and only his near relatives, as they pointed proudly to the gilded letters recording his name in the ancestral hall, or gave his departed soul kind offerings of food, would have remembered his existence. His bones might have been inurned in some peaceful spot on the hills close to his home, where he used to confer with his friend Fung Yun-san; and when his spirit desired to revisit earth, it might there have had sweet repose, shaded by the pine-trees, cheered by the singing of birds, looking down contented on the ancestral fields still ploughed by his descendants, and beyond these to the flowing waters of the Pearl River and the mountains of the White Cloud. This is what, according to all Chinese ideas, would have been a happy and enviable fate; but it was not decreed for him. The son of a small peasant farmer, and himself a poor literate, afflicted with fits of madness and trances and visions, he was to sweep over the great Flowery Land, and, as Tseng Kwo-fan says, cause devastation in sixteen provinces and six hundred cities. As it turned out, cruel exterminating Wangs-not brown-haired, pot-bellied little children were his disciples. His ploughshare of steel and fire drove through the great valley of the Yangtsze, and approached the walls of Peking. No small tawdry yamun, or village school-house, was his abode for many years, but the ancient capital of China and the palaces of the Ming. His visions turned into heavensent edicts which decided the fate of millions, and were pondered over in the distant capitals of Europe. At one moment the Black-haired People seemed about to accept