LITERATURE. The history of Chinese litera ture is long—going back perhaps eighteen or twenty centuries ',Lc.; though, owing to the lack of durable monuments, there are no credible texts of very ancient inscriptions in China, as inere are in Babylonia and Egypt. by the Sixth Century B.r., Confueius edited the f:unous sacred canon km»vo as the Ching (King), there evidently existed a considerable literature in verse and prose already considered old. To the Ching, the model of literary form, the acme of philosophic wisdom, is largely due that extraor dinary staldlit• of Chinese thought and institu tions which is the wonder of their history. They consist of the 'Five Classics'—! Ching [•i King], the "Book of Changes"; Shu Ching, the "Book of Distory"; Ching [Shi King], or "Book of Odes": Li Chi [Li Ki], or "Book of Rites": and the Ch'un chin [Ch'un Ts'in], or "Spring and Autumn," the last being the only one claiming Confucius as the actual author—and to these are added the 'Four Books': The Lun Lii. or "Ana leas," of Confucius, his views and maxims re tailed by disciples; the "Book of Mencius"; the 7'n IINii eh or "Great Learning": and the Chang inn!! or "Doctrine of the Mean," a short treatise enlarging upon Conftwins's teaching as to con duct. and ascribed to his grandson, K'ung Chi. These classics of the Far East constitute as in teresting a body of literatnre as can lie found in any ancient civilization. No written product of the human mind has for so long a period, or so eompletely, molded the culture, morals, and government of a large fraction of civilized man kind. its profound and continuous sillily has not only left abiding traces upon Chinese thought and institutions. Init has, through veneration for the letter as well as the spirit, preserved the langoage almost unchanged during three thou sand set a permanent standard of literary style, and stimulated the eritieal faculties of an :witty people to the production of thousands of volumes of commentary and discussion. The "Book of Changes," probably the oldest of the 'Five Classics,' is ascribed to \Vi• Wang, found er of the Chou (or Chow) Dynasty in the Twelfth Century the. It consists of a series of apparently random deductions based upon the groupings of divided and undivided lines said originally to have been copied and arranged from the haek of a tortoise by the chief Fu Hsi, thirty-three cen turies n.c. The eight diagrams of triplet lines (thus. =--, ==,=--, etc.) were enlarged to sixty-four by into sextets, each representing some natural force or element and followed by a short essay ascribing to every line its highly fanciful and allegorical import. The
text is followed by ten wing. or commentaries, long ascribed to Confucius, but unquestionably of later origin. It is impossible to do more than as to the real purpose of this antique puzzle, foreign speculators calling it a philosophy, a vocabulary of pre-Chinese tribes, a calendar of the lunar year. etc.. while the natives persist in venerating it as divinely inspired, though they cannot interpret its true meaning. The "Book of History" embodies, like the Hebrew Scripture, fragments of very- ancient documents; but its present form is the work of Confucius, who in fused into its brief and rather monotonous rec ords his ideas of virtue. statecraft. and phi losophy. Though its text is not always beyond dispute, this record places China indisputably in the first rank of Asiatic nations for its au thentic data on ancient times. Scarcely less im portant in this respect, and as a sociological document. is the "Book of Odes," while its hu man and literary interest far surpasses all the other Ching. This poetical relic consists of 305 odes, chants, and ballads, said to have been gar nered by the Sage from 3000 songs current in China at his time. They date from the Eigh teenth to the Sixth Century B.C., and many if not most of them seem to have a religious use and meaning; but it is hardly possible to exag gerate their interest to the scholar as true pic tures of the life and thought of antiquity, or their value in illustrating the language, cults, and customs of old China. They have inspired eighty generations of Chinamen since Confucius expressed approval of them by declaring that "He who knows not the Shih stands with his face toward a wall." The fourth classic, the "Book of Rites." does not properly belong to the Con fucian period. being the compilation of two cousins named Tai, in the First Century we. It got its present form after remodeling in the Second Century A.D., and until the Fourteenth Cen tury was always joined with two older works— the ("boo Li and I Li—both devoted, as it was, to ceremonial forms and usages. The "Spring and Autumn Annals" is the title of a brief ree ord of Confucius's native State between the years 722-t84 me.. written by the Sage himself, a book upon which he considered his reputation would stand for all time. It is hardly more than a simple statement of events, devoid of comment or interest. but its dry annals were expanded by the illuminating commentary of his diseiple. Tso, who made it altogether one of the most read able accounts we have of the remote past, earn ing for its author the title of the Froissart of ancient China.