One of the great "difficulties that the ordinary foreigner feels in this country is to get at the inner life of the native. The Chinese have for centuries elected to adopt what is popularly known as a policy of isolation. This means, being interpreter, that they have found their own modus vivendi satisfactory to themselves, and that they have not been suddenly and crazily enamoured of the practices, the morals, or the notions on which the inhabitants of Western realms set so high store. A very formidable barrier, fore, exists between the Chinese and the citizens or subjects of European countries, This is to be regretted on all accounts, and it is to be deplored and to be wondered at that more efforts are not made by foreigners to get at the inner secret of the Chinaman's life, and to trace the average career that he seems destined torn. The adage that "there is a deal of human nature in man," if it could be thoroughly realized and acted on would do more than the pulpit and platform addresses of many missionaries to induce foreign residents to warm to the subject of China ud to feel for and with its inhabitants. The question what sre a Chinaman's ideas of life and ite duties is an interesting one. A foreigner who begins to study England and the English, not from life but from books, goes through a course of Shake. speare, and gets very early acquainted with that stock piece, the "Seven Ages." He probably learns by heart the d tion of the infant in his nuts arms, and the school-boy "creeping like snail unwillingly to school," and the lover, and the soldier " full of strange onthe," and in this and in all kindred things; first, the general trathtolness and harmony of the pictures and their universality of application, and second, the little local and temporary notes of time and costume which tie the series of descriptions down to an epoch, and give it perhaps in some of its characters, notably in that of the Justice, its distinctive English flavour. A similar picture of the ages of man's life is found in China, and it is worth while to introduce it to the reader. The China. man does not give us seven ages, but ton; and his description of thosuccossion of figures and cbarnoteristios is The age of ton is called the degree;" twenty, "youth expired thirty, "strength and marriage;" forty, officially apt" fifty, "error-knowing;" sixty, "cycle closing seventy, "rare bird of age eighty, "rusty visaged;"" ninety, "delayed;" one hundred, "Age's extremity." Here, of cousge, there are points which coincide with the European division of man's duties and destination, and there are points which. strangely differ from the o jew of the succession of tasks and characteristics which await and distinguish humanity.
Side by side with the ten ages of man according to the Chinese, we have the ancient Jewish division in the fourteen ages of the Mishua, We give an ap. proved translation from the German—"At five, to the Scripture he turns At ten, in the Mishna he learns Thirteen for the duties of life Fifteen in the talmud is rife Eighteen to take him a wife At twenty to get himself wealth At thirty in pride of his health At forty he hoards up his pelf At fifty gives counsel himself At sixty mature in his age 5 At seventy his hairs show him sage;
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.