The great Dr. Johnson unco said: We read the ' Paradise Lost' asa task." Miike manner we can well imagine that there are those who will find it a task to read Mr, the circumstances which gave it its re- Gi i book, The Chinese poot Sung Yi putation, for at the time of which we are the music of the masses speaking the Five Colours of Babylonian f a narrow circle; ti still astrology had been accepted as indica. is the classical tors of good and ill fortune, This The work before us i connection of a red colour with the one. Readers who, li notion of immortality through the cousin Bridget, must have story—well, medium of good and bad Inck led to 4i: ill, or indifferently told—nill no doubt be disappointed. The book moreover has no the adoption of cinnabar as the philosoperoual interest. The poets and scholars pher's stone, and thas to the constracwho are hi produced never s0 much tion of the whole system of alchemy, as know thi and also to the notion that the God of England. They can memory or association in commo Fire, the Tsao Shen, should be wor. shipped as being able to confer impublic whom they are now brought before. in one word, the interest of the book is mortality. Chinese old books speak of purely literary one. Nevertheless there the Plant of Immortal Life before they must surely be in literature " power more mention the mineral. There is be-abiding than that which only personal interest or association can give. Truth tween them at least an interval of a cen. and beauty have no memory, no tradition, tury, and the Islands of the Immortals no nationality, no cousins, no fri in the Eastern Ocean had been talked They are free as the sunlight of heavy about ever since Lich-tait introduced this levo of western romance into hia book, liste ar the truth, thing that open wi ace the beauty, oars "in a joy a fow years after the death of Con-Yi King it fucius, The Tree of Life in Eden points When truth joken, men sands of miles will respond to it." to some land of immortal life afar off. saya "he has not catered for There will probably be found in corres. ste, but he has a pondence with this ancient relic in our I hand-book of Chin Bibles, a Babylonian tradition which li found its way to China " short time before we process to exi in detail how Mr. Giles has before Chinese writers begin to speak accomplished the task he about the Plant of Immortality. There him, let us look at the ial upon were sacred islands on the way down which he has spent so much scholarly the Gulf of Persia to the ocean, and the labour. Chinese literature has hitherto 'Arabian Nights' tell us of the magic eon regarded as an unknown world, yet unexplored. Like the surface of the moon, wonders of Ceylon and other islands in it might be all a dreary waste of burut-up those seas. Here probably was ori-volcanic lava, or it might be, as the poets minated the idea of the Islands of the tell, quite a fairy world full of sounds and Immortals, a fiction of Babylonian and sights that the imagination yet dreams not of. The extent of the Chinese literature, Phosnician navigators who peopled the however, has generally been admitted by distant ocean, whether north, south, all who know anything of the subject. east, or west, with colonies of genii endowed with perpetual youth, and nourished by the fruit, leaves, or juice of this or that Plant of Immortality.
But those who have hitherto extolled the value of Chinese literature a
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.