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Mr. Ross is known as_an industrious worker who has published Corean and Mandarin Primers, a History of the Manchus, and a pamphlet ridently attacking the Roman Catholic priests, with results which are known to several. He informs us that the present work is the product of the ransack of several hundred Chinese volumes.
It is obviously the fruit of much labour, We wish to be understood as not undertaking a review of Mr. Rose's book. Not having sucked the dust out of hundreds of Chinese volumes, and having no previous special knowledge of the subject, it would be unbecoming to criticize from 3 Chinese historical standpoint the work which Mr. Ross has accomplished. What we have to say is what any one might say and what great many readers doubt-leas do say, and is said, we repeat, not from the standpoint of the scholar, but from that of the ordinary reader. We are principally moved to take up the pen by a sentence in the preface, from which we are led to infer that the present work is but one in an indefinite series, which is promised (or threatened), and all of which are presumably likely to be of the same general description.
That the History of China ought to be presented to the average English reader in popular and intelligible form, is a pro-ition which it would seem difficult to Gispute, As ordinarily presented, that History is simply a wild clines of dyniastice, longer or shorter, which follow each other for no perceived reason, and which, as, in their remote origin, they abut on the grey dawn which precedes all History, furnish a catalogue of such appalling length as to discourage the most stout-hearted. Whattorical students may know or think, we venture to say, out of one hundred English renders regard Chinese History. If they have been unfortunate enough to dip into the wretched work of Mz. Deme-trins Boulger, with its labyrinth of disconnected vents, unimportant detail and ignorant mistakes, the impression have been very considerably confirmed, What is wanted, is a spirit which shall enter into this Valley of Dry Bones, and bid them live. We wish to know, not merely that some Han Emperor matched an army somewhere, which army was defeated, whereupon he did (or did not) march another somewhere else; but we respectfully inglis all, and whether thing in his mor marching his troops, and capturing (or failing to capture) certain cities, Wo have just awakened to the fact, in this Inst quarter of. the nineteenth century, that History is a record of people, and not merely of a handful of indivi duals who ordered the people about, Compare, for instance, Green's History of the English People, with Smollet's continuation of Hume, Compare the little volumes published in Harper's Half Hour Series and styled ' Epochs of English History," with the jejune annals couned by our grandfathers, 'The one are crisp, fresh, vital—the others (now fortunately forgotten) were arid and tasteless, 'There is, no doubt, a great deal of History which is' by no means worth writing. In his former Essay on History, Macaulay has pointed out that a complete record would embrace all the slightest particulars of the slightest transactions—all the things done and all the words uttered during the time of which it treats." Such a History is of course, happily impossible, and it remains for each historian to select what shall be told and what shall be suppressed. The statement of his task is easy; its execution is difficult in the extreme. One other observation is of great importane: There is a vast amount of History that not worth writing at all. Its bearing on present affairs may be go slight, the access sible details so incoherent, or #0 essentially unimportant—so monotonous or so credible, that, do what he will with them, the Historian'cannot make them live, In that case, we think the best thing the Historian' can do is to let History alone, or at best fo present a clear and comprehensive summary, which shall give all the advantages of a tour of the
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.