corresponds with the low social status of the actor; and it is a curious
fact—true also of novels—that many of the best efforts are anonymous.

Plays by women are also to be found; but I have never yet come across,
either on the stage or in literature, any of those remarkable dramas
which are supposed to run on month after month, even into years.

* * * * *

Division E is a very important one for students of the Chinese language.
Here we find a number of works of reference, most of which may be
characterised as indispensable, and the great majority of which are
easily procurable at the present day.

Beginning with dictionaries, we have the famous work of Hsü Shên, who
died about A.D. 120. There was at that date no such thing as a Chinese
dictionary, although the language had already been for some centuries
ripe for such a production, and accordingly Hsü Shên set to work to fill
the void. He collected 9353 written characters,—presumably all that were
in existence at the time,—to which he added 1163 duplicates, _i.e._
various forms of writing the same character, and then arranged them in
groups under those parts which, as we have already seen in the preceding
Lecture, are indicators of the direction in which the sense of a
character is to be looked for. Thus, all characters containing the
element 犭 "dog" were brought together; all those containing 艹
"vegetation," 疒 "disease," etc.

So far as we know, this system originated with him; and we are therefore
not surprised to find that in his hands it was on a clumsier scale than
that in vogue to-day. Hsü Shên uses no fewer than 540 of these