families, schoolmasters, doctors, fortune-tellers, geomancers, and
booksellers' hacks.

Of high-class Chinese literature, it is not possible to give even the
faintest idea in the space at disposal. It must suffice to say that all
branches are adequately represented, histories, biographies, philosophy,
poetry and essays on all manner of subjects, offering a wide field even
to the most insatiate reader.

And here a remark may be interjected, which is very necessary for the
information of those who wish to form a true estimate of the Chinese
people. Throughout the Confucian Canon, a collection of ancient works on
which the moral code of the Chinese is based, there is not a single word
which could give offence, even to the most sensitive, on questions of
delicacy and decency. That is surely saying a good deal, but it is not
all; precisely the same may be affirmed of what is mentioned above as
high-class Chinese literature, which is pure enough to satisfy the most
strait-laced. Chinese poetry, of which there is in existence a huge
mass, will be searched in vain for suggestions of impropriety, for sly
innuendo, and for the other tricks of the unclean. This extraordinary
purity of language is all the more remarkable from the fact that, until
recent years, the education of women has not been at all general, though
many particular instances are recorded of women who have themselves
achieved success in literary pursuits. It is only when we come to the
novel, to the short story, or to the anecdote, which are not usually
written in high-class style, and are therefore not recognized as
literature proper, that this exalted standard is no longer always
maintained.

There are, indeed, a great number of novels, chiefly historical and