which each is composed. Hence, probably, it results that few students
venture to push their reading beyond novels, and remain during the
whole of their career in a state of darkness as to that literary
wealth of China which enthusiasts delight to compare with her
unexplored mines of metal and coal. Inasmuch, however, as it is not
absolutely necessary to read a book from beginning to end to be able
to form a pretty correct judgment as to its value, so, many students
who are sufficiently advanced to read a novel with ease and without
the help of a teacher, might readily gain an insight into a large
enough number of the most celebrated scientific or historical works to
enable them to comprehend the true worth of the whole of this vast
literature. For vast it undoubtedly is, though our own humble efforts
to appraise it justly, in comparison of course with the other
literatures of the world, brought upon us in the first hours of
discovery that some years of assiduous toil had been positively thrown
away. Sir W. Hamilton, if we recollect rightly, said that by so many
more languages as a man knows, by so many more times is he a man--an
apophthegm of but a shallow kind if all he meant to convey was that an
Englishman who can speak French is also a Frenchman by virtue of his
knowledge of the colloquial. The opening up of new fields of thought
through the medium of a new literature, is a result more worthy the
effort of acquiring a foreign language than sparkling in a _salon_
with the purest imaginable accent; and herein Sir W. Hamilton counted
without Chinese. The greater portion of the "Classics," cherished
tomes to which China thinks even now she owes her intellectual
supremacy over the rest of the world, is open through Dr Legge's
translation to all Englishmen, and those who run may read, weighing it
in the balance and determining its status among the ethical systems
either of the past or present. Had we found as much that is solid in
other departments of Chinese literature, as there is mixed up with the