led and cut to pieces. He threw the pieces all
over the hill, and next morning, on awaking, he found these pieces
transformed into men and women; thus the earth was repeopled.

The Dream of the South Branch

The dawn of Chinese romantic literature must be ascribed to the
period between the eighth and tenth centuries of our era, when
the cultivation of the liberal arts received encouragement at the
hands of sovereigns who had reunited the Empire under the sway of
a single ruler, and whose conquests and distant embassies attracted
representatives from every Asiatic nation to their splendid Court. It
was during this period that the vast bulk of Indian literature was
successfully attacked by a host of Buddhist translators, and that the
alchemists and mechanicians of Central Asia, Persia, and the Byzantine
Empire introduced their varied acquirements to the knowledge of the
Chinese. With the flow of new learning which thus gained admittance to
qualify the frigid and monotonous cultivation of the ancient classics
and their commentators, there came also an impetus to indulgence in
the licence of imagination in which it is impossible to mistake the
influence of Western minds. While the Sanskrit fables, on the one
hand, passed into a Chinese dress, and contributed to the colouring
of the popular mythology, the legends which circulated from mouth to
mouth in the lively Arabian bazaars found, in like manner, an echo
in the heart of China. Side by side with the mechanical efforts
of rhythmical composition which constitute the national ideal of
poetry there began, during the middle period of the T'ang dynasty
(A.D. 618-907), to grow up a class of romantic tales in which the
kinship of ideas with those that distinguish the products of Arabian
genius is too marked to be ignored. The invisible world appears
suddenly to open before the Chinese eye; the relations of the sexes
overstep for a moment the chilling limit imposed by the traditions
of Confucian decorum; a certain degree of freedom and geniality is,
in a word, for the first time and only for a brief interval infused
into the intellectual expression of a nation hitherto closely cramped
in the bonds of a narrow pedantry. It was at this period that the
drama began to flourish, and the germs of the modern novelist's art
made their first appearance. Among the works of imagination dating
from the period in question which have come down to the present
day there is perhaps none which