d
to be avarice.

Taou-Kwang had no taste either for literature or the arts; and he
jumbled together in one large magazine the beautiful pictures, clocks,
and musical instruments accumulated by his ancestors. To explain and
repair these, there had always been Europeans, chiefly Portuguese, in
attendance; and to some of these we have been indebted in times past
for memoirs of the court of Peking; but Taou-Kwang dismissed the last
of them. It is believed that an undefined dread of Western power had
much to do with this distaste for the products of its ingenuity.

The only orgies which the emperor seemed desirous of maintaining, were
feasts for the promotion of Manchoo union; on which occasions, the
Manchoos assembled to eat meat without rice--in order to maintain the
recollection of their Nimrodic origin--and to drink an intoxicating
liquor made of mare's milk. He had a favourite sequestered abode at no
great distance from the capital, where he had allowed the vegetation
to run wild and rank, in order to make it a rural retreat, instead of
an imperial park. All business was excluded from the precincts, and
here the emperor spent much of his time, wandering solitarily on foot
among the trees, amusing himself with the friends of his youth, or
sailing, with some of the ladies of his family, along the mimic
rivers.

According to traditional usage, the monarch must perform a pilgrimage
to the tombs of his ancestors. The astronomical, or rather
astrological board having ascertained the month, the day, the hour,
even the minute, when the stars would prove propitious, the cavalcade
set out. The princes of the blood, the ladies of the palace, and the
favourite ministers of the court, formed part of the train, which was
attended by at least 2000 camels. But even an emperor cannot travel
through waste and desert lands without inconvenience; and though great
preparations had been made beforehand in erecting temporary dwellings
where no villages were to be found, yet his Celestial majesty, with
his court, had often to bivouac under tents in the open air. The
people crowded in thousands to see their sovereign--a liberty which,
it is well known, may not be used in Peking, where every one must
hasten to hide his head as from the fabled Gorgon. The ancestral tombs
at Mookden, where the imperial manes repose under care of a large
garrison, were at length reached. And now Taou-Kwang became a family
man, abandoning the forms of state and