hors open with selected
Memorials to the Throne and other documents of an official character.
The public interest in these may have long since passed away; but they
are valued by the Chinese as models of a style to be imitated, and the
foreign student occasionally comes across papers on once burning
questions arising out of commercial or diplomatic intercourse with
western nations. Then may follow--the order is not always the
same--the prefaces which the author contributed from time to time to
the literary undertakings of his friends. Preface-writing is almost a
department of Chinese literature. No one ever thinks of publishing a
book without getting one or more of his capable associates to provide
prefaces, which are naturally of a laudatory character, and always
couched in highly-polished and obscure terms, the difficulty of the
text being often aggravated by a fanciful and almost illegible script.
Prefaces written by emperors, many examples of which may be seen, are
of course highly esteemed, and are generally printed in coloured ink.
The next section may comprise biographical notices of eminent men and
women, or of mere local celebrities, who happened to die in the
author's day. Then will follow Records, a title which covers
inscriptions carved on the walls of new buildings, or on memorial
tablets, and also notes on pictures which the author may have seen,
places which he may have visited, or allegorical incidents which he
may have imagined. Then come disquisitions, or essays on various
subjects; researches, being short articles of archaeological interest;
studies or monographs; birthday congratulations to friends or to
official colleagues; announcements, as to deities, a cessation of
whose worship is threatened if the necessary rain or fair weather be
not forthcoming; funeral orations, letters of condolence, &c. The
above items will perhaps fill half a dozen volumes; the remaining
volumes, running to twenty or thirty in all, as the case may be, will
contain the author's poetry, together with his longer and more serious
works. The essential of such a collection is, in Chinese eyes, its
completeness.

San Kuo Chih.

Hung Lou Meng.

Liao Chai.

_Fiction_.--Although novels are not regarded as an integral part of
literature proper, it is generally conceded that some novels may be
profitably studied, if for no other reason, from the point of vie