ng and Chow
dynasties revived by men who appreciated their spirit but could not
help making the revival an excuse for the display of their own
superior skill. The monstrous vases and incense-burners of the past
thus appear once more, but are now decorated with a delicate
embroidery of inlay, are polished and finished to perfection, but lose
therewith just the rudeness of edge and outline which made the older
work so gravely significant. At times even some grandly planned vessel
will appear with such a festoon of pretty tracery wreathed about it
that the incongruity is little short of ridiculous, and we recognize
we have passed the turning-point to decline.

Decline indeed came rapidly, and to the latter part of the Ming epoch
we must assign those countless bronzes where dragons and flowers and
the stock symbols of happiness, good luck and longevity sprawl
together in interminable convolutions. When once we reach this stage
of contortion, of elaborate pierced and relief work, we come to the
place in history of Chinese bronzes where serious study may cease,
except in so far as the study of the symbols themselves throws light
upon the history of Chinese procelain (see CERAMICS). One class of
bronze alone needs a word of notice, namely, the profusely decorated
pieces which have a Tibetan origin, and are obviously no older than
the end of the Ming period. Of these fig. 17 will serve as a specimen,
and a comparison with fig. 9 will show how the softer rounded forms
and jewelled festoons of Hindu-Greek taste enervated the grand
primitive force of the earlier age, and that neither the added
delicacy of texture and substance nor the vastly increased dexterity
of workmanship can compensate for the vanished majesty. (C. J. H.)

VII. THE CHINESE LANGUAGE

_Colloquial._--In treating of Chinese, it will be found convenient to
distinguish, broadly, the spoken from the written language and to deal
with each separately. This is a distinction which would be out of place
if we had to do with any European, or indeed most Oriental languages.
Writing, in its origin, is merely a symbolic representation of speech.
But in Chinese, as we shall see, for reasons connected with the peculiar
nature ot the script, the two soon began to move along independent and
largely divergent lines. This division, moreover, will enable us to
employ different methods of inquiry more suited to each. With re