ssed upon
the beginner that the profit likely to accrue to him therefrom is
infinitesimal. As for fixed rules of grammatical construction, so far
from being a help, he will find them a positive hindrance. It should
rather be his aim to free his mind from such trammels, and to accustom
himself to look upon each character as a root-idea, not a definite
part of speech.

_The Book Language._--Turning now to some of the more salient
characteristics of the book language, with the object of explaining how
it came to be so widely separated from common speech, we might
reasonably suppose that in primitive times the two stood in much closer
relation to each other than now. But it is certainly a striking fact
that the earliest literary remains of any magnitude that have come down
to us should exhibit a style very far removed from any possible
colloquial idiom. The speeches of the Book of History (see _Literature_)
are more manifestly fictitious, by many degrees, than the elaborate
orations in Thucydides and Livy. If we cannot believe that Socrates
actually spoke the words attributed to him in the dialogues of Plato,
much less can we expect to find the _ipsissima verba_ of Confucius in
any of his recorded sayings. In the beginning, all characters doubtless
represented spoken words, but it must very soon have dawned on the
practical Chinese mind that there was no need to reproduce in writing
the bisyllabic compounds of common speech. _Chien_ "to see," in its
written form [Ch], could not possibly be confused with any other
_chien_, and it was therefore unnecessary to go to the trouble of
writing [Ch][Ch] _k'an-chien_ "look-see," as in colloquial. There was a
wonderful outburst of literary activity in the Confucian era, when it
would seem that the older and more cumbrous form of Seal character was
still in vogue. If the mere manual labour of writing was so great, we
cannot wonder that all superfluous particles or other words that could
be dispensed with were ruthlessly cut away. So it came about that all
the old classical works were composed in the tersest of language, as
remote as can be imagined from the speech of the people. The passion for
brevity and conciseness was pushed to an extreme, and resulted more
often than not in such obscurity that detailed commentaries on the
classics were found to be necessary, and have always constituted an
important branch of Chinese literature. After the introduction of the
improved s