rained minds, able to carry on
sustained and complex arguments without violating any of the
Aristotelian canons, although as a matter of fact they never heard of
Aristotle and possess no such work in all their extensive literature as
a treatise on logic. The affairs of their huge empire are carried on,
and in my opinion very successfully carried on--with some reservations,
of course--by men who have had to get their mental gymnastics wholly and
solely out of Chinese.

I am not aware that their diplomatists suffer by comparison with ours.
The Marquis Tseng and Li Hung-chang, for instance, representing opposite
schools, were admitted masters of their craft, and made not a few of our
own diplomatists look rather small beside them.

Speaking further of the study of the Greek and Roman classics, Sir
Richard Jebb says: "There can be no better proof that such a discipline
has penetrated the mind, and has been assimilated, than if, in the
crises of life, a man recurs to the great thoughts and images of the
literature in which he has been trained, and finds there what braces and
fortifies him, a comfort, an inspiration, an utterance for his deeper
feelings."

Sir Richard Jebb then quotes a touching story of Lord Granville, who was
President of the Council in 1762, and whose last hours were rapidly
approaching. In reply to a suggestion that, considering his state
of health, some important work should be postponed, he uttered the
following impassioned words from the Iliad, spoken by Sarpedon to
Glaucus: "Ah, friend, if, once escaped from this battle, we were for
ever to be ageless and immortal, I would not myself fight in the
foremost ranks, nor would I send thee into the war that giveth men
renown; but now,--since ten thousand fates of death beset us every day,
and these no mortal may escape or avoid,--now let us go forward."

Such was the discipline of the Greek and Roman classics upon the mind of
Lord Granville at a great crisis in his life.

Let us now turn to the story of a Chinese statesman, nourished only upon
what has been too hastily stigmatised as "the dry bones of Chinese
literature."

Wen T'ien-hsiang was born in A.D. 1236. At the age of twenty-one he came
out first on the list of successful candidates for the highest literary
degree. Upon the draft-list submitted to the Emperor he had been placed
seventh; but his Majesty, after looking over the essays, drew the grand
examiner's attention to the originality and