ency; and it is certainly curious that, as
in ancient Greece, the names of animals are not frequently used in this
connection, with the sole exception of the dog. No Chinaman will stand
being called a dog, although he really has a great regard for the
animal, as a friend whose fidelity is proof even against poverty.

In the ivory shops in China will be found many specimens of the carver's
craft which will bear comparison, for the patience and skill required,
with the greatest triumphs of Greek workmen. Both nations have
reproduced the human hand in ivory; the Greeks used it as an ornament
for a hairpin; the Chinese attach it to a slender rod about a foot and
a half in length, and use it as a back-scratcher.

The Chinese drama, which we can only trace vaguely to Central Asian
sources, and no farther back than the twelfth century of our era, has
some points of contact with the Greek drama. In Greece the plays began
at sunrise and continued all day, as they do still on the open-air
stages of rural districts in China, in both cases performed entirely
by men, without interval between the pieces, without curtain, without
prompter, and without any attempt at realism.

As formerly in Greece, so now in China, the words of the play are partly
spoken and partly sung, the voice of the actor being, in both countries,
of the highest importance. Like the Greek actor before masks were
invented, the Chinese actor paints his face, and the thick-soled boot
which raises the Chinese tragedian from the ground is very much the
counterpart of the cothurnus.

The arrangement by which the Greek gods appeared in a kind of balcony,
looking out as it were from the heights of Olympus, is well known to the
Chinese stage; while the methodical character of Greek tragic dancing,
with the chorus moving right and left, is strangely paralleled in the
dances performed at the worship of Confucius in the Confucian temples,
details of which may be seen in any illustrated Chinese encyclopaedia.

Games with dice are of a high antiquity in Greece; they date in China
only from the second century A.D., having been introduced from the West
under the name of _shu p'u_, a term which has so far defied
identification.

The custom of fighting quails was once a political institution in
Athens, and under early dynasties it was a favourite amusement at the
Imperial Court of China.

The game of "guess-fingers" is another form of amusement common to both
countries. So