nody on John William Inchbold, and a lovely lyric entitled
_The Interpreters_.

In human thought have all things habitation;
Our days
Laugh, lower, and lighten past, and find no station
That stays.

But thought and faith are mightier things than time
Can wrong,
Made splendid once by speech, or made sublime
By song.

Remembrance, though the tide of change that rolls
Wax hoary,
Gives earth and heaven, for song's sake and the soul's,
Their glory.

Certainly, 'for song's sake' we should love Mr. Swinburne's work, cannot,
indeed, help loving it, so marvellous a music-maker is he. But what of
the soul? For the soul we must go elsewhere.

_Poems and Ballads_. Third Series. By Algernon Charles Swinburne.
(Chatto and Windus.)

A CHINESE SAGE
(_Speaker_, February 8, 1890.)

An eminent Oxford theologian once remarked that his only objection to
modern progress was that it progressed forward instead of backward--a
view that so fascinated a certain artistic undergraduate that he promptly
wrote an essay upon some unnoticed analogies between the development of
ideas and the movements of the common sea-crab. I feel sure the
_Speaker_ will not be suspected even by its most enthusiastic friends of
holding this dangerous heresy of retrogression. But I must candidly
admit that I have come to the conclusion that the most caustic criticism
of modern life I have met with for some time is that contained in the
writings of the learned Chuang Tzu, recently translated into the vulgar
tongue by Mr. Herbert Giles, Her Majesty's Consul at Tamsui.

The spread of popular education has no doubt made the name of this great
thinker quite familiar to the general public, but, for the sake of the
few and the over-cultured, I feel it my duty to state definitely who he
was, and to give a brief outline of the character of his philosophy.

Chuang Tzu, whose name must carefully be pronounced as it is not written,
was born in the fourth century before Christ, by the banks of the Yellow
River, in the Flowery Land; and portraits of the wonderful sage seated on
the flying dragon of contemplation may still be found on the simple
tea-trays and pleasing screens of many of our most respectable suburban
households. The honest ratepayer and his healthy family have no doubt
often mocked at the dome-like forehead of the philosopher, and laughed