effort to broaden the religious outlook; he tried to stop
the persecution of the Christians, and allowed them to organize a
national church, the Nestorian;--India, still and until 456, at
the height of her glory:--there is a continual rise as you go
eastward, with the climax in India. The next step is China; to
which now after all these centuries we return.

As we have seen, since the Hans fell there had been a confusion
of ephemeral kingdoms jostling and hustling each other across the
stage of time: there had been too much history altogether; too
many wars, heroes, adventures and wild escapades. Life was too
riotous and whirling an affair: China seemed to have sunk into a
mere Europe, a kind of Kilkenny Christendom. Not that culture
ever became extinct; indeed, through this whole period the
super-refinement that had grown up under the Hans persisted side
by side with the barbarian excursions and alarms. It was not, as
in Rome, a case of major pralaya: men did not resort to
savagery; literary production seems never to have run quite so
sterile. But things were in the melting-pot, centripetalism had
gone; little dynasties flared up quickly and expired; and
amidst all those lightning changes there was no time for
progress, or deep concerns, or for the Soul of the Black-haired
People to be stirring to manifestation.

You will, I dare say, have learned to look for a rise in China at
any falling-time in Europe; so would consider something should
have happened there in 365, the year of the great earthquake and
tidal wave, when the fifty thousand Alexandrians were drowned,--
the second year after Julian's death. Well; in that 365 Tao
Yuan-ming was born, who later became known as Tao Chien: in
Japanese, Toemmei. There had been poets all along. During the
last thirty years of the Hans, 190 to 220, there had been the
Seven Scholars of the Chien An Period: among them that jolly
K'ung Jung who, because he was a descendant of Confucius, claimed
blood-relationship with the descendants of Laotse. Ts'ao Ts'ao
himself wrote songs: he was that bold bad adventurer and highly
successful general who turned out the last Han and set his own
son on the throne as Wei Wenti; who also was a poet, as was his
brother Ts'ao Chih. Of Ts'ao Chih a contemporary said: "If all
the talent in the world were divided into ten parts, Ts'ao Chih
would have eight of them."--"Who, then, would have the other
two?" asked somebody.--"I should