er amorous hopes
or fears in a poem; but these effusions are of very little merit,
and are seldom read except by children and maiden Gy-ei. The most
interesting works of a purely literary character are those of
explorations and travels into other regions of this nether world,
which are generally written by young emigrants, and are read with great
avidity by the relations and friends they have left behind.

I could not help expressing to Aph-Lin my surprise that a community in
which mechanical science had made so marvellous a progress, and in
which intellectual civilisation had exhibited itself in realising
those objects for the happiness of the people, which the political
philosophers above ground had, after ages of struggle, pretty generally
agreed to consider unattainable visions, should, nevertheless, be so
wholly without a contemporaneous literature, despite the excellence
to which culture had brought a language at once so rich and simple,
vigourous and musical.

My host replied--"Do you not perceive that a literature such as you mean
would be wholly incompatible with that perfection of social or political
felicity at which you do us the honour to think we have arrived? We have
at last, after centuries of struggle, settled into a form of government
with which we are content, and in which, as we allow no differences of
rank, and no honours are paid to administrators distinguishing them from
others, there is no stimulus given to individual ambition. No one would
read works advocating theories that involved any political or social
change, and therefore no one writes them. If now and then an An feels
himself dissatisfied with our tranquil mode of life, he does not attack
it; he goes away. Thus all that part of literature (and to judge by the
ancient books in our public libraries, it was once a very large part),
which relates to speculative theories on society is become utterly
extinct. Again, formerly there was a vast deal written respecting
the attributes and essence of the All-Good, and the arguments for and
against a future state; but now we all recognise two facts, that there
IS a Divine Being, and there IS a future state, and we all equally agree
that if we wrote our fingers to the bone, we could not throw any light
upon the nature and conditions of that future state, or quicken our
apprehensions of the attributes and essence of that Divine Being. Thus
another part of literature has become also extinct, happily fo