Directory_and_Chronicle_1841 — Page 570

1841.

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Poo Nang Che tsang sin.

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sion. Philosophers, too, must have their due allowance of threading, through metaphysical labyrinths with light steps, and be indulged sub- lime flights, amusing themselves with no entities and building ether real castles, speaking in riddles and beguiling human reason. But when we find geographers, historians, &c., talking the same absur- dities, and writing and quoting poetry where they ought to use only saber prose, we cannot but be displeased. We have had the misfor- tune of opening hundreds of volumes either descriptive or narrative, and we have found little information. Take a topographical work, for instance, and you will find that, besides names and dates, which are tolerably correct, there is such a collection of gallimatia, that fifty volumes might be condensed into one. There are indeed honorable exceptions, but they are few. Their very statistics do not always escape this bane, and many an edict is as poetical as Le Taepik's effusions. This taste has prevailed throughout all ages, even when knight errantry and romance were entirely out of vogue. If any man ; shonld abandon the beaten track and write useful books for some good to the purpose, he would be denounced as a literary heretic. Still the nation at large is remarkable for the practical tendency of, its genius and sound sense, though occasionally disturbed by cunning, so that its literature forms a direct contrast to the current principles of action.

Under such circumstances one would have thought, that useful. knowledge, conveyed in the prize essays at the public examinations, would win the day; but it is not so. All the successful candidates, whose treatises are printed and subjected to the judgment of the public, exoel in rodomontade and quotations from authors as spicy and jucoherent as some of our own Latin Collectapea. It is, however, a most extraordinary thing that these glaring defects in literature are made up by work of fiction, which take the very opposite road, and instead of dwelling upon names, intrigues, foolish stories, rites and, ceremonies, like all grave historians, give a lively, description of the, age, countries and people. There is a historical work called San Kwo Che, in many large octavo volumes; and, when you have forced yourself to read the dry and uninteresting detail of its pages, you have scarcely any conception of the extraordinary events that filled China with war and devastation for a long period; but after, having read the little book of fiction of the same name, you seem to live in those remote ages, and see the heroes and heroines actually flitting before you, as if the author, were, using a magic lantern. There are hundreds and thousands of volumes of this kind, which, with all their

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