and wrong-headedness natural to a hero of romance, however in all other respects perfect, does not once conceive that there can be any mistake, and decides irrevocably against the marriage. In vain does the disappointed matchmaker enlarge upon the merit and beauty of the heroine and the advantages of the alliance. All her efforts prove unavailing, and she is compelled at last to give up the point in despair. Gu, on hearing her report, is so much nettled at the perversity of his protégé, that he determines to be revenged upon him, and for this purpose makes interest with the examining officer of the city, an old college companion of his own, to obtain a revocation of the degree that has just been conferred upon the young poet. Being, however, naturally a good-humored old gentleman, he afterwards repents of his severity, and gets the title restored. The tractability here attributed to the examining officer may serve to show, that the Chinese system of political advancement, however beautiful in theory, is, like all other human institutions, susceptible of abuse, and affords opportunity for intrigues and evasions not less barefaced than those, which result from the borough-mongering of the mother country, or the caucussing of ours.

Such, however, is the nature of the first obstacle to the union of the lovers, which, though it shows no great richness of invention, is treated pleasantly enough in the details, and carries us on smoothly some distance into the second volume. The next difficulty is of a more complicated kind, and the exposition of it occupies a much larger space in the work, since the hero is not fairly clear of it till the middle of the third volume. It forms indeed the main knot of the story, and results from the efforts of a stupid rival to appropriate to himself by a series of devices the merit of Sa's poems, and thus eclipse him in the affections of the heroine (which are of course graduated exactly by the scale of the respective poetical talents of her suitors), and secure her hand. We can only indicate in a general way the leading points of this intrigue, which involves a great variety of details, and gives occasion to a number of Sa's finest productions. The outline is briefly as follows.

After rejecting the abovementioned overture, Sa receives an invitation to reside with his uncle, our old acquaintance the inspector general of the first chapter, who is about to pass through Nankin in one of the canal boats, and fixes a place

where he will take his nephew on board. Sa sets off accordingly to join him, but meets with an accident that interrupts his journey, and obliges him to take up his lodging for the night in a convent. The next morning, as he is walking about the neighborhood, he falls in with a party of young men in a summer-house, who are engaged in the usual occupation of writing poetry. This time, however, they are not doing it for mere amusement, but for the purpose of establishing their respective pretensions to the hand of a young lady in the neighborhood, who turns out to be no other than our fair friend Red-Jasper. Pa had, it seems, in the interim returned from Tartary; and learning the failure of the attempt on Sa, he resorts, for the purpose of marrying his daughter, to the expedient of offering her hand as a prize to the person who shall produce the best piece of poetry upon a subject assigned, which is The Willow-tree in Spring. Sa, being informed of these particulars, and not aware that the lady in question is precisely the one, whose hand he had already rejected when she was proposed to him as the daughter of Gu, tries his skill on the spot, and produces of course a poem that excites the admiration of the party. They all send their respective productions, carefully signed and sealed, to Pa's house; but one of the others, yclept Chang-Fanju, contrives, by bribing the porter, to suppress Sa's letter, and pass off the piece as his own. The poem gives so much satisfaction to the young lady and her father, that the supposed author is invited to take up his residence at the house on probation for a year, during which time he is to act as tutor to a young son.

In this situation Chang, who is wholly incapable himself of writing a decent stanza, adroitly keeps Sa about him, and repeatedly makes use of his talent to maintain the reputation he had already acquired, always passing off the productions of his rival as his own, in particular a superb ode to a pear-tree, which was considered in the family as quite a masterpiece. We may remark en passant that the Chinese poets seem to select their subjects, in preference, from the vegetable kingdom; and that among the various sorts of plants the pear-tree is not the least favorite. In this way, however, Chang, though a coarse and ill-favored, as well as an exclusively prosaic character, acquires much credit in the house, and seems to be in a fair way to carry off the prize. At length Sa, by good luck, and the help of a pretty but knowing chambermaid, in a green

gauze robe, with red crape sleeves, called Yanson, succeeds in discovering the trick that has been put upon him, and proving to the satisfaction of the young lady, that he is the author of his own poems. After putting his talent to one more test by imposing upon him a difficult acrostic, as a final trial of his skill in poetry, of which he acquits himself as usual, Jasper, overcome by so many proofs of a real talent for all sorts of versification, finally gives her consent that he should apply to her father for her hand. These communications are managed through the medium of the soubrette. Sa pleads hard, not for a personal interview, the possibility of which does not occur to him even in imagination, but for an opportunity of seeing his mistress at a distance in profile. Such however is the strictness of the Chinese manners in this particular, that even for this, according to our usages, somewhat modest request, he is taken severely to task by the very chambermaid.

"It is growing late," says Sa, at the close of one of his conversations with this person, "and I must take my leave. Could not I, however, under favor of the darkness, and while there is no one here, obtain a glimpse of your young mistress, were it only in profile?"

"A strange proposal this," replied Yanson. "Let me tell you, sir, that my young lady is a person whose virtue is equal to her wit; and that she is governed in all her actions by the strictest rules of propriety. The affair in which she is now engaged is the most important of her life, and she cannot be blamed for endeavoring to obtain a husband worthy of her. But your request, sir, seems to show that your morals do not correspond with your talent. If I were to make it known to my mistress, she would despise you for it, and reject your suit without hesitation."

Thus severely reprimanded by our stern moralist in red crape sleeves and a green gauze petticoat, and being now more tractable, it seems, in taking a lady's charms on credit, than on the former occasion, Sa is fain to give the matter up, and begs a thousand pardons for his indiscretion. Even these indirect communications are considered too irregular to be made known to the old gentleman Pa; and it is agreed between the lovers that Sa, without alluding to anything that has passed, shall apply to the father through the intervention of the uncle Gu. A matrimonial negotiation must always be conducted through a third person. For this purpose Sa sets off immediately for Pekin, whither Gu had in the mean time returned. In conseVOL. XXVII.NO. 61.

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quence of his absence, Chang, now left entirely to his own resources, is soon unmasked by the father, brought to a decisive trial, from which it appears that he cannot write a passable couplet, were it his neck-verse at Hairibee,' and being thus plucked of the borrowed feathers, in which he has hitherto plumed himself, is dismissed ignominiously from the house.

Such is the solution of the second principal difficulty which obstructs the happiness of the lovers, and which carries us forward, as we have already remarked, to the middle of the third volume. From this point the current of the action proceeds with comparative smoothness, though not wholly free from shoals and rapids, the nature of which we have not room to describe in detail. The leading object of the last volume and a half is not so much to create and remove new obstructions to the marriage of the principal parties, as to bring forward the second heroine, Dream-of-a-Peartree, whose introduction is effected in the following manner.

After taking leave of his mistress in the manner above described, our hero sets off for the capital of the empire, where he expects to find uncle Gu. He gets on for some time prosperously enough; but at length falls in with a band of robbers, and is stripped of every ounce of silver that he has about him. In this embarrassing situation he has recourse to his talent for poetry to recruit his finances, or in the more popular phrase, to raise the wind.' It is observed by Voltaire, in reference to the great Frederic, that there is always some hope of a king who can write verses; and it appears from the present example, that the rule may be extended to private citizens, at least in China. It so happens that a magistrate named Li, residing at the village where the robbery takes place, is preparing a large screen in four parts, as a present for his superior officer; and having already adorned each part with a painting, wants nothing but the appropriate poetical inscriptions to complete his plan. The province of Canton, where the scene is now laid, is, it seems, not so dear to the Muses, as some others, particularly that of Nankin; and Li no sooner hears that there is a Nankin poet in town, than he invites him to his house for the purpose of putting his talent in requisition. Sa writes the four inscriptions at a sitting, for on this as on all other occasions he (and the case is the same with all the other poets that are mentioned) produces poetry of the first order with a facility only paralleled by that of the Scotts, the Southeys,

the Byrons, and the Bowrings of our time. Whenever they take the pencil in hand, the author is careful to mention the expedition with which they work; and seems to be at a loss for words and images sufficiently strong to give a complete notion of it. Thus, in the present instance, his enthusiasm at the rapidity with which his hero wrote the inscriptions, transports him above the regions of plain prose into the following quatrain;

The movement of his hand was not slow like that of a pedestrian,

But as rapid as the course of the swiftest steed.

'He starts off and checks his flight with the lightness of a winged spirit;

'His thoughts cover the paper as the fleecy clouds spread themselves over the sky.'

In the same way, when he sits down on a previous occasion, by order of his mistress, to write the acrostic which is to decide his fate, notwithstanding the delicacy of the situation, he loses nothing of the freedom of thought and expression.

6

'Pearls and diamonds,' says the author, flew about the paper like drops of rain in an April shower.'

So when the heroine produces the little chef-d'œuvre, which we quoted from the first chapter,

'Thoughts drop from her pencil, like rain from a dark summer cloud; and spring up under her rapid hand in seven-fold clusters of flowers, till the whole paper becomes, as it were, a chain of pearls and diamonds.'

It must be owned that the Chinese poets, like the Vicar of Wakefield's painter, are not sparing of their jewelry. A slow manner of composing, on the other hand, is the invariable accompaniment of dulness. Thus Pa, after bringing Chang and another stupid pretender to the experimentum crucis, goes back to his daughter, and tells her that they had been wagging their heads over their inkstands the whole afternoon, without being able to shake out a word. These passages seem to imply a false notion of the difficulty of writing good poetry, which, we imagine, does not lie in the metrical arrangement, or mere form, as is here supposed. When the rules of versification are once settled, and good models given, it is rather easier to express ideas in these regular measures, than to write harmonious prose. The difficulty lies in supplying 'the thoughts