hors, whether a German can be a bel esprit,' too much at heart. In labouring with might and main to disprove the inference of the jesuit, they have very nearly afforded some practical arguments to those who might wish to maintain the negative side of the question. In many respects, a faithful type of that nation may be found in Sherlock's fat German baron, who was so smitten, by the liveliness of his French companions, that he disturbed, the hotel at midnight, by jumping upon the chairs and tables in his bed-room, pour apprentre a tetre fif. The herr Grobianus, in earnest admiration of the brisk philosophers of the Encyclopédie, soon succeeded in drilling himself into a kind of portentous agility; and fully emulated his enlightened tutors' in throwing off the old-fashioned prejudices of his grand-fathers. He could not, however, persuade the military to turn their cannon against the fortresses of despotism and superstition, so he was forced to content himself with shewing his spirit by lolling out his tongue and making wry faces at the parson. But there were other imputations against the taste of Grobianus, which still subjected him to the ridicule of his Gallic instructors. Because he preferred sour crout to soup meager, and liked his neighbour's wife less than his own, he was accused of want of delicacy in either appetite. Grobianus did not care to part with the substantial viands to which he had been accustomed; but he felt nettled at the latter half of the charge: so he unbuttoned his waistcoat, after dinner, like Falstaff, and, with much ado, taught himself to sigh; and he was fain to leave his home and his spouse at nights for the purpose of wandering in the pale moonshine, and listening to the nightingale arm in arm with Wilhelmina. The Germans have attached a vast degree of importance to novel and romance; and this species of composition forms a very bulky division in their literary history, it having been cultivated by almost every author of real or fancied eminence. We are willing to believe that amongst heaps of trumpery, they can select some specimens of genuine merit; as far, however, as we are enabled to judge from a limited acquaintance with them, they all read uncomfortably. What are supposed to be the affections of the heart are descanted upon, until the tone of the novelist assumes the whine of a sick lap-dog; the characters are lost in clouds of puffy eloquence; and the whole is richly interlarded with a spurious morality, which has all the consistency of the piety of Mother Cole, and the pithiness of an undertaker's motto. It is time to leave the Germans and to return once more to Mr. Dunlop. After the ungrateful employment of groping about for flaws and blemishes, we are happy to be called upon to discharge a more pleasing duty. Much of Mr. Dunlop's composition, and in particular that which relates to the Italian novelists and the modern modern French and English novels and romances, is executed with judgment and correctness: as a specimen, we give the following lively criticism on a popular writer. "Of this justly celebrated woman, the principal object seems to have been to raise powerful emotions of surprise, awe, and especially terror, by means and agents apparently supernatural. To effect this, she places her characters, and transports her readers, amid scenes which are calculated strongly to excite the mind, and to predispose it for spectral illusion: Gothic castles, gloomy abbeys, subterraneous passages, the haunts of banditti, the sobbing of the wind, and the howling of the storm, are all employed for this purpose; and in order that these may have their full effect, the principal character in her romances is always a lovely and unprotected female, encompassed with snares, and surrounded by villains. But, that in which the works of Mrs. Radcliffe chiefly differ from those by which they were preceded is, that in the Castle of Otranto and Old English Baron, the machinery is in fact supernatural; whereas the means and agents employed by Mrs. Radcliffe are in reality human, and such as can be, or, at least, are professed to be, explained by natural events. By these means she certainly excites a very powerful interest, as the reader meanwhile experiences the full impression, of the wonderful and terrific appearances; but there is one defect which attends this mode of composition, and which seems indeed to be inseparable from it. As it is the intention of the author, that the mysteries should be afterwards cleared up, they are all mountains in labour; and even when she is successful in explaining the marvellous circumstances which have occurred, we feel disappointed that we should have been so agitated by trifles. But the truth is, they never are properly explained; and the author, in order to raise strong emotions of fear and horror in the body of the work, is tempted to go lengths, to account for which the subsequent explanations seem utterly inadequate. Thus, for example, after all the wonder and dismay, and terror and expectation, excited by the mysterious chamber in the castle of Udolpho, how much are we disappointed and disgusted to and that all this pother has been raised by a waxen statue. In short, we may say not only of Mrs. Radcliffe's castles, but of her works in general, that they abound "in passages that lead to nothing." In the writings of this author there is a considerable degree of uniformity and mannerism, which is perhaps the case with all the productions of a strong and original genius. Her heroines too nearly resemble each other, or rather they possess hardly any shade of difference, They have all blue eyes and auburn hair-the form of each of them has "the airy lightness of a nymph"-they are all fond of watching the setting sun, and catching the purple tints of evening, and the vivid glow or fading splendour of the western horizon. Unfortunately they are all likewise early risers. I say unfortunately, for in every exigency Mrs. Radcliffe's heroines are provided with a pencil and paper, and the sun is never allowed to rise nor set in peace. Like Tilburina in the play, they are "inconsolable to the minuet in Ariadne," and in the most dis tressing tressing circumstances find time to compose sonnets to sun-rise, the bat, a sea-nymph, a lily, or a butterfly.'-vol. iii. pp. 385, 6, 7. We are quite tired of giving good advice to authors. Our pains are all thrown away upon the stiff-necked generation; and we may complain with the Dean of St. Patrick that our exhortations could not be less attended to if they were delivered from the pulpit. We can therefore scarcely hope that Mr. Dunlop will listen to us in recommending him to bestow, before his next edition, a thorough revision upon that portion of his work which constitutes its chief attraction-we mean the fictions of the middle ages, and to keep the originals constantly by his side. At all events, we wish him to treat it with more feeling than is displayed in his present tone and manner. An author will never gain or, indeed, deserve much credit, unless he acts the lover's part towards his undertaking. He must discover graces which elude the vulgar gaze and even the very blemishes should be considered as approximating to beauties Nominibus mollire licet mala: fusca vocetur This disposition of mind enables him to toil with delight, and to impart the genial enthusiasm to others, who respect him in return for making them sensible of new sources of intellectual pleasure. At present, Mr. Dunlop seems to be somewhat ashamed of the companions whom he introduces, and in order to ward off from himself the ridicule of those who are perhaps incapable of appreciating their real worth, he is anxious to be the first to sneer at the society which he has chosen. Yet to the numerous class of light readers who seek entertainment and novelty, and general information, Mr. Dunlop's work will be highly acceptable; and its faults themselves will, perhaps, contribute to adapt it to general perusal. ART. VI. Translations from the original Chinese: with Notes. Canton; China. small 4to. Printed by order of the Select Committee. 1815. OURS being the only journal that has employed a portion of its pages occasionally, and we trust not uselessly, in marking the progress of Chinese literature in Europe, we should hold ourselves inexcusable were we to pass over unnoticed these maiden productions of the Canton press. We are anxious likewise to perform an act of justice in withdrawing those strictures which, towards the early part of our labours, we found ourselves compelled to make, on the total neglect of the Chinese language by those who were so materially interested in the cultivation of it. That reproach can no longer be urged against the servants of the East India Company resident at Canton; they are become fully sensible of the important advantages to be gained, in every ordinary transaction, by a knowledge of the language of those with whom they have to communicate. em Sir George Staunton was unquestionably the first who opened to Europeans any of the useful treasures of Chinese literature. His elaborate translation of the Ta-tsing-leu-lee, or fundamental laws and institutions of the Ta-tsing dynasty, made us acquainted with the real practical machinery by which the Chinese government is enabled to keep together, in one bond of union, the multitudinous population of that extensive empire. Before this valuable work appeared, all the world thought, and the Jesuit missionaries encouraged the opinion, that the Chinese had found out the secret of keeping men in order by the application of certain refined maxims of morality to the practical operations of the government,—a secret which had elevated that nation to the acme of political wisdom; so that when M. Pauw asserted that the Chinese were actually governed by the whip and the bamboo, he was held up by the missionaries as an ignorant and prejudiced writer. M. Pauw's statements however were amply verified by the two subsequent embassies of Lord Macartney and Mr. Titsing to the court of Pekin. The truth is, that the missionaries suppressed the facts that every day came immediately before their eyes, and published only what they read in Chinese books; they gave the theory of the government, but kept back the practice-the moral sentiments, but not the moral conduct of the people; and they omitted to tell, what they must have known, and what Mr. Morrison very soon discovered, that there is no nation in the world in which professions and practice are more at variance than in China.' They wrote as if the common-place maxims of morality drawn from the ancient writings of Confucius were actually the rule of conduct with the Chinese: in short, as if China was a nation of sages, in which philosophy and science not only flourished among the upper classes, but produced wholesome fruit in the multitude. The corrupt jargon of the schools of Boudh and Brahma, rendered more absurd and unintelligible by translation into an obscure and symbolical language, was called history, and philosophy, and science; and the most trifling sayings of the ancients, provided they were old enough, were set down as sublime truths. It is the more remarkable that the French missionaries should stuff their communications with theories built on moral sentences, since the real state of the government, its public acts, its views and We would make an exception, however, of the Hao-kiau-tchuan, or ' Pleasing History,' translated by the Bishop of Dromore from a Portugueze manuscript, which is a genuine Chinese novel, containing a faithful picture of the domestic manners, habits, and character of this singular people. motives, motives, all the trials, acquittals and condemnations, with the confirmation or modification of the sentences by the emperor; all reports of civil commotious and military operations, the state of the harvest, of embankments, &c. are daily published in the Pekin Gazette; and are, through this medium, communicated to every part of the empire. It is not the less remarkable that there are still in Paris a few learned and sensible men, who, having acquired a smattering of the Chinese language, are treading in the precise steps of their predecessors, admiring every thing that is perfectly unintelligible, and puzzling themselves with lucubrations on Hindoo cosmogony transfused into Chinese characters, and with vain endeavours to strike something like sense out of a jargon that never had any. If M. de Sacy, Julius von Klaproth, and Doctor Abel Remusat are desirous that the world should really profit from their Chinese studies, we would recommend them to leave the digrams and trigrams of Fo-hi, for something less ancient and more intelligible; let them follow the example of the gentlemen whose labours we are about to notice, and they may then do the literary world some service. The first part of the little volume now before us contains a selection of reports and edicts from the Pekin Gazette, translated by Mr. Morrison the missionary, of whose literary labours we have already had occasion to speak. The most interesting are those which relate to a rebellion raised by a certain sect (the Tienlee) with a view of expelling Kia-King, the present emperor, from his throne, headed, it has been supposed, by his own brother, though the knowledge of this part of the transaction is properly suppressed. It has been the custom of all the emperors of the present Tartar dynasty to pass the summer months at Gehol in Tartary, on account of the heat; or, as the Chinese say, to keep open the communication with the country from which they came, in the event of a change of circumstances making it necessary for them to retreat thither. On the 18th October, 1813, as His Imperial Majesty Kia-King was returning from this summer excursion, and about to enter Pekin, a party of conspirators broke into the imperial palace, and kept possession of a part of it for three days. On this occasion His Imperial Majesty issued a proclamation, which, as he candidly states, was to announce a revolution, and to take blame to himself. After observing that he had scarcely mounted the throne when the sect of the Pe-lien (the white water lily-the nelumbia) caused a revolt in four provinces, which took eight years in subduing; that another sect, the Tien-lee, (heavenly reason, illuminati,) whom Mr. Morrison makes His Imperial Majesty to call a banditti of vagabonds,' suddenly created disturbances; but now,' he continues, rebellion has 1 suddenly |