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Rh sufficiently sure of any of their vassals to delegate them to such an office. When one raised himself to the position, they were obliged unwillingly to confirm him in it.

Five of these presiding chiefs are named during the time under our review :—Hwan of Ts‘e (683–642); Wăn of Tsin (634–627); Sëang of Sung (649–636); Muh of Ts‘in (658–620); and Chwang of Ts‘oo (612–590). The ﬁrst two, however, are the best, and I think the only representatives of the system. Hwan was endowed with an extraordinary amount of magnanimity, and Wăn had been disciplined by a long experience of misfortune, and was subtile and scheming. Both of then were fully acknowledged as directors and controllers of the States generally by the court of Chow; and it seems to me not unlikely that if Wăn had been a younger man when he came to the marquisate of Tsin, and his rule had been protracted to as great a length as that of Hwan, he would have gone on to supersede the dynasty of Chow altogether, and we should have had a dynasty of Tsin nearly nine hundred years earlier than it occurs in Chinese chronology. As it was, his successors, till nearly the end of the Ch‘un Ts‘ëw period, claimed for their State the leading place in the kingdom; and it was generally conceded to them. Though the system of which I am speaking be connected with the names of the five princes which I have mentioned, it yet continued to subsist after them. They were simply the first to vindicate, or to endeavour to vindicate, a commanding influence for the States to which they belonged throughout the kingdom; and though neither Hwan nor Wăn had any one among their successors fully equal to them, they had many who tried to assert a supremacy, and Tsin, as I have said, was long acknowledged to be 'lord of covenants.'

Sëang of Sung was not entitled to a place among the five chiefs, either from his own character, or from the strength and resources of his State. He appears rather as a madman than a man of steady purpose; and many scholars exclude this name from the category, and introduce instead Hoh-leu of Woo or Kow-ts‘ëen of Yueh. Nor is Muh of Ts‘in much better entitled to the place assigned to him, for though he was a prince of very superior character to Sëang, his inﬂuence was felt only in the west of the kingdom, and not by the States generally. Chwang of Ts‘oo, moreover, did certainly exercise the influence of a chief over several of the States, but he was not acknowledged as such by the king of Chow, and the 115]