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Rh name were the work of the historiographers or recorders, who, we know, were attached to the royal court and to the courts of the various feudal princes. I have spoken of those officers in the prolegomena to vol.III. p.11, and in those to vol.IV., pp.24–26. Pan Koo in the same chapter from which I have made a quotation from him in the preceding paragraph, says that the historiographers of the Left recorded words, that is, Speeches, Charges, &c., and those of the Right recorded affairs; that the words formed the Shoo, and the affairs the Ch‘un Ts‘ëw.

But if we are to judge of what the Ch‘un Ts‘ëw of the States were from what the one Ch‘un Ts‘ëw preserved to us is, the statement that they contained the records of events cannot be admitted without considerable modiﬁcation. There can have been no details in them, but only the briefest possible compends of the events, or references to them.

That there were the records of events, kept in the oﬁices of historiography, must be freely admitted, and it will appear, when I come to speak of the commentary of Tso K‘ëw-ming, that to them we are mainly indebted for the narratives which impart so much interest to his Work. But the entries in the various Ch‘un Ts‘ëw were not made from them,—not made from them fairly and honestly as when one tries to give in a very few words the substance of a narrative which is before him. Those entries related to events in the State itself, at the royal court, and in other States with which it maintained friendly relations. Communications about remarkable and ominous occurrences in one State, and about important transactions, were sent from it to others, and the receiving State entered them in its Ch‘un Ts‘ëw in the terms in which they were made out, without regard to whether they conveyed a correct account of the facts or not. Then the great events in a State itself,—those connected with the ruling House and the principal families or clans in it, its relations with other States, and natural phænomena supposed to affect the general wellbeing, also found a place. Sometimes these things were recorded under the special direction of the ruler; at other times we must suppose that the historiographers committed them to their tablets as a part of their official duty. How far truth, an exact conformity of the record with the circumstances, was observed in these entries about the internal affairs of a State, is a point on which it is not competent for me at this point of the inquiry to pronounce an opinion.

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