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Rh so. What were the historiographers to do? If they called the king when living a viscount, it would seem to us reasonable that they might have been satisfied to call him a duke when dead. But this would have been a direct falsification of the notification which they had received from the State of the deceased. They therefore ignored the burial altogether, and so managed to make their suzerain of Chow the only king that appeared in their annals. Confucius sanctioned the practice; or if he suppressed all the paragraphs in which the burials of the lords of Ts‘oo and Woo were entered, either as dukes or kings, then specially against him lies the charge of thus shrinking from looking the real state of things fairly in the face, as if he could make it any better by taking no notice of it.

[ii.] A large list of cases of ignoring might be made out by comparing the notes and narratives of Tso with the entries of the Ch‘un Ts‘ëw, but the cases of concealing the truth are much more numerous; and in fact it is difficult to draw the line in regard to many of them between mere concealment and misrepresentation. I have quoted, on 13, from Maou K‘e-ling many startling instances of the manner in which the simple notice ‘he died' is used, covering almost every possible way of violent and unnatural death. It may be said that most of them relate to the deaths of princes of other States, and that the historiographers of Loo simply entered the notices as they were communicated to them from those States. Might we not have expected, however, that when their entries came under the revision of Confucius, he would have altered them so as to give his readers at least an inkling of the truth? But it is the same with the chronicling of deaths in Loo itself. Duke Yin was basely murdered, with the connivance of his brother who succeeded him, and all that is said about it in I. xi. 4 is— ‘In winter, in the 11th month, on Jin-shin, the duke died.' His successor was murdered in turn, with circumstances of peculiar atrocity, and the entry in II. xviii. 2 is simply—'In summer, in the 4th month, on Ping-tsze, the duke died in Ts‘e.' In III. xxxii. three deaths are recorded. We read:—'In autumn, in the 7th month, on Kwei-sze, duke [Hwan's son] Ya died;' 'In the 8th month, on Kwei-hae, the duke died in the State-chamber;' 'In winter, in the 10th month, the duke's son Pan died.' Only the second of these deaths was a natural one. Ya was compelled to take poison by a half-brother Ke-yëw, under circumstances which are held by 42]