Page:Elementary Chinese - San Tzu Ching (1900).djvu/14

IV to be President of the Board of Rites. As a statesman however he was not an unqualified success, and in 1274 he retired, disgusted with official life.

Among the countless editions of the original San Tzŭ Ching which have appeared during the past six hundred years, there is one which may be said to give the textus receptus, accompanied by the very best commentary which has hitherto been produced. It is by a scholar named 王相 Wang Hsiang, and was published in 1786. Another almost equally well-known and more pretentious edition is by one 賀興思 Ho Hsing-ssŭ. In the preface to this, written as usual by an enthusiastic friend, the San Tzŭ Ching is likened unto "a jewelled sword, which is an object of reverence to all." The writer goes on to lament that "boys merely learn to repeat the bald text, remaining ignorant of the fact that this book is positively a pocket edition of 'The Mirror of History.' For although there is a commentary by Wang Hsiang, that scholar did not see the whole leopard;"—implying that his field of view was narrow, like that of a man looking through a tube at a leopard, and seeing only one or two of its spots. This is unfair. Ho Hsing-ssŭ appropriated the best part of Wang Hsiang's commentary, and drew out his own to a quite unnecessary length by additions which furnished little that was new.

From the above it may be guessed that the San Tzŭ Ching, a hornbook for boys, contains a text upon which scholars have not disdained to exercise their wits. Some of it is indeed quite beyond the comprehension of a child. It has also proved to be more or less beyond the comprehension of a host of foreign translators. The prose translations of Bridgman in 1835 and of Julien in 1864 must be relegated to the limbo of pioneer work. In 1873 I myself published a metrical version based on the above, which passed muster at that time, but which will not do now. In 1879 Père Zottoli, S.J.,