Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 16.djvu/13

Rh M E N M E N is ill-suited even to choral metre. The Old Comedy was worked by men of real genius, who &quot; were indeed giants, while the men of Menander s day only showed how strong and thorough was the culture which in art and literature outlived the decadence of the nation.&quot; 1 In all, we have, as collected by Meineke, 1045 fragments of Menander, of which 515 can be referred to known plays, the titles of those quoted from amounting to ninety, and including the Terentian Andria, Adelphi, Eunuchus, Heaiitontimorumenos. These fragments contain about 1650 verses or parts of verses, not including a considerable number of words quoted expressly as from Menander by the old lexicographers. Besides all these there are not fewer than 758 monostich verses separately preserved in MSS., though some of these are met with in the other and longer frag ments. Many of the fragments are obscure, some corrupt ; and they have been a fertile field for critical acumen from the time of Bentley. Not unfrequently we come upon the shrewd or original remark of an observer. Thus (frag. 7) &quot;A poor man has no relations, for no one acknowledges him, lest he should beg.&quot; Frag. 145, &quot;Every thing that takes place is brought about by law, necessity, or fashion.&quot; 237, &quot;The gods do not save men through any human means (prayer or sacrifices) ; if they did, the human would have more power than the divine.&quot; 275, &quot;Poverty is the most easily cured of all evils ; any friend can do it by merely putting his hand in his pocket.&quot; 397, &quot;A poor man who lives in a large town makes himself more wretched than he need ; for he cannot help comparing with his own the luxurious lives of the rich.&quot; 435, &quot;No man realizes the extent of a sin when he commits it ; it is afterwards that he sees it.&quot; 460, &quot;A man is convinced not so much by what is said as by the manner of saying it.&quot; 474, &quot;There is one thing only that hides vulgarity, villainy, and every other fault, wealth. Everything but that is carped at and criticized.&quot; 517, &quot;People who have no merit of their own generally boast of their birth and their ancestors. But every living man has ancestors, or he would not be a living man.&quot; 578, &quot; Wealth acts on a man as wind does on a ship, it often forces him out of his proper course.&quot; 663, &quot; Many a young lady says a great deal in her own favour by saying nothing at all.&quot; 688, &quot;A man who abuses his own father is practising blasphemy against the gods.&quot; In fact, Menander is characteristi cally a sententious writer, like Euripides, with whom in the general style of his writings, though not, of course, in his somewhat loose and irregular versification, he is sometimes compared. (F. A. P.) MENCIUS, the Latinized form of Mang-tsze, &quot;Mr Mang,&quot; or &quot;Mang the philosopher,&quot; a name in China only second as a moral teacher to that of Confucius. His statue or spirit-tablet (as the case may be) has occupied, in the temples of the sage, since our llth century, a place among &quot;the four assessors&quot;; and since 1530 A.D. his title has been &quot;the philosopher Mang, sage of the second degree.&quot; The Mangs or Mang-suns had been in the time of Con fucius one of the three great clans of Ld (all descended from the marquis Hwan, 711-694 B.C.), which he had en deavoured to curb. Their power had subsequently been broken, and the branch to which Mencius belonged had settled in Tsau, a small adjacent principality, the name of which still remains in Tsau hsien, a district of Yenchau Shan-tung. A magnificent temple to Mencius is the chief attraction of the district city. The present writer visited it in 1873, and was struck by a large marble statue of him in the courtyard in front. It shows much artistic skill, and gives the impression of a man strong in body and mind, thoughtful and fearless. His lineal representative lives in the city, and thousands of Mangs are to be found in the neighbourhood. The dates of some of the principal events in Mencius s life are fixed by a combination of evidence, and his death is referred by common consent to the year 289 B.C. He had lived to a great age, some say to his eighty-fourth year, placing his birth in 372 B.C., and others to his ninety- seventh, placing it in 385. All that we are told of his father is that he died in the third year of the child, who was thus left to the care of his mother. She was a lady of superior character, and well discharged her trust. Her virtues and dealings with her son were celebrated by a great writer in the first century before our era, and for two thousand years she has been the model mother of China. 1 Mahaffy, Ibid., p. 490. We have no accounts of Mencius for many years after his boyhood, and he is more than forty years old when he comes before us as a public character. He must have spent much time in study, investigating the questions which were rife as to the fundamental principles of morals and society, and brooding over the condition of the country. The his tory, the poetry, the institutions, and the great men of the past had received his careful attention. He intimates that he had been in communication with men who had been disciples of Confucius. That sage had become to him the chief of mortal men, the object of his untiring admiration ; and in the doctrines which he had taught Mencius recog nized the truth for want of an appreciation of which the bonds of order all round him were being relaxed, and the kingdom hastening to a general anarchy. When he first comes forth from Tsau, he is accompanied by several eminent disciples. He had probably imitated Confucius in becoming the master of a school, and en couraging the resort to it of inquiring minds that he might resolve their doubts and unfold to them the right methods of government. One of his sayings is that it would be a greater delight to the superior man to get the youth of brightest promise around him and to teach and train them than to enjoy the revenues of the kingdom. His intercourse with his followers was not so intimate as that of Confucius had been with the members of his selected circle ; and, while he maintained his dignity among them, he was not able to secure from them the same homage and reverent admiration. More than a century had elapsed since the death of Confucius, and during that period the feudal kingdom of Chau had been showing more and more of the signs of dissolution, and portentous errors that threatened to upset all social order were widely disseminated. The sentiment of loyalty to the dynasty had disappeared. Several of the marquises and other feudal princes of earlier times had usurped the title of king. The smaller fiefs had been absorbed by the larger ones, or reduced to a state of helpless dependence on them. Tsin, after greatly extend ing its territory, had broken up into three powerful king doms, each about as large as England. Mencius found the nation nominally one, and with the traditions of two thousand years affirming its essential unity, but actually divided into seven monarchies, each seeking to subdue the others under itself. The consequences were constant war fare and chronic misery. In Confucius s time we meet with recluses who had withdrawn in disgust from the world and its turmoil ; but these had now given place to a class of men who came forth from their retirements provided with arts of war or schemes of policy which they recommended to the contend ing chiefs, ever ready to change their allegiance as they were moved by whim or interest. Mencius was once asked about two of them, &quot; Are they not really great men 1 Let them be angry, and all the princes are afraid. Let them live quietly, and the flames of trouble are everywhere ex tinguished.&quot; He looked on them as little men, and delighted to proclaim his idea of the great man in such language as the following : &quot; To dwell in love, the wide house of the world, to stand in propriety, the correct seat of the world, and to walk in righteousness, the great path of the world ; when he obtains his desire for office, to practise his principles for the good of the people, and when that desire is disappointed, to practise them alone ; to be above the power of riches and honours to make dissipated, of poverty and mean condition to make swerve from the right, and of power and force to make bend, these characteristics constitute the great man.&quot; Most vivid are the pictures which Mencius gives of the condition of the people in consequence of the wars of the states. &quot; The royal ordinances were violated ; the multi-