Page:Leaves from my Chinese Scrapbook - Balfour, 1887.djvu/58

 her protector and embraced a religious life. She is said to have been extraordinarily fascinating,—though it must be confessed that the only portrait of her we have ever seen represents her as particularly plain. But eventually she was discovered in her convent by the successor of the monarch, and after years of the cleverest and most audacious intrigue, found herself in a position of power which for an entire generation proved absolutely unassailable. She was the female counterpart of the great, bad sovereign who burnt the books, boiled the sages, buried courtiers alive, and arrogated to himself the title of The First Emperor. From a purely artistic standpoint, it is a thousand pities that this woman was so vile; for the splendid audacity of her genius, and her wonderful originality and independence of character, would otherwise have combined to make her a true heroine of romance, and one of the most extraordinary and attractive characters in the history of the world. Stories of her strange extravagances are legion. Everybody has read how she claimed authority over nature, and pretended to make the peonies bloom at her command as she walked in the palace gardens; how she had one good, great counsellor, to whom she remained steadfast throughout in spite of her evil propensities; how she strengthened her power by foreign alliances; how she altered the style of her reign no fewer than seventeen times; how she attempted to change the mode of writing Chinese characters; how she held the reins of government for over twenty years in the teeth of the universal execration with which she was regarded; and how, in spite of the actual existence of a real Emperor on one hand, and the Salic law on the other, she assumed and was accorded the title of "Most Holy