Page:Oriental Religions - China.djvu/469

Rh has put itself into the form of written record, and that this record includes every description of secular memorial known to our own experience, elaborated by age after age of utilizing effort. Of this systematic and all-embracing construction for practical uses, the Cyclopædia is of course always, there as here, the crowning result; and its compilation is a source of fame which emperors may well have coveted. The true imperial immortality may be said to consist in collecting libraries and securing the services of scholars like Ma-touan-lin and Sse-ma-thsian; sometimes in even presiding, like Kang-hi and Kien-lung, over the whole process of literary enterprises that vie in vastness with the dreams of Mongol world-conquerors, and infinitely surpass them in success. That a still intenser elaboration is applied to the language itself appears from the sixty dictionaries enumerated by Wylie; and prodigious stores of mathematical and astronomical data testify to the patient struggles of this people to master even those sciences for which they had no such natural gifts as the star-gazing races of Assyria and Egypt.

Anthologies go back to the sixth century; and have once flowered out into a collection of fifty thousand poems from a single dynasty, upon which two thousand compilers were employed. Where every feature in literature is colossal, we are not surprised at the mountains of commentation that are said to have been piled, during single epochs, upon the songs of more living ages that preceded them. Forms of ethical literature are exhausted; and it may suggest thankfulness that the difficulty of mastering the language is likely to save us from the sudden avalanche of didactics which the nibs of busy pens might bring upon our heads. But these snows from Chinese mountains would at least be immeasurably purer than the mud streams that pour from great sluices of the Western press. And if the vast record is a monument of