Page:Sacred Books of the East - Volume 27.djvu/17

 &emsp;P. Gallery's translation of his expurgated text is for the most part well executed, and his notes, of which I have often made use, are admirable. I have also enjoyed the benefit of the, more recent work, "Cursus Litteraturae Sinicae," by P. Angelo Zottoli, in whom the scholarship of the earlier Jesuit missionaries has revived. In his third volume, published at Shang-hâi in 1880, there are good translations of the 1st, 5th, 10th, 20th, 21st, and 22nd Books; while the 28th and 39th are in his second volume. In the Latin which he employs, according to the traditions of his church and what is still a practice of some scholars, he is able to be more brief in his renderings than Callery and myself, but perhaps not so satisfactory to readers generally. I also referred occasionally to Signor Carlo Puini's "Li-Ki: Instituzioni, Usi e Costumanze della Cina antica; Traduzione, Commento e Note (Fascicolo Primo; Firenze, 1883)."

&emsp;The present translation is, as I said above, the first published in any European language of the whole of the Lî Kî; but another had existed in manuscript for several years,— the work of Mr. Alexander Wylie, now unhappily, by loss of eye-sight and otherwise failing health, laid aside from his important Chinese labours. I was fortunate enough to obtain possession of this when I had got to the 35th Book in my own version, and, in currying the sheets through the press, I have constantly made reference to it. It was written at an early period of Mr. Wylie's Chinese studies, and is not such as a Sinologist of his attainments and research would have produced later on. Still I have been glad to have it by me, though I may venture to say that, in construing the paragraphs and translating the characters, I have not been indebted in a single instance to him or P. Callery. The first six Books, and portions of several others, had been written out, more than once, before I finally left China in 1873; but I began again at the beginning, early in 1883, in preparing the present version. I can hardly hope that, in translating so extensive and peculiar a work, descriptive of customs and