Page:Sacred Books of the East - Volume 27.djvu/72

 "was still alive, and in straits, in Sung, being afraid that the lessons of the former sage (or sages) would become obscure, and the principles of the ancient Tîs and Kings fall to the ground, he made the Tâ Hsio as the warp of them, and the Kung Yung as the woof." This would seem to have been the opinion of scholars in that early time, and the only difficulty in admitting it is that Kâng Hsüan does not mention it. Notwithstanding his silence, the conviction that Khung Kî wrote both treatises has become very strong in my mind. There is that agreement in the matter, method, and style of the two, which almost demands for them a common authorship.

A fuller account of the ceremony of capping is obtained from portions of the ninth and other Books, where it comes in only incidentally, than from this Book in which we might expect from the title to find all the details of it brought together. But the object of the unknown writer was to glorify the rite as the great occasion when a youth stepped from his immaturity into all the privileges and responsibilities of a man, and to explain some of the usages by which it had been sought from the earliest times to mark its importance. This intention is indicated by the second character in the title called Î, which we have met with only once before in the name of a Book,—in Kî Î, "the Meaning of Sacrifices," the title of XXI. It is employed in the titles of this and the five Books that follow, and always with the same force of "meaning," "signification," "ideas underlying the ceremony." Callery renders correctly Kwan Î by "Signification de la Prise du Chapeau Viril."

The Chinese cap of manhood always suggests the toga virilis of the Romans; but there was a difference between the institutions of the two peoples. The age for assuming the toga was fourteen; that for receiving the cap was twenty. The capped Chinese was still young, but he had grown to man's estate; the gowned Roman might have reached puberty, but he was little more than a boy.