Page:The lives of celebrated travellers (Volume 2).djvu/160

 *culate an eclipse, were ignorant of the art of founding cannon, of building chimneys, of making clocks and watches; and, what was infinitely worse than all this, they were under so little moral restraint that men incapable of maintaining a family married several wives with the execrable design of exposing or murdering their offspring. The existence of foundling hospitals in civilized countries proves that there everywhere exist individuals to whom the offshoots of their own being are objects of no solicitude; ancient nations, too, sometimes exposed weak or deformed children; but no people, as far as I have been able to discover, ever arrived at that pitch of depravity which distinguishes the Chinese, "among whom," says Sir George Staunton, "habit seems to have familiarized a notion that life only becomes truly precious, and inattention to it criminal, after it has continued long enough to be endowed with a mind and sentiment; but that mere dawning existence may be suffered to be lost without scruple, though it cannot without reluctance."

In the fine arts the Chinese have made but little progress, having no knowledge of sculpture, and very little of painting. Their literature, it is very clear, contains none of those splendid creations of genius which we might expect to find among a people partly civilized during so many ages, and which actually exist in the languages of Persia and Hindostan. Their popular religion is the grossest and most corrupt form of Buddhism; and even this, as well as their philosophy and arts, such as they are, they originally borrowed from Hindostan, which seems in antiquity to have been the great workshop where all the fantastic systems, religious and philosophical, which were current among the heathen were fabricated.

Captain Ismailoff seems, like Lord Amherst, to have felt a peculiar antipathy to the practice of bowing nine times before the Chinese emperor; but at