sayings, which had been extolled as the very epitome of wisdom, were now voted jejune and commonplace. His teaching was found to be shallow, disjointed, unsatisfying. He was blamed for his materialistic bias, for his rigid formalism, for his poverty of ideas, for his lack of spiritual elevation. Comparisons, much in his disfavour, were drawn between him and the founders of other world-systems of religion and ethics. All this before the circumstances of his career had been studied, before the surface of contemporary Chinese history had been so much as scratched, before the host of native commentators and critics had been consulted, or their existence even become known; above all, before the very book which contained his authentic sayings had been translated with anything approaching to exactness or understanding, or with a faint realisation of its numerous difficulties and pit-falls.

Such was still the deplorable state of things when Legge set to work on his translation of the Confucian Canon, which when completed many years later, with its exhaustive prolegomena, notes and appendices, formed a truly wonderful monument of research and erudition. With its publication, Chinese scholarship was carried at once to a higher plane, and foreign study of Confucian doctrine began in earnest. The heavy accumulations of ignorance and error were in large part removed, and the figure of the great Teacher began at last to emerge from the "obliterating sands of time." His sayings were no longer read as interesting but desultory fragments of conversation, but studied in relation to the events of his life. From various Chinese sources, the chief of which were the Analects themselves and Ssŭ-ma Ch‘ien's biography, Legge managed to compile a good and coherent account of the sage's life, work and wanderings, which was an enormous advance on anything that had been done before, and is not likely, even in the future, to undergo any considerable addition or amendment. There are many minor points which may be disputed, and many long blanks which may never be filled up, but taken as a whole, the chronology and the leading events of the life of Confucius must now be considered as finally settled.

If Legge is on firm ground where hard facts are concerned, it is far otherwise when he comes to draw inferences from these facts, to sum up the salient principles of Confucian ethics, and to pass judgment on the character of Confucius himself. His pronouncements on these points, too hastily accepted as final, need to be carefully re-examined and, as I shall hope to show, largely modified if not totally reversed. His opinion, of course, was based chiefly on his own interpretation of the more important sayings in the Analects, in translating which he had the oral help of native scholars, besides the benefit of voluminous standard commentaries. Thus equipped for his task, it cannot but appear strange that he, admittedly a great sinologue, should have gone so far astray as to miss the very core and essence of the doctrines to the elucidation of which he devoted most of his life. The explanation may lie in the fact that he was a Christian missionary in the first place, and only secondly a scientific student; he had come to teach and convert the heathen, not to be taught or converted by them. This preconceived idea acted as a drag on the free use of his understanding, and prevented him from entering whole-heartedly into his subject. We are told that the Master himself had "no foregone conclusions," but Legge's whole attitude to Confucianism bespoke one comprehensive and fatal foregone conclusion—the conviction that it must at every point prove inferior to Christianity. A certain inelasticity of mind showed itself also in the way in which he approached the work of translation. He was too apt to look upon a Chinese word as something rigid and unchanging in its content, which might be uniformly rendered by a single English equivalent. Delicate shades of meaning he too often ruthlessly ignored. Now there is a certain number of Chinese terms which mirror Chinese ideas, but have really no absolute equivalent in English at all, and must therefore be translated with the aid of circumlocution, and in such a way as to suit the context and the general spirit of the passage. It is in such terms, unfortunately, that the very essence and inner significance of the Confucian teaching are contained. Obviously, if proper equivalents are not given, the whole sense of the passages in which they occur will be lost or violently distorted. Worse still, the judgments laboriously built up on such rotten foundations will be hopelessly vitiated. Here, indeed, we have an object-lesson of the importance, clearly recognised by Confucius himself, of "defining terms" and making "words harmonise with things." Indispensable as such a process is for any investigation in which language plays a part, it is doubly so when words have to be transplanted, as it were, from their native soil to one differing from it in almost every conceivable quality. Such an operation can only be successful if carried out with the utmost delicacy and care, and no amount of erudition can supply the want of that instinctive feeling for the right word which is the translator's choicest gift. The scope of the present work forbids my entering into details, but some broad examples of failure in this respect will be noted later on.

Of the life of Confucius only the barest sketch can be given here, but stress may be laid on one or two points which it is important to bear in mind. Confucius was born at a time when the feudal system, established several centuries earlier by the founder of the Chou dynasty, was showing unmistakable signs of disruption and decay. It is almost certain that China had been feudally governed from the very earliest times, but Wu Wang placed the whole system on a seemingly firmer basis than ever. He divided his realm into a large number of vassal states, which he bestowed upon his own kith and kin who had helped him to the throne. Thus the Empire really came to resemble the huge united family which Chinese political theorists declare it to be, and for a short time all seems to have worked smoothly. But as the bonds of kinship grew looser, the central government gradually lost all effective control over its unruly children, and the various states were soon embroiled in perpetual feuds and struggles among themselves, besides being usually at loggerheads with the parent dynasty. The state of things that ensued may be likened (though on a far larger scale) to several Wars of the Roses going on at the same time, or better still, to the turbulence of the later days of the Holy Roman Empire, when the fealty of its members had become merely nominal. Matters were further complicated in many of the states by the upgrowth of large and powerful families which often attempted either by insidious methods or by open violence to wrest the supreme authority into their own hands. Thus in Lu, the comparatively small state to which Confucius belonged, there were three such families, the Chi, the Mêng, and the Shu; the heads of these clans, of whom we hear a good deal in the Analects, had already, by the time of Confucius, reduced their lawful prince (or duke, as he is generally called) to a condition of virtual dependency. On the other hand, they themselves were sometimes threatened by the lawless behaviour of their own officers, such as the ambitious chariot-driver, Yang Huo,[1] who thought nothing of seizing towns or even the person of his own chief, in order to hold him to ransom. Thus, though the period of the "Warring States"