The Crest-Wave Of Evolution Part 28

We learn from him what enormous activity in letters was to be found in those days in his native Spain; where every town had its center of learning and apostles and active propaganda of culture. Such things denote an ancient cultural habit, lapsed for a time, and then revived.

Another great Spainiard, and the best man in literature of the age, was Quintilian: gracious, wise, and of high Theosophic ideals, especially in education. He was born in A.D. 35; and was probably the greatest literary critic of cla.s.sical antiquity.

For twenty years, from 72 until his death, he was at the head of the teaching profession in Rome. The "teaching" was, of course, in rhetoric. Rome resounded with speech-makings; and Gaul, Spain, and Africa were probably louder with it than Rome. Though the end of education then was to turn out speech-makers,--as it is now to turn out money-makers,--I do not see but that the Romans had the best of it,--Quintilian saw through all to fundamental truths; he taught that your true speech-maker must be first a true man. He went thoroughly into the training of the orator,--more thoroughly, even from the standpoint of pure technique, than any other Greek or Roman writer;--but would base it all upon character, balance of the faculties,--in two words, Raja-Yoga. Pliny the Younger was among his pupils, and owed much to him; also is there to prove the value of Quintilian's method;--for Quintilian turned out Pliny a true gentlman. Prose in those days,--that is, rhetoric,--was tending ever more to flamboyancy and extravagance: a current which Quintilian stood against valiantly. We find in him, as critic, just judgment, sane good taste, wide and generous sympathies;--a tendency to give the utmost possible credit even where compelled in the main to condemn;--as he was in the case of Senaca. He had the faculty of hitting off in a phrase the whole effect of a man's style; as when he speaks of the "milky richness of Livy," and the "immortal swiftness of Sall.u.s.t." *

------ * _Encyclopaedia Britannica;_ article 'Quintilian'

So then, to sum up a little: I think we gain from these times a good insight into cyclic workings. First, we shall see that the cycles are there, and operative: action and reaction regnant in the world,--a tide in the affairs of men; and strong souls coming in from time to time, to manipulate reactions, to turn the currents at strategic points in time; making things, despite what evils may be ahead, flow on to higher levels than their own weight would carry them to: thus did Augustus and Tiberius; --or throwing them down, as the merry Julius did, from bright possibilities to a sad and lightless actuality. For perhaps we have been suffering because of Julius' exploit ever since; and certainly, no matter what Neros and Caligulas followed them, the world was a long time the better for the ground the great first two Principes captured from h.e.l.l.--And next, we shall learn to beware of being too exact, precise, and water-tight with out computations and conceptions of these cycles: we shall see that nature works in curves and delicate wave-lines, not in broken off bits and sudden changes. Rome was going down in Tiberius' reign: she was bad enough then, heaven knows; though we may put her pa.s.sing below the meridian at or near the end of it;-- conveniently, in the year 36. And then, what with (1) the tenseness of the gloom and the severity of suffering in the reigns of Caligula, Nero, and Domitian;--and (2) the inflow of new and cleaner blood from the provinces at all times but especially under Vespasian; and above all, (3) the Theosophic impulse whose outward visible sign is the mission of Apollonius and Moderatus:--we find her ready to emerge into light in 96, when Nerva came to the throne, instead of having to wait the five more years for the end of the half-cycle;--although we may well suppose it took that time at least for Nerva and Trajan to clear things up and settle them. So we may keep this scheme of dates in memory as indicative: a (rough) half-cycle before 29 B.C., that of dawn and darkest hour preceding it; 29 B.C. to 36 A.D.

daylight; 36 to 101, night and the beginnings of a new dawn.

And now we must turn to China.

Dusk came on in Rome with the death of Tiberius in A.D. 37; but what is dusk in the west is dawn in the east of the world. In 35 Han Kw.a.n.g-wuti had put down the Crimson-Eyebrow rebellion, and seated himself firmly on the throne. The preceding half-cycle, great in Rome under Augustus and Tiberius, had been a time, first of puppet emperors, then of illegalism and usurpation, then of civil war. Han Kw.a.n.g-wuti put an end to all that, and opened, in 35, a new cycle of his own.

But there is also an old cycle to be taken into account: the original thirteen-decade period of the Hans, that began in 194, and ended its first "day" in 63 or so,--to name convenient dates.

I should, if I believed in this cyclic law, look for a recurrence of that: a new day to dawn, under its influence, in 66 or 67 A.D., thirteen decades after the old one ended,--and to last until 196 or 197. But on the other hand, here is Han Kw.a.n.g-wuti starting things going in 35, a matter of thirty-two years ahead of time,--catching the flow of force just as it diminished in Rome.--And this thirty-two years, you may note, with what odd months we may suppose thrown in, is in itself a quarter-cycle.

Now cyclic impulses waste; a second day of splendor will commonly be found a Silver Age, where the first was Golden: it will often be more perfect and refined, but much less vigorous, than the first. So I should look for the second "day" of the Hans to come on the whole with less light to s.h.i.+ne and less strength to endure than its predecessor; I should expect a gentleness as of late afternoon in place of the old noontide glory. But then there is the complication induced by Han Kw.a.n.g-wuti, who started his cycle in 35.... or more probably his half-cycle;--I should look for it to be no more than that, on account of this same wastage of the forces;--this also has to be taken into consideration.

Brooding over the whole situation, I should foretell the history of this second Han Dynasty in this way: from 35 to 67,--the latter date the point where the old and new cycles intersect,-- would be a static time: of consolidation rather than expansion; of the gathering of the wave, not of its outburst into any splendor of foam. Between 67 and 100, or when the two cycles coincide, I should look for great things and doings; for some echo or repet.i.tion of the glories of Han Wuti,--perhaps for a finis.h.i.+ng and perfecting of his labors. From then on till 197 I should expect static, but weakening conditions: static mainly till 165, weakening rapidly after. Advise me, please, if this is clear.--Well, if you have followed so far, you have a basis for understanding what is to come.

The dynasty, as thus re-established by Kw.a.n.g-wuti, is known as that of the Eastern Hans; for this reason:--just as late in the days of the Roman empire, Diocletian was stirred by cyclic flowing east-ward to move his capital from Rome to Nicomedia,-- Constantine changed it afterwards to Byzantium,--so was Han Kw.a.n.g-wuti to move his from Changan in Shensi, in the west, eastward to Loyang or Honanfu,--the old Chow capital,--in Honan.

While Rome was weltering under Caligula, Claudius, and Nero, China was recovering herself, getting used to a calm equanimity, under Haii Kw.a.n.g-wuti: the conditions in the two were as opposite as the poles. She dwelt in quietness at home, and held her own, and a little more, on the frontiers. In 57, two years before Nero went mad and took the final plunge into infamy, Han Kw.a.n.g-wuti died, and Han Mingti succeeded him. As Nero went down, Han Mingti went up. His ninth or tenth year, remember, was to be that of the recurrence of the old Han cycle. It was the year in which the provinces rose against Nero,--the lowest point of all in Rome. I do not know that it was marked by anything special in China; the fact being that all the Chinese sixties were momentous.

In the third Year of his reign Han Mingti dreamed a dream: he saw a serene and "Golden Man" descending towards him out of the western heavens. It would mean, said his brother, to whom he spoke of it, the Golden G.o.d wors.h.i.+ped in the West,--the Buddha.

Buddhism had first come into China in the reign of Tsin s.h.i.+ Hw.a.n.gti; but that imperial ruffian had made short work of it:-- he threw the missionaries into prison, and might have dealt worse with them, but that a "Golden Man" appeared in their cell in the night, and opened all doors for their escape. Buddhist scriptures, probably, were among the books destroyed at the great Burning. So there may have been Buddhists in China all through the Han time; but if so, they were few, isolated and inconspicuous; it is Han Mingti's proper glory, to have brought Buddhism in.

He liked well his brother's interpretation, and sent inquirers into the west. In 65 they returned, with scriptures, and an Indian missionary, Kas.h.i.+apmadanga,--who was followed shortly by Gobharana, another. A temple was built at Loyang, and under the emperor's patronage, the work of translating the books began.--We have seen before how some touch from abroad is needed to quicken an age into greatness: such a touch came now to China with these Indian Buddhists;--who, in all likelihood, may also have been in their degree Messengers of the Lodge.

In the usual vague manner of Indian chronology, the years 57 and 78 A.D. are connected with the name of a great king of the Yueh Chi, Kanishka, whose empire covered Northern India. Almost every authority has a favorite point in time for his habitat; but these dates, not so far apart but that he may well have been reigning in both, will do as well as another. You will note that 72 A.D. (which falls between them) is a matter of thirteen decades from 58 B.C., the date sometimes ascribed to that much-legended Vikramaditya of Ujjain. Or, if we go back to the (fairly) settled 321 B.C. of Chandragupta Maurya, and count forward thirteen-decade periods from that, we get 191 for the end of the Mauryas (it happened about then); 61 for Vikramaditya (which may well be); 69 for Kanishka,--which also is likely enough, and would make him contemporary with Han Mingti. As the years 57 and 78 are both ascribed to him, it may possibly be that they mark the beginning and end of his reign respectively.

We know very little about him, except that he was a very great king, a great Buddhist, a man of artistic tastes, and a great builder; that he loved the beautiful hills and valleys of Cashmere; and that his reign was a wonderful period in sculptue, --that of the Gandhara or Greco-Buddhist School. Again, he is credited (by Hiuen Tsang) with convening the Fourth Buddhist Council: following in this, as in other matters, the example of Asoka. We are at liberty I suppose, if we like, to a.s.sign that cyclic year 69 to the meeting of this Council: this year or its neighborhood. So that all this may have had something to do with the missionary activity that responded to Han Mingti's appeal. But there is something else to remember; something of far higher importance; namely, that during all this period of her most uncertain chronology, India was in a peculiar position: the Successors of the Buddha were more or less openly at work there;--a long line of Adept leaders and teachers that can be traced (I believe) through some thirteen centuries from Sakya-muni's death. We may suppose, not unreasonably, that Kas.h.i.+apmadanga and Gobharana were disciples and emissaries of the then Successor.

It is, so far, and with so little translated, extremely hard to get at the undercurrents in these old Chinese periods; but I suspect a strong spiritual influence, Buddhist at that, in the great events of the years that followed. For China proceeded to strike into history in such a way that the blow resounded, if not round the world, at least round as much of it as was discovered before Columbus; and she did it in such a nice, clean, artistic and quiet way, and withal so thoroughly, that I cannot help feeling that that glorious warriorlike Northern Buddhism of the Mahayana had something to do with it.

It was not Han Mingti himself who did it, but one of his sevants; of whom, it is likely, you have never heard; although east or west there have been, probably, but one or two of his trade so great as he, or who have mattered so much to history. His name was Pan Chow; his trade, soldiering. He began his career of conquest about the time the major Han Cycle was due to recur,--in the sixties; maintained it through three reigns, and ended it at his death about when the Eastern Han half-cycle, started in 35, was due to close;--somewhere, that is, about 100 A.D., while Trajan was beginning a new day and career of conquest in Rome.

XXI. CHINA AND ROME: THE SEE-SAW (CONTINUED)

During the time of Chinese weakness Central Asia had relapsed from the control the great Han Wuti had imposed on it, and that Han Suenti had maintained by his name for justice; and the Huns had recovered their power. One wonders what these people were; of whom we first catch sight in the reign of the Yellow Emperor, nearly 3000 B.C.; and who do not disappear from history until after the death of Attila. During all those three millenniums odd they were predatory nomads, never civilized: a curse to their betters, and nothing more. And their betters were, you may say, every race they contacted.

It seems as if, as in the human blood, so among the races of mankind, there were builders and destroyers. I speculate as to the beginnings of the latter: they cannot be . . . races apart, of some special creation;--made by demons, where it was the G.o.ds made men. . . . "To the Huns," says Gibbon, "a fabulous origin was a.s.signed worthy of their form and manners,--that the witches of Scythia, who for their foul and deadly practices had been driven from society, had united in the desert with infernal spirits, and that the Huns were the offspring of this execrable conjunction." But it seems to me that it is in times of intensive civilization, and in the slums of great cities, that Nature--or anti-Nature--originates noxious human species. I wonder if their forefathers were, once on a time, the hooligans and yeggmen of some very ancient Babylon Bowery or the East End of some pre-Nimrodic Nineveh? Babylon was a great city,--or there were great cities in the neighborhood of Babylon, before the Yellow Emperor was born. One of these may have had, G.o.d knows when, its glorious freedom-establis.h.i.+ng revolution, its up-fountaining of sansculottes,--patriots whose predatory proclivities had erstwhile been checked of their free brilliance by busy-body tyrannical police;--and then this revolution may have been put down, and the men of the underworld who made turned out now from their city haunts, driven into the wilderness and the mountains,--may have taken,--would certainly have taken, one would say,--not to any industry, (they knew none but such as are wrought by night unlawfully in other men's houses); not to agriculture, which has ever had, for your free spirit, something of degradation in it;--but to pure patriotism, freedom and liberty, as their nature was: first to cracking such desultory cribs as offered,--knocking down defenseless wayfarers and the like: then to bolder raidings and excursions;--until presently, lo, they are a great people; they have ridden over all Asia like a scirocco; they have thundered rudely at the doors of proud princes,--troubling even the peace of the Yellow Emperor on his throne.

Well,--but isn't the stature stunted, physical, as well as mental and moral, when life is forced to reproduce itself, generation after generation, among the unnatural conditions of slums and industrialism? . . . Can you nourish men upon poisons century by century, and expect them to retain the semblance of men?

They had bothered Han Kw.a.n.g-wuti; who could do little more than hold his own against them, and leave them to his successor to deal with as Karma might decree. Karma, having as you might say one watchful eye on Rome and Europe, and what need of chastis.e.m.e.nt should arise after awhile at that western end of the world, provided Han Mingti with this Pan Chow; who, being a soldier of promise, was sent upon the Hun war-path forthwith.

Then the miracles began to happen. Pan Chow strolled through Central Asia as if upon his morning's const.i.tutional: no fuss; no hurry; little fighting,--but what there was, remarkably effective, one gathers. Presently he found himself on the Caspian sh.o.r.e; and if he had left any Huns behind him, they were hardly enough to do more than pick an occasional pocket. He started out when the Roman provinces were rising to make an end of Nero; in the last year of Domitian, from his Caspian headquarters he determined to discover Rome; and to that end sent an emissary down through Parthia to take s.h.i.+p at the port of Babylon for the unknown West. The Parthians (who were all against the two great empires becoming acquainted, because they are making a good thing of it as middle-men in the Roman-Chinese caravan trade), knew better, probably, than to oppose Pan Chow's designs openly; but their agents haunted the quays at Babylon, tampered with west-going skippers, and persuaded the Chinese envoy to go no farther. But I wonder whether some impulse achieved flowing across the world from east to west at that time, even though its physical link or channel was thus left incomplete? It was in that very year that Nerva re-established const.i.tutionalism and good government in Rome.

Pan Chow worked as if by magic: seemed to make no effort, yet accomplished all things. For nearly forty years he kept that vast territory in order, despite the huge frontier northward, and the breeding-place of nomad nations beyond. All north of Tibet is a region of marvels. Where you were careful to leave only the village blacksmith under his spreading chestnut-tree, or the innkeeper and his wife, for the sake of future travelers, let a century or two pa.s.s, and their descendants would be as the sea-sands for mult.i.tude; they would have founded a power, and be thundering down on an empire-smas.h.i.+ng raid in Persia or China or India: Whether Huns, Sienpi, Jiujen, Turks, Tatars, Tunguses, Mongols, Manchus: G.o.d knows what all, but all destroyers. But as far as the old original Huns were concerned, Pan Chow settled their hash for them. Bag and baggage he dealt with them; and practically speaking, the land of their fathers knew them no more. Dry the starting tear! here your pity is misplaced. Think of no vine-covered cottages ruined; no homesteads burned; no fields laid waste. They lived mainly in the saddle; they were as much at home fleeing before the Chinese army as at another time. A shunt here; a good kick off there: so he dealt with them. It is in European veins their blood flows now;--and prides itself on its pure undiluted Aryanism and Nordicism, no doubt. I suppose scarcely a people in continental Europe is without some mixture of it; for they enlisted at last in all foraying armies, and served under any banner and chief.

Pan Chow felt that they belonged to the (presumably) barbarous regions west of the Caspian. Ta Ts'in in future might deal with them; by G.o.d's grace, Han never should. He gently pushed them over the brink; removed them; cut the cancer out of Asia. Next time they appeared in history, it was not on the Hoangho, but on the Danube. Meanwhile, they established themselves in Russia; moved across Central Europe, impelling Quadi and Marcomans against Marcus Aurelius, and then Teutons of all sorts against the whole frontier of Rome. In the sixties, for Han Mingti, Pan Chow set that great wave in motion in the far east of the world.

Three times thirteen decades pa.s.sed, and it broke and wasted in foam in the far west: in what we may call the Very First Battle of the Marne, when Aetius defeated Attila in 451. I can but think of one thing better he might have done: s.h.i.+pped them eastward to the remote Pacific Islands; but it is too late to suggest that now. But I wonder what would have happened if Pan Chow had succeeded in reaching his arm across, and grasping hands with Trajan? He had not died; the might of China had not begun to recede from its westward limits, before the might of Rome under that great Spaniard had begun to flow towards its limits in the east.

Through the bulk of the second century China remained static, or weakening. Her forward urge seems to have ended with the death of Pan Chow, or at the end of the half-cycle Han Kw.a.n.g-wuti began in 35. We might tabulate the two concurrent Han cycles, for the sake of clearness, and note their points of intersection, thus:

--Western Han Cycle, 130 years

--Eastern Han Half-Cycle, 65 yrs

--35 A.D. Opened by Han Kw.a.n.g-wuti.

--A static and consolidating time until 67 A.D., thirteen decades from the death of Han Chaoti. Introduction of Buddhism in 65.

--The period of Pan Chao's victories; the Golden Age of the Eastern Hans, lasting until (about):

--100 A. D. the end of the Eastern Han 'Day'; death of Pan Chow.

--Continuance of Day under this, and supervention of Night under this Cycle, produce:

--A static, but weakening period until:

--165, the year in which a new Eastern Han Day should begin. A weak recrudescence should be seen.

--197: the year in which the main or original Han Cycle should end. We should expect the beginnings of a downfall. By or before:

--230, the end of the second, feeble, Eastern Han Day, the downfall would have been completed.

Now to see how this works out.

The first date we have to notice is 165. Well; in the very scant notices of Chinese history I have been able to come on, two events mark this date; or rather, one marks 165, and the other 166. To take the latter first: we saw that at a momentous point in Roman history,--in the year of Nerva's accession, 96,--China tried to discover Rome. In 166 Rome actually succeeded in discovering China. This year too, as we shall see, was momentous in Roman history. You may call it a half cycle after the other; for probably the amba.s.sadors of King An-Tun of Ta Ts'in who arrived at the court of Han Hwanti at Loyang in 166, had been a few years on their journey. You know King An-tun better by his Latin name of Marcus Aurelius Antoninus.

The event for 165 is the foundation of the Taoist Church, under the half-legendary figure of its first Pope, Chang Taoling; whose lineal descendants and successors have reigned Popes of Taoism from their Vatican on the Dragon-Tiger Mountain in Kiangsi ever since. They have not adverertised their virtues in their names, however: we find no Innocents and Piuses here: they are all plain Changs; his reigning Holiness being Chang the Sixth-somethingth. It was from Buddhism that the Taoists took the idea of making a church of themselves. Taoism and Buddhism from the outset were fiercely at odds; and yet the main splendor of China was to come from their inner coalescence.

Chu Hsi, the greatest of the Sung philosophers of the brilliant twelfth century A.D., says that "Buddhism stole the best features of Taoism; Taoism stole the worst features of Buddhism: as if the one took a jewel from the other, and the other recouped the loss with a stone." * This is exact: the jewel stolen by Buddhism was Laotse's Blue Pearl,--Wonder and Natural Magic; the stone that Taoism took instead was the priestly hierarchy and church organization, imitated from the Buddhists, that grew up under the successors of Chang Taoling.

------ * _Chinese Literature:_ H.A. Giles ------

If Laotse founded any school or order at all, it remained quite secret. I imagine his mission was like Plato's, not Buddha's: to start ideas, not a brotherhood. By Ts'in s.h.i.+ Hw.a.n.gti's time, any notions that were wild, extravagant, and gorgeous were Taoism; which would hardly have been, perhaps, had there been a Taoist organization behind them;--although it is not safe to dogmatize. It was, at any rate, mostly an inspiration to the heights for the best minds, and for the ma.s.ses (including Ts'in s.h.i.+ Hw.a.n.gti) a rumor of tremendous things. After Han Wuti's next successor, the best minds took to thinking Confucianly: which was decidedly a good thing for China during the troublous times before and after the fall of the Western Hans. Then when Buddhism came in, Taoism came to the fore again, spurred up to emulation by this new rival. I take it that Chang Taoling's activities round about this year 165 represent an impulse of the national soul to awakenment under the influence of the recurrence of the Eastern Han Day half-cycle. What kind of reality Chang Taoling represents, one cannot say: whether a true teacher in his degree, sent by the Lodge, around whom legends have gathered; or a mere dabbler in alchemy and magic. Here is the story told of him; you will note an incident or two in it that suggest the former possibility.

He retired to the mountains of the west to study magic, cultivate purity of life, and engage in meditation; stedfastly declining the offers of emperors who desired him to take office. Laotse appeared to him in a vision, and gave him a treatise in which were directions for making the 'Elixir of the Dragon and the Tiger.' While he was brewing this, a spirit came to him and said: "On the Pesung Mountain is a house of stone; buried beneath it are the Books of the Three Emperors (Yao, Shun, and Yu). Get these, practise the discipline they enjoin, and you will attain the power of ascending to heaven." He found the Pesung Mountain; and the stone house; and dug, and discovered the books; which taught him how to fly, to leave his body at will, and to hear all sounds the most distant. During a thousand days he disciplined himself; a G.o.ddess came to him, and taught him to walk among the stars; then he learned to cleave the seas and the mountains, and command the thunder and the winds. He fought the king of the demons, whose hosts fled before him "leaving no trace of their departing footsteps." So great slaughter he wrought in that battle that, we are told, "various divinities came with eager haste to acknowledge their faults."

In nine years he gained the power of ascending to heaven. His last days were spent on the Dragon-Tiger Mountain; where, at the age of a hundred and twenty-three, he drank the elixir, and soared skyward in broad daylight;--followed (I think it was he) by all the poultry in his barnyard, immortalized by the drops that fell from the cup as he drank. He left his books of magic, and his magical sword and seal, to his descendants; but I think the Dragon-Tiger Mountain did not come into their possession until some centuries later.

I judge that the tales of the Taoist _Sennin_ or Adepts, if told by some Chinese-enamored Lafcadio, would be about the best collection of fairy-stories in the world; they reveal a universe so deliciously nooked and crannied with bewildering possibilities:--as indeed this our universe is;--only not all its byways are profitable traveling. It is all very well to cry out against superst.i.tion; but we are only half-men in the West: we have lost the faculty of wonder and the companions.h.i.+p of extrahuman things. We walk our narrow path to nowhere safely trussed up in our personal selves: or we not so much walk at all, as lie still, chrysalissed in them:--it may be just as well, since for lack of the quality of balance, we are about as capable of walking at ease and dignity as is a jellyfish of doing Blondin on the tight-rope. China, in her pralaya and dearth of souls, may have fallen into the perils of her larger freedom, and some superst.i.tion rightly to be called degrading: in our Middle Ages, when we were in pralaya, we were superst.i.tious enough; and being unbalanced, fell into other evils too such as China never knew: black tyrannies of dogmatism, burnings of heretics wholesale.

But when the Crest-Wave Egos were in China, that larger freedom of hers enabled her, among other things, to achieve the highest heights in art: the Yellow Crane was at her disposal, and she failed not to mount the heavens; she had the glimpses Wordsworth pined for; she was not left forlorn. This merely for another blow at that worst superst.i.tion of all: Unbrotherliness, and our doctrine of Superior Racehood.--Many of the tales are mere thaumatolatry: as of the man who took out his bones and washed them once every thousand years; or of the man who would fill his mouth with rice-grains, let them forth as a swarm of bees to gather honey in the valley,--then readmit them into his mouth as to a hive, where they became rice again,--presumably "sweetened to taste." But in others there seems to be a core of symbolism and recognition of the fundamental things. There was a man once,--the tale is in Giles's Dictionary of Chinese Biography, but I forget his name--who sought out the Sennin Ho Kw.a.n.g (his name might have been Ho Kw.a.n.g); and found him at last in a gourd-flask, whither he was used to retire for the night. In this retreat Ho Kw.a.n.g invited our man to join him; and he was enabled to do so; and found it, once he had got in, a fair and s.p.a.cious palace enough. Three days he remained there learning; while fifteen years were pa.s.sing in China without. Then Ho Kw.a.n.g gave him a rod, and a spell to say over it; and bade him go his ways. He would lay the rod on the ground, stand astride of it, and speak the spell; and straight it became a dragon for him to mount and ride the heavens where he would. Thenceforth for many years he was a kind of Guardian Spirit over China: appearing suddenly wherever there was distress or need of help: at dawn in mountain Chungnan by Changan town in the north; at noon, maybe, by the southern sea; at dusk he might be seen a-dragon-back above the sea-mists rolling in over Yangtse;--and all in the same day. But at last, they say, he forgot the spell, and found himself riding the clouds on a mere willow wand;--and the wand behaving as though Newton had already watched that aggravating apple;--and himself, in due course dashed to pieces on the earth below.--There is some fine symbolism here; the makings of a good story.