of all kinds are made matter of traffic,—while everything nutritive, including “rats and mice, and such small deer,” (however unclean, according to European notions), are searched out and eaten for food. Opium is much in use; but both the perniciousness of its effects, and the extent to which it is indulged in, have been overstated by most writers on the subject. The misery caused by it is never to be compared to the plague of drunkenness, which is the bane of our own country. “Redness of the eyes,” as a mark of intoxication, is very conspicuous in the Chinese, as it was in the days of Solomon among the Jews; and if you see two Chinamen walking hand in hand in the street, says Mr Lay, it is ten to one that they are both flustered with drink! The Chinese, like most Asiatics, do not dance for pleasure, nor are their unmelodious voices formed for song. Their favourite amusements are games of chance,—in which, perhaps, they out-do all Asiatics. The grand aim of a Chinaman, as we have said, is _to enjoy himself_; and this colours even his gravest doings. With him, banqueting and religious ceremonies are the same thing, and he would never keep any sacred festival if he could not enjoy himself. No festival is without its play, and only a few temples are without a stage; and so fond are the people of theatricals, that they will attend a whole night to them, without showing the least weariness, and will afterwards recount with ecstasy what they have seen. The people in general never pray, nor have they any forms of prayer; and the Mandarins, on public occasions, only recite a formula, in the shape of a simple message, to the idols, but never address them in their own words. The affairs of this life are ever uppermost in the mind of a Chinese; and long life, wealth, and male children, are the great objects of desire. Nothing is regarded with so much horror as death—gloomy death, after which their souls go to wander cheerless among the genii; and strange to say, the elixir of life seems to have been more generally and more perseveringly sought after in reasoning and materialistic China than among the most spiritual and imaginative nations of mankind.