In the appreciation of beauty, the Chinese are below any other nation that ever emerged from barbarism. Their painting is of a very commonplace description,—though not so bad, we believe, as it is generally supposed to be in this country; and their only notion of sculpture is, to represent a thing lusty in order that it may look grand. Their architecture, says Mr Barrow, “is void of taste, grandeur, beauty, solidity, or convenience; their houses are merely tents [an exaggeration]; and there is nothing magnificent even in the palace of the emperor.” One of the few notable exceptions to this remark is the celebrated Porcelain Pagoda at Nanking, which Du Halde thought “the most solid, remarkable, and magnificent structure in the eastern world.” For this want of beauty in their buildings, some excuse may be found in the circumstance that the law does not permit them to deviate from the established rules, and that any Mandarin who should venture to indulge an architectural fancy of his own would quickly draw down upon himself the vengeance of the Board of Rites; but “when there’s a will there’s a way,” and had the general taste ever advanced beyond the tent-shaped domiciles of their early ancestors, the administration of the law would hardly have proved an insurmountable barrier to improvement. However flattering to the Chinese some of the preceding statements may be, it will be seen, on the whole, that they by no means hold a high place in regard to might of intellect. The discoverers of many important facts, and inventors of many useful arts, they yet seem as if they had stumbled upon them by chance, and were unable to appreciate their value; and the highly civilised race who, ages ago, were familiar with astronomy and printing, gunpowder and the magnetic needle, are now incomparably surpassed in their use by nations comparatively of yesterday. “Their mechanical contrivances,” says Mr Wade, “remain but as monuments of an originality which seems to have exhausted itself by its earlier efforts. They appear never to have investigated the principles of the discoveries by which the requirements of their agriculture, architecture, or navigation, were first satisfied. The means which their genius suggested to meet their immediate wants they adopted, and, without the aid of theory, perfected—in some instances, to a degree not surpassed, if attained, by the most scientific of nations; but errors and defects were left untouched; no spirit of inquiry quickened the dormant powers of their reason, and the lack of a habit of reflection prevented their pushing their invention beyond a certain necessary point.” There is something stunted or microscopic in the intellect of the Chinese, which leads them to magnify trifles, yet to be blind when great facts stare them in the face,—to keep the steam-engine a toy and gunpowder a plaything, yet to spend an infinity of skill and patience upon the manufacture of one of their ivory “puzzles.” Excellent in