and subsequently made to send him back to his friends in Kwang-si and Central China. Our missionaries were almost hysterical over their treasure; they declared he had quite established himself in the confidence and esteem of the Shanghai missions; that he exhibited “much talent, evinced much sweetness of disposition, and, above all, had given undoubted proofs of the sincerity of his attachment to the Christian faith.” Early in 1859 he contrived at last to rejoin his relative in Nankin: a relative whom he had left years before as a mere conspirator in Kwang-si, he now found self-installed as an incarnation of the Deity in a yamun of Nankin. The discontented and unsuccessful candidate for literary honours of Canton was now the King of Heaven, the Tien-wang of Nankin. Hung-jin was welcomed as he deserved, for he had well served the King of Heaven by throwing dust in the eyes of the much-feared foreigner; and Hung-jin, the Christian impostor, stepped into royal robes as the “Kan-wang,” “Shield King,” or, in other words, the prop and stay of Taepingism; and, having shown such ability in bamboozling the foreigner, his especial province appears to have been to feed us with hopes of a general conversion and extension of trade, but to take care that we did not test their sincerity. Feeling that it was not yet time to throw off the cloak of piety which had hitherto served him so well, Commander Brine tells us that the Kan-wang wrote to the Rev. Mr Edkins, deploring his unfitness for the high post to which his distinguished relative had appointed him; expressing his own anxiety “to promote the diffusion of true religion;” adding, that he was more than ever impressed with the superhuman wisdom of the Tien-wang, or King of Heaven! Just after he had thus given utterance to these expressions of diffidence and zeal, our late pupil, now an assistant-king in Nankin, started on an expedition into Ngan-hwuy province, to spread the knowledge of Perfect Peace. A traveller who happened to be on the river Yang-tsze at that time, tells us that it was easy to trace the path of the mission by “the smoking and flaming villages.” Every impostor must, however, eventually be exposed, and so it was with the Kan-wang; for the missionaries, taking him and his relative at their word, thrust themselves into Nankin. Mr Roberts, the quondam instructor in divinity of the Taeping rulers, had preceded the Kan-wang, and the latter found Mr Roberts clad in regal robes, and holding some sort of office. About this time also (1860), the Rev. Mr Holmes visited Nankin; he came away shocked at what he had seen and heard. We shall avail ourselves presently of his testimony as to the character of the Taeping rebellion; but for the present we shall confine ourselves to the career of Hung-jin, or Kan-wang. In the ‘North China Herald’ of October 19, 1861, under the signature “Rusticus Expectans,” we next hear of the scamp. The anonymous writer turns out, by the evidence of Captain T. W. Blakiston,