"She had all her wits about her, though she quaked a bit with fear. Said she (the artful wretch!), 'It seems miraculous, my dear! _Some unseen power impelled me to break the coffin-lid, To see if you were still alive_--which, of course, you know I did! "'_I felt sure you must be living; so, to welcome you once more, My mourning robes I tore off, and my wedding garments wore; But, were you dead, to guard against all noxious fumes, I quaffed, As a measure of precaution, a disinfecting draught!_' "Said Chuang, 'Your tale is plausible, but I think you'd better stop; Don't fatigue yourself by telling lies; just let the matter drop. _To test your faithfulness to me_, I've been merely shamming dead, _I'm the youth you just now married--my widow I've just wed!_'" Appended to these two poems, there is the regulation moral, in which married ladies are warned not to be too sure of their constancy, nor judge severely the poor widows who make haste to console themselves. "Do your best, but avoid supercilious pride, For you never can tell what you'll do till you're tried." We can not say much for the translation of these comic works. Mr. Stent is a high authority in the Chinese language and literature, but is not at home in English prosody. It is plain, however, from his translations, rough as they may be, that there is a comic vein in the Chinese character which finds expression in Chinese literature. [Illustration: A Deaf Mandarin. (From a Figure in the British Museum.)[32] [Footnote 32: "Malcolm's Caricaturing," plate iv., fig. 9.]] Caricature, as we might suppose, is a universal practice among them; but, owing to their crude and primitive taste in such things, their efforts are seldom interesting to any but themselves. In Chinese collections, we see numberless grotesque exaggerations of the human form and face, some of which are not devoid of humor and artistic merit; but the specimens given on this and the next page suffice for the present purpose. The Chinese, it appears, are fond of exhibiting their English visitors in a ridiculous light. The caricature of an English foraging party, given in the first part of this chapter, was brought home thirty years ago by a printer attached to an American mission in China. Recently a new illustration of this propensity has gone abroad. In 1874 an account appeared in the English papers of the audience granted to the foreign ministers by the Emperor of China, in which Mr. Wade, the English embassador, was represented as having been overwhelmed with awe and alarm in the presence of the august potentate, the Son of Heaven. The origin of the paragraph was explained by the _Athenoeum_: