predecessor, and expressed the stereotyped wish that he could have lived a hundred years. Taoukwang was in his sixty-ninth year, having been born on September 12, 1781, and the thirty years over which his reign had nearly extended were among the most eventful, and in some respects the most unfortunate, in the annals of his country. When he was a young man, the power of his grandfather, Keen Lung, was at its pinnacle, but the misfortunes of his father's reign had prepared him for the greater misfortunes of his own, and the school of adversity in which he had passed the greater portion of his life had imbued him only with the disposition to bear calamity, and not the vigor to grapple with it. Yet Taoukwang was not without many good points, and he seems to have realized the extent of the national trouble, and to have felt acutely his inability to retrieve what had been lost. He was also averse to all unnecessary display, and his expenditure on the court and himself was less than that of any of his predecessors or successors. He never wasted the public money on his own person, and that was a great matter. His habits were simple and manly. Although Taoukwang's reign had been marked by unqualified misfortune, he seems to have derived consolation from the belief that the worst was over, and that as his authority had recovered from such rude shocks it was not likely to experience anything worse. He had managed to extricate himself from a foreign war, which was attended with an actual invasion of a most alarming character, without any diminution of his authority. The symptoms of internal rebellion which had revealed themselves in more than one quarter of the empire had not attained any formidable dimensions, and seemed likely to pass away without endangering the Chinese constitution. Taoukwang may have hoped that while he had suffered much he had saved his family and dynasty from more serious calamities, and that on him alone had fallen the resentment of an offended Heaven. The experience of the next fifteen years was to show how inaccurately he had measured the situation, and how far the troubles of the fifteen years following his death were to exceed those of his reign; for just as he had inherited from his father, Kiaking, a legacy of trouble, so did he pass on to his son an inheritance of misfortune and difficulty, rendered all the more onerous by the pretension of supreme power without the means to support it.