Corean culture resembles that in mediæval Europe. It is extra-vernacular. It is in Latin—the Latin of Eastern Asia—the classic tongue of the oldest of living empires. This literary instrument of the learned is not the speech of the modern Chinamen, but the condensed, vivid, artificial diction of the books, which the Chinese cannot and never did speak, and which to be fully understood must be read by the eye of the mind. The accomplished scholar of Seoul who writes a polished essay in classic style packs his sentences with quotable felicities, choice phrases, references to history, literary prismatics, and kaleidoscopic patches picked out here and there from the whole range of ancient Chinese literature, and imbeds them into a mosaic—smooth, brilliant, chaste, and a perfect unity. This is the acme of style. So in the Corean mind, the wise saws and ancient instances, the gnomic wisdom, quotations and proverbs, political principles, precedents, historical examples, and dynasties, are all Chinese, and ancient Chinese. His heaven, his nature, his history, his philosophy, are those of Confucius, and like the Chinaman, he looks down with infinite contempt upon the barbarians of Christendom and their heterodox conceptions of the universe. Meanwhile his own language, literature, and history are neglected. The Corean child begins his education by learning by voice, eye, and pen, the simple and beautiful native alphabet of twenty-five letters, and the syllabary of one hundred and ninety or more combinations of letters. He learns to read, and practises writing in both the book or square style and the script form or running hand. The syllabary is not analyzed, but committed to memory from sight and sound. Spelling is nearly an unknown art, as the vowel changes and requirements of euphony—so numerous as to terrify the foreign student of Corean—are quickly acquired by ear and example in childhood. With this equipment in the rudiments, which is all that nearly all the girls, and most of the boys learn, the young reader can master the story-books, novels, primers of history, epistles, and the ordinary communications of business and friendship. If the lad is to follow agriculture, cattle-raising, trade, mining, or hunting, he usually learns no more, except the most familiar Chinese characters for numbers, points of the compass, figures on the clock-dial, weights, measures, coins, and the special technical terms necessary in his own business. Thus it often happens that a Corean workman, like a Chinese washerman, may be perfectly familiar with the characters even to the number of hundreds relating to his trade or occupation, and yet be utterly unable to read the simplest book, or construct one Chinese sentence. With the Chinese characters, one can write English as well as Corean or Japanese, but a thorough knowledge of the terms necessary to a sailor, a jeweller, a farmer, or a lumber merchant would not enable one to read Ivanhoe or Wordsworth.