Suicide is no crime, with the Chinese. To receive a present, with one hand, is deemed an act of rudeness. They never say of the departed, that he is _dead_, but that he has _gone to his ancestors_. Among the good traits of the Chinese are to be numbered filial respect, and general sobriety. In one particular, their legislation may be considered superior to our own--among the grounds of divorce, says Mr. Davis, they include "_excessive talkativeness_." I have been reared, in the faith, that the Chinese are not only a _peculiar_, but an exceedingly _nasty_ generation. According to Barrow, and to Du Halde, in his _Hist. Gén. de la Chine_, they are so liable to a species of leprosy, that, for the purpose of arresting its progress, it is numbered among the causes of divorce. The itch and other cutaneous diseases are extremely common. "They seem," says De Pauw, "to have neither horror nor repugnance for any kind of food; they eat rats, bats, owls, storks, badgers, dogs," &c. Brand, in his _Reise nach China_, observes--"Dogs are chiefly employed, as food, by the Chinese, during the great heat in summer, because they fancy their flesh to have a cooling quality." Barrow was private secretary to the Earl of Macartnay, and, in 1804, published his travels in China, a work of great merit, and which has been highly lauded, for its candor and fidelity. In proof of my remark, I offer the following quotation, from that work, on pages 76 and 77. After alluding to the custom of crippling the feet, Mr. Barrow proceeds--"The interior wrappers of the ladies' feet are said to be seldom changed, remaining sometimes, until they can no longer hold together; a custom that conveys no very favorable idea of Chinese cleanliness. This indeed forms no part of their character; on the contrary, they are what Swift would call a _frowzy_ people. The comfort of clean linen, or frequent change of under-garments, is equally unknown to the sovereign and the peasant. A sort of thin coarse silk supplies the place of cotton or linen next the skin, among the upper ranks; but the common people wear a coarse kind of open cotton cloth. These vestments are more rarely removed for the purpose of washing, than for that of being replaced with new ones; and the consequence of such neglect is, as might naturally be supposed, an abundant increase of those vermin, to whose growth filthiness is found to be most favorable. The highest officers of state made no hesitation of calling their attendants, in public, to seek in their necks, for those troublesome animals, which, when caught, they very composedly put between their teeth. They carry no pocket handkerchief, but generally blow their noses into small square pieces of paper, which some of their attendants have ready prepared for the purpose. Many are not so cleanly, but spit about the rooms, or against the walls, like the French, and they wipe their dirty hands, in the sleeves of their gowns. They sleep at night in