From earliest boyhood to the grave Chinese students never cease, yet never complete, committing these characters to memory and welding them into those graceful verses and essays which are the pride of Chinese literature. Handwriting is accounted a fine art, and for many hours each day, year in and year out, characters are laboriously copied by means of a little brush filled with ink, which in the form of a cake or stick similar to Indian ink is moistened and ground on to a stone slab or "ink-stone," until the penmanship is frequently of a firmness and beauty surpassing that of copper-plate. In such veneration is the written character held that it is accounted wrong to debase in any way paper on which writing may be inscribed, wherefore conscientious _literati_ sometimes pass along the streets gathering into baskets stray pieces of paper bearing written characters, to burn them reverently in miniature pagodas or towers erected on public ground for that especial purpose. The career of a student is considered to be the most honourable of all, but though chiefly restricted to handwriting, knowledge of characters, composition and national history, the Chinese admit that no man has ever yet thoroughly mastered his own language or even learnt all the characters. How then about foreigners' knowledge of the language? It is like the nibblings of a mouse at a mountain. In the course of two or three years a European by means of hard work, good memory and facile ear, may succeed in speaking one of the dialects so as generally to make himself understood, but to the end of his days his speech, for more than a few sentences, would never be mistaken in the dark by one Chinaman for that of another Chinaman. As for the written character, I do not believe it possible for any European to acquire more than a superficial general, or a mature one-sided, knowledge of it. Some missionaries, notably Jesuits, have given their lives to the work and have undoubtedly attained to considerable erudition in the classics and in subjects pertaining to religious doctrines, but in place give them some business papers or other documents in current use and they would be at once hopelessly nonplussed. A man may have mastered eight or ten thousand characters and may be able to read or dictate letters on any subject, but he probably would not be able to read a single line from most of the classics. I have heard, as a phenomenal thing, of a foreigner being able to write a letter himself, but the fact of its being phenomenal shows how unusual it was, and does not prove the absence of either crudities or errors. All Europeans, even the most competent, are _always_ assisted by educated Chinamen when engaged on serious Chinese work. Unaided, they might read much correctly, but they might altogether miss the sense, and most probably would meet with characters they did not know.