It is the model of biographical dictionaries. I have long possessed our own _Dictionary of National Biography_, in how many weighty volumes? Sixty-two, including the _Errata_; but after the dry, epigrammatic conciseness of Dr. Giles it is unreadable. To this sage appraiser of Chinese genius and address all meritorious men come alike--whether statesmen, cynics, sorcerers, or saints. He never questions: he merely puts on record in brief credulous sentences their characters and deeds. When all is said, it is, I suppose, their imperturbability and saturnine humour that are the most engaging qualities of the Chinese. They could not have found a better celebrant, or one more in tune with themselves, than Dr. Giles. He sets down everything gravely, and is as kind to the supernatural as to the natural. The sole qualification for admission into the Gilesian Valhalla is merit. The book's brevity is its great charm. It was Henri Taine, I think, who said that there was no volume he could not compress into a chapter, and no chapter that would not go into a sentence. Dr. Giles has carried out Taine's thrasonical brag. There is no Chinese lifetime, however crowded and illustrious, that he cannot pack into a paragraph or a page. Nor does anything strike one as wanting. One could do with more, of course, and yet who would have the olive larger? There is no blemish on this work save its prohibitive weight as a bed book, and that I have overcome by cutting it into four pamphlets. I find a disdain for worldly advantage among these pagan Celestial philosophers that makes a more reasonable ideal for some of our Western plutocrats to-day than many that are placed before them in the professional pulpit. A few Englishmen have had a similar whimsical unworldliness, but they are few and far between. I imagine that J. K. Stephen had, for one, and the Shelley that emerges from certain of Hogg's pages. A glittering example of the humorous romantic detachment and carelessness of public opinion that I mean is Chang Chih-ho, of the eighth century A.D., who spent his time in angling, but used no bait, his object not being to catch fish. When Lu asked him why he roamed about, Chang's answer was instant: "With the Empyrean as my home, the bright moon my constant companion, and the four seas my inseparable friends--what mean you by _roaming_?" and when a friend offered him a comfortable home instead of his poor boat, he replied, "I prefer to follow the gulls into cloud-land rather than bury my ethereal self beneath the dust of the world." Isn't that fine?