Hence, though he may be said to have returned to his native state with flying colours, he took no further active part in its administration, but devoted the rest of his life to literary labours which have added materially to his fame. Such were the collecting and editing of certain old national ballads known to us as the Odes, and the penning of the Spring and Autumn Annals of Lu, which may be regarded as the first real record of authentic facts, as opposed to the mere string of speeches and eulogies which we find in the miscalled Book of History. To this closing period, too, are to be referred most of the sayings given in the present volume. These, together with the invaluable biography by Ssŭ-ma Ch'ien, which is largely built upon them, form the only really reliable source of information about Confucius and his doctrines. The Chinese title _Lun Yü_ may be rendered "Conversations" or "Discussions," but neither is a very apt description of the work, which contains very little discussion in the ordinary sense. It consists in fact almost wholly of detached _obiter dicta_, or replies to questions put by various disciples on subjects chiefly moral or personal. These sayings were once supposed to have been collected and committed to writing by the immediate disciples of Confucius, but Legge has shown sufficient reason to believe that they were transmitted orally at first, and did not take the form in which we have them until at least two generations after the Master's death. Nor must it be imagined that they represent the _ipsissima verba_ of Confucius. No man could have made offhand remarks in such a crisp, concise and epigrammatic style. A translation, in which brevity has again and again to be sacrificed to smoothness and lucidity, hardly allows the European reader to form any idea of the glittering compactness of these sayings in the original. So far from having been uttered impromptu, they appear to have been repeatedly ground and polished, and shorn of every redundancy, until they shone like diamonds fresh from the hands of the cutter. At the same time, as expressing the essence of what the Master thought and the substance of what he said, it is with good reason that they are to be found inscribed on hundreds of thousands of scrolls and tablets in every corner of the Empire. These gems, however, are unsorted. As in most Chinese philosophical works, there is very little attempt at orderly arrangement; even such a rough classification as will be found in this volume is absent. This is not necessarily to be regarded as a defect: jewels jumbled in a heap often have a charm which they lack when strung symmetrically into a necklace. The only danger is that unwary readers, looking in vain for a beginning, a middle and an end, may jump to the conclusion that Confucius himself was merely a master of casual apophthegms; they may very easily miss the connecting principles which serve to bind the Confucian teachings into one rounded system.