For if perchance some music should be mine,
      I would fling forth its notes like a fierce sea,
   To wash away the piles of tyranny,
      To make love free and faith unbound of creed. 
   O for some power to fill my shrunken line,
      And make a trumpet of my oaten reed.

(1) The Wanderings of Oisin and Other Poems.  By W. B. Yeats. (Kegan Paul.)

(2) Venetia Victrix.  By Caroline Fitz Gerald. (Macmillan and Co.)

(3) Volumes in Folio.  By Richard Le Gallienne. (Elkin Mathews.)

A CHINESE SAGE

(Speaker, February 8, 1890.)

A eminent Oxford theologian once remarked that his only objection to modern progress was that it progressed forward instead of backward—­a view that so fascinated a certain artistic undergraduate that he promptly wrote an essay upon some unnoticed analogies between the development of ideas and the movements of the common sea-crab.  I feel sure the Speaker will not be suspected even by its most enthusiastic friends of holding this dangerous heresy of retrogression.  But I must candidly admit that I have come to the conclusion that the most caustic criticism of modern life I have met with for some time is that contained in the writings of the learned Chuang Tzu, recently translated into the vulgar tongue by Mr. Herbert Giles, Her Majesty’s Consul at Tamsui.

The spread of popular education has no doubt made the name of this great thinker quite familiar to the general public, but, for the sake of the few and the over-cultured, I feel it my duty to state definitely who he was, and to give a brief outline of the character of his philosophy.

Chuang Tzu, whose name must carefully be pronounced as it is not written, was born in the fourth century before Christ, by the banks of the Yellow River, in the Flowery Land; and portraits of the wonderful sage seated on the flying dragon of contemplation may still be found on the simple tea-trays and pleasing screens of many of our most respectable suburban households.  The honest ratepayer and his healthy family have no doubt often mocked at the dome-like forehead of the philosopher, and laughed over the strange perspective of the landscape that lies beneath him.  If they really knew who he was, they would tremble.  For Chuang Tzu spent his life in preaching the great creed of Inaction, and in pointing out the uselessness of all useful things.  ’Do nothing, and everything will be done,’ was the doctrine which he inherited from his great master Lao Tzu.  To resolve action into thought, and thought into abstraction, was his wicked transcendental aim.  Like the obscure philosopher of early Greek speculation, he believed in the identity of contraries; like Plato, he was an idealist, and had all the idealist’s contempt for utilitarian systems; he was a mystic like Dionysius, and Scotus Erigena, and Jacob Bohme, and held, with them and