The matter is not unimportant; since we are to talk of a member of this family.  We shall understand him better for remembering the kind of heredity that lay behind him:  some seventy generations of nobility, all historic.  Only one royal house in the world now is as old as his was then:  that of Japan.

Some generations before, the K’ung family had lost their duchy of Sung and emigrated to Lu; where, in the early part of the sixth century, its head, this Shuhliang Heih, had made a great name for himself as a soldier.  He was now a widower, and seventy years old; and saw himself compelled to make a second marriage, or the seventy illustrious generations of his ancestors would be deprived of a posterity to offer them sacrifices.  So he approached a gentlman of the Yen family, who had three eligible daughters.  To these Yen put the case, leaving to them to decide which should marry K’ung.—­“Though old and austere,” said he, “he is of the high descent, and you need have no fear of him.”  Chingtsai, the youngest, answered that it was for their father to choose.—­“Then you shall marry him,” said Yen.  She did; and when her son was to be born, she was warned in a dream to make pilgrimage to a cave on Mount Ne.  There the spirits of the mountain attended; there were signs and portents in the heavens at the nativity.  The k’e-lin, a beast out of the mythologies, appeared to her; and she tied a white ribbon about its single horn.  It is a creature that appears only when things of splendid import are to happen.

Three years after, the father died, leaving his family on the borders of poverty.  At six, Ch’iu, the child, a boy of serious earnest demeanor, was teaching his companions to play at arranging, according to the rites, toy sacrificial vessels on a toy altar.  Beyond this, and that they were poor, and that he doted on his mother—­who would have deserved it,—­we know little of his boyhood.  “At fifteen,” he tells us himself, “his mind was bent on learning.”  Nothing in the way of studies, seems to have come amiss to him; of history, and ritual, and poetry, he came to know all that was to be known.  He loved music, theory and practice; held it to be sacred:  “not merely one of the refinements of life, but a part of life itself.”  It is as well to remember this; and that often, in after life, he turned dangerous situations by breaking into song; and that his lute was his constant companion.  He used to say that a proper study of poetry—­he was not himself a poet, though he compiled a great anthology of folk-poems later—­would leave the mind without a single depraved thought.  Once he said to his son:  “If you do not learn the Odes, you will not be fit to talk to.”  “Poetry rouses us,” said he, “courtesy upholds us; music is our crown.”  You are, then, to see in him no puritan abhorring beauty, but a man with artistic perceptions developed.  At what you might call the other pole of knowledge, he was held to know more about the science of war than any man living; and I have no doubt he did.  If he had consented to use or speak about or let others use that knowledge, he might have been a great man in his day; but he never would.