thing; nothing in the world for the brain-mind to get excited about.  You take very little notice at the time:  more of their quaint punchinello chinoiserie, you say.  Three weeks after, you find that it was a clear voice from the supermundane, a high revelation.  The Chinese poet saunters along playing a common little tune on his Pan-pipes.  Singing robes?—­ None in the world; just what he goes to work in.  Grand Manner?—­ ‘Sir,’ says he, ’the contemptible present singer never heard of it; wait for that till the coming of a Superior Man.’—­’Well,’ you say, ’at least there is no danger of pombundle’; and indeed there is not.  But you rather like the little tune, and stop to listen . . . and then . . .  Oh God! the Wonder of wonders has happened, and the Universe will never be quite the dull, fool, ditchwater thing it was to you before . . .

Liehtse gives one rather that kind of feeling.  We know practically nothing about him.—­I count three stages of growth among the sinologists:  the first, with a missionary bias; the second, with only the natural bias of pure scholarship and critical intellectualism, broad and generous, but rather running at times towards tidying up the things of the Soul from off the face of the earth; the third, with scholarship plus sympathy, understanding, and a dash of mystical insight.  The men of the first stage accepted Liehtse as a real person, and called him a degenerator of Taoism, a teacher of immoral doctrine;—­in the Book of Liehtse, certainly, such doctrine is to be found.  The men of the second stage effectually tidied Liehtse up:  Dr. H. A. Giles says he was an invention of the fertile brain of Chwangtse, and his book a forgery of Han times.  Well; people did forge ancient literature in those days, and were well paid for doing so; and you cannot be quite certain of the complete authenticity of any book purporting to have been written before Ts’in Shi Hwangti’s time.  Also Chwangtse’s brain was fertile enough for anything;—­so that there was much excuse for the men of the second stage.  But then came Dr. Lionel Giles* who belongs to the third stage, and perhaps is the third stage.  He shows that though there is in the Book of Liehtse a residue or scum of immoral teaching, it is quite in opposition to the tendency of the teaching that remains when this scum is removed; and deduces from this fact the sensible idea that the scum was a later forgery; the rest, the authentic work of a true philosopher with an original mind and a style of his own.  Such a man, of course, might have lived later than Chwangtse, and taken his nom de plume of Liehtse from the latter’s book; but against this there is the fact that Liehtse’s teaching forms a natural link between Chtangtse’s and that of their common Master Laotse; and above all—­and herein lies the real importance of him—­the real Liehtse treats Confucius as a Teacher and Man of Tao.  But by Chwangtse’s time the two schools had separated:  Confucius was Chwangtse’s butt;—­we shall see why.  And in the scum of Liehtse he is made fun of in Chwangtse’s spirit, but without Changtse’s wit and style.