the place where I then was.  I saw them; I spoke to them; I invited them to partake with me in the pleasures of the chase; and, at the end of the number of days appointed for this exercise, they attended me in my retinue as far as to Ge-hol.  There I gave them a ceremonial banquet and made them the customary presents....  It was at this Ge-hol, in those charming parts where Kang Hi, my grandfather, made himself an abode to which he could retire during the hot season, at the same time that he thus put himself in a situation to be able to watch with greater care over the welfare of the peoples that are beyond the western frontiers of the Empire; it was, I say, in those lovely parts that, after having conquered the whole country of the Eleuths, I had received the sincere homages of Tchering and his Tourbeths, who alone among the Eleuths had remained faithful to me.  One has not to go many years back to touch the epoch of that transaction.  The remembrance of it is yet recent.  And now—­who could have predicted it?—­when there was the least possible room for expecting such a thing, and when I had no thought of it, that one of the branches of the Eleuths which first separated itself from the trunk, those Torgouths who had voluntarily expatriated themselves to go and live under a foreign and distant dominion, these same Torgouths are come of themselves to submit to me of their own good will; and it happens that it is still at Ge-hol, not far from the venerable spot where my grandfather’s ashes repose, that I have the opportunity, which I never sought, of admitting them solemnly into the number of my subjects.’

“Annexed to this general memoir there were some notes, also by the Emperor, one of them being that description of the sufferings of the Torgouths on their march, and of the miserable condition in which they arrived at the Chinese frontier, which De Quincey has quoted at p. 417.  Annexed to the Memoir there is also a letter from P. Amiot, one of the French Jesuit missionaries, dated ’Pe-king, 15th October, 1773,’ containing a comment on the memoir of a certain Chinese scholar and mandarin, Yu-min-tchoung, who had been charged by the Emperor with the task of seeing the narrative properly preserved in four languages in a monumental form.  It is from this Chinese comment on the Imperial Memoir that there is the extract at p. 418 as to the miserable condition of the fugitives.

“On a comparison of De Quincey’s splendid paper with the Chinese documents, several discrepancies present themselves; the most important of which perhaps are these:—­(1) In De Quincey’s paper it is Kien Long himself who first descries the approach of the vast Kalmuck horde to the frontiers of his dominions.  On a fine morning in the early autumn of 1771, we are told, being then on a hunting expedition in the solitary Tartar wilds on the outside of the great Chinese Wall, and standing by chance at an opening of his pavilion to enjoy the morning sunshine, he